Grenadier bearskins as memorials of the day they had captured the colour of Louis XIV’s household guards at Ramillies. They tightened their chin straps and made the usual small jokes of men facing battle. The air was rich with the smell of horse dung.
An officer raised a gloved hand, held it motionless for a second, then dropped it to point at where the gun smoke hung above the valley. A bugle sounded the advance as the long attack lines moved forward in a jingle of curb chains and creak of leather.
They were the heavy cavalry of Britain; the Sovereign’s Guard and the Union Brigade. They were the best- mounted cavalry in all the world, and the worst led.
They rode big strong horses reared on rich English and Irish grassland. The horses were fresh, unblooded and eager. The riders drew their swords and looped the weapons’ leather straps round their gauntletted wrists. Each sword blade was thirty-five inches of heavy steel that had been sharpened to a spear point. The bugle called the trot and the long plumes began to undulate behind the ranks. Some men took a last pull of rum from their canteens while others touched their lucky charms. A horse curled its lips to show long yellow teeth, another whinnied with excitement. A man spat a wad of tobacco, then wrapped his horse’s reins round his left wrist. The leading ranks of cavalry were at the crest and they could see, through the scrims of cannon smoke, that the valley was a killer’s playground; a wide field crammed with an unsuspecting enemy. Twenty thousand French infantry had crossed the valley and two and a half thousand cavalry would now charge at their exposed flank. The horsemen spurred into a canter, their plumes tossing wild in the smoky wind. Sabretaches and empty scabbards flapped at their sides. A guidon embroidered in gold thread led them down the slope. The troopers’ ranks were already ragged for each man only wanted to close on the enemy, while their officers, not wanting to be outrun, raced ahead as though they rode on a hunting field and feared to miss the kill.
Then, at last, the trumpeters sounded the full charge. The ten notes, rising in triplets, pierced to the final high and brilliant tone which threw the horsemen on. Damn caution. Damn the slow approach and the final steady charge that would bring the horses home as one cohesive mass. This was war! This was the hunting field with a human quarry, and glory did not wait for the last man to form line, and so the trumpet shivered the blood with its madman’s call. Charge home, and the devil bugger the hindmost.
They made a glorious charge of bright horse that slanted across the face of the ridge’s forward slope like a flood. Ahead of them were the Cuirassiers, and beyond the breast-plated enemy horsemen were the infantry who were neither in column nor in line. None of the French was expecting the attack.
The Cuirassiers’ horses were blown. They were still forming their lines after the slaughter of the Red Germans, and now they stood no chance. They were broken in an instant. Lord John, racing behind the Life Guards, heard the blacksmith sound of swords clashing on breastplates; he had a glimpse of unhorsed men, of horses thrown to the ground, then of a sword rising high and bloody. The Cuirassiers, hugely outnumbered, were obliterated in the time it took for a trooper on a galloping horse to hack down once. An Irish horseman screamed, not in pain, but from the sheer joy of killing. Another man was drunk on rum, his sword was wet with blood, and his horse bleeding from the spur wounds as he hurled it on to yet more slaughter.
A few British riders were down, their horses tripped by the broken Cuirassiers, but most of the charge simply flowed around the fallen horses and wounded Frenchmen. The horsemen could see the infantry milling like sheep brought to the wolfs den. A bugle, its notes wavering because they were being blown from a galloping horse, tore its bright challenge to glory.
Lord John was screaming as though drunk. He had never, in all his life, known excitement like this. The very earth seemed to shudder. All around him, bright in the day’s gloom, a torrent of men and horses flowed at full killing stretch. The horses, teeth bared, seemed to fly across the field. Mud churned up by the hooves ahead flecked and slapped his face. There was a wild music in the air, the sound of banging hoofbeats and shrill shouts, of horses’ lungs rasping like bellows, of screams fading behind and warning shouts sounding louder ahead, of the bugle hurling them on, of glory as vivid as the guidon banner that seemed to drive straight at the heart of the doomed French column.
Then the horsemen hit.
And the French, still half manoeuvring out of column, were helpless.
The big horses and their towering riders crashed home all along the column’s broken flank. Cavalry drove great wedges into the very centre of the French infantry. The swords slashed down, rose, then slashed again. Horses reared, lashing with their hooves to break skulls. The troopers, revelling in the slaughter, wheeled in the middle of the breaking column to break it yet further apart and thus make it easier to kill its constituent parts. They lashed the French with steel, and still more horsemen came to drive yet further lanes of death and horror into the shattered mass.
“Fix bayonets!” The redcoats on the ridge top fumbled at their scabbards, dragged the long blades free, then slotted the bayonets onto the hot smoking muzzles of the guns.
“Forward!”
There was an hurrah along the ridge, then the redcoats ran to join the killing.
The French broke. No infantry could have stood. The French columns broke and fled, and that made the horsemens’ task even easier. It was no trouble to kill a running man and so the cavalrymen slaked themselves on killing and wanted even more. They were drunk on the slaughter, drenched in it, glorying in it. Some of the riders were properly drunk, soused in rum and lust, and killing like fiends. The bugles screamed at them, encouraged them until the sword blades were so thick with blood that the cavalry’s hands and wrists were sopping with it.
A Scots sergeant, six feet four inches tall and on a horse to match, took the first Eagle. He did it alone, riding his great warhorse deep into a thicket of desperate Frenchmen who were ready to die for their standard. They did die. Sergeant Ewart was strong enough to use the clumsy thirty-five-inch sword. He cut the first defender down through the head. A French sergeant, armed with one of the spears issued to protect the precious Eagles, drove its point at Ewart, but the Scotsman’s blade drove up through the Sergeant’s jaw. He wrenched the sword free, spurred his horse on, felt a musket-ball blaze past his face and hacked down at the man who had fired, breaking the man’s skull apart with the vicious blade. Ewart wheeled his horse, reached for the Eagle, snatched it, and his heels went back as he lifted the golden trophy high over his head. He was shouting so all the world would see what he had done, and his horse, as if it shared the triumph, rode across the path of dead with its bloody head high and its flanks sheeted scarlet.
“You’ve done enough for one day!” The Scots Grey’s Colonel offered Sergeant Ewart a salute. “Take it to the rear!”
Ewart, holding the Eagle high, and punching it at the sky to show the gods what he had achieved, cantered back towards the British ridge. He passed a Highland infantry regiment that cheered him hoarse.
The other horsemen drove on. The field was wet with blood and rain, and treacherous underfoot with the fallen dead and pitiful with the wounded, yet still the horses streamed their ribbons of steel and bone into the fleeing, panicked Frenchmen. A drum was splintered by a horse’s hooves. The drummer boy, just twelve years old, was dead. Another boy, screaming in terror, was ridden down by a white horse that broke his skull with the blow of a hoof. Some of the French infantry just ran to the charging British infantry and threw themselves onto the redcoats’ mercy. The British infantry, checked by the slaughter in their path, stopped their charge and gathered in the terrified prisoners.
The cavalry knew no such mercy. They had dreamed of such a field, filled with a broken enemy to be broken further. Captain Clark of the Royals took the second Eagle, hacking its defenders apart with his sword, snatching the trophy, defending it, then carrying it clear of the pathetic French survivors who, hearing their death in the big hooves, still tried to run, but there was nowhere to run as the Irish and Scots and English horsemen ravaged about the valley. Even the horses were trained to kill. They bit, they lashed with their hooves, they fought like the crazed men who rode them.
Lord John at last learned how to kill. He learned the joy of losing all restraint, of absolute power, of riding into shattered men who turned, screamed, then disappeared behind as his sword thumped home. He found himself picking a target, and stalking the man even if it meant ignoring closer Frenchmen, then choosing the manner of his victim’s death. One he skewered through the neck, almost losing his sword because it pierced so far. He practised the lunge, learning to control the heavy point of the blade. He soaked the steel in blood, spraying droplets into the air after each victory, then lowering the point for more. He saw a fat French officer‘ clumsily running away, and Lord John spurred through the closest Frenchmen, stood in his stirrups, and slashed down with the sword. He felt the skull crumple like a giant boiled egg and he laughed aloud to think of such a comparison at
