Cuirassiers now led the charge.
Rebecque groaned. In almost the exact same place as the Hanoverians had been slaughtered, the KGL now suffered. The cavalry, a mixture of Cuirassiers, Lancers and Dragoons who had survived the slaughter of the horsemen among the British squares, now struck the flank of Ompteda’s right-hand battalion. To Rebecque it seemed that the red-coated infantry simply disappeared beneath the swarm of mounted killers. To the French horsemen this was a blessed moment of revenge on the infantry who had made them bleed and suffer earlier in the day.
The Prince just stared. He had gone pale, but he made no move to help the men he had just doomed. His mouth opened slackly and his fingers twitched on his reins.
The Germans stood no chance. The horsemen sabred and stabbed from the open flank. The men of the right-hand KGL battalion broke into hopeless flight and were run down by the horses. The left-hand battalion formed a rally square to protect its colour, but the right-hand battalion was destroyed. The Prince turned away as a French swordsman captured a KGL colour and hefted it aloft in a gesture of triumph. Colonel Ompteda died trying to save the flag. The French infantry ran to add their bayonets to the horsemen’s blades. The German survivors, pitifully few, inched in their rough square back towards the ridge. They too might have been doomed, but, some of their own cavalry streamed down from the elm tree to drive the enemy back.
A French cavalry trumpeter sounded a derisive flurry as the remnants of the King’s German Legion limped back up the slope. A Cuirassier brandished the captured colour, taunting the suffering British ridge with this foretaste of French victory.
The Prince did not look at the Germans nor at the exultant French. Instead he stared imperiously towards the east. “It isn’t my fault if men won’t fight properly!”
None of the staff answered. Not even Winckler was minded to soften the disaster with flattery.
“We gave the garrison a breathing space, did we not?” The Prince gestured at La Haye Sainte that was once more ringed with smoke, but again no one answered and the Prince, who believed he deserved loyalty from his military family, turned furiously on his staff. “The Germans should have formed square! It wasn’t my fault!” He looked from man to man, demanding agreement, but only Simon Doggett was brave enough to meet the Prince’s petulant and bulging eyes.
“You’re nothing but a silk stocking full of shit,” Doggett said very clearly, and utterly astonished himself by so repeating Patrick Harper’s scornful verdict on the Prince.
There was an appalled silence. The Prince gaped. Rebecque, not quite sure whether he had heard correctly, opened his mouth to protest, but could not find adequate words.
Doggett knew he had just seconds to keep the initiative. He tugged at his horse’s reins. “You’re a bloody murderer!” he said to the Prince, then slashed back his spurs and galloped away. In a few seconds the smoke hid him.
The Prince stared after him. Rebecque hastened to assure His Highness that Doggett’s wits had clearly been loosened by the stress of battle. The Prince nodded acceptance of the facile explanation, then turned furiously on his staff again. “I’m surrounded by incompetents! That bloody man should have formed square! Is it my fault if a damned German doesn’t know his job?” The Prince’s indignation and anger spilled out in furious passion. “Is it my fault that the French are winning? Is it?”
And in that, at least, the Prince spoke true. The French, at last, were winning the battle.
CHAPTER 19
French victory became a virtual certainty when La Haye Sainte fell. The farm’s German defenders ran out of rifle ammunition and the French attackers tore down the barricaded doors and flooded into the farm buildings. For a time they were held off“ by bayonets and swords as the defenders fought furiously in the corridors and stables. The Germans made barricades of their own and the French dead, then rammed their sword-bayonets over the piled bodies, and for a time it seemed as if their steel and fury might yet hold the farm, but then the French musket volleys tore into the Riflemen and the French musket wadding set fire to the stable straw, and the defenders, choking and decimated, were forced out.
Those Riflemen who escaped from La Haye Sainte ran up the ridge’s slope as the victorious French swarmed into the farm buildings. The Riflemen of the 95th had long been driven from the adjacent sandpit, so now the centre bastion of the Duke’s line was gone. The French brought cannon into the farm’s kitchen garden and, at perilously short range, opened fire on the ridge. Voltigeurs, given a new territory to exploit, spread up the forward slope to open a killing fire on the troops nearest to the elm tree.
An immediate counter-attack could have recaptured the farm while the French hold on its buildings was still new and tenuous, but the Duke had no reserves left. Every man who could fight in the Duke’s army was now committed to defend the ridge, while the rest of his troops had either fled, were wounded, or were dead. What was left of the Duke’s army was a thin line of men stretched along a blood-soaked ridge. The line was two ranks deep, no more, and in places the ridge seemed empty where the battalions had been forced to shrink into four ranks as a precaution against the cavalry that still lurked in the smoke that drifted at the slope’s foot.
The French were winning.
The Duke, hardly a man given to despair, muttered a prayer for the coming of either the Prussians or the night. But both, this day, came painfully slowly.
The first French attacks on the British ridge had failed, but now their gunners and their skirmishers were grinding down the British defence. Men died in ones and twos, but constantly. The already truncated battalions shrank as the surviving Sergeants ordered the files to close the gaps. Men who had started the day four files apart became neighbours, and still the gun-fire shredded the ranks and still the Voltigeurs fired from the smoke and still the Sergeants chanted the litany of a battalion’s death, “Close up! Close up!”
Victory was a mere drumbeat away because the British line had been scraped thin as a drumskin.
The Emperor felt the glorious certainty of victory. His will now stretched clear across the battlefield. It was seven o’clock on a summer’s evening, the sun was slanting steeply through the remnants of cloud and skeins of smoke, and the Emperor held the lives and deaths of all three armies in his hand. He had won. All he now needed to do was fend off the Prussians with his right hand, and annihilate the British with his left.
He had won. Yet he would wait a few moments before savouring the victory. He would let the guns in the newly captured La Haye Sainte finish their destruction of the British centre, and only then would he unleash his immortals.
To glory.
The bombardment ground on, but slower now for the French gun barrels were degrading from their constant fire. Some guns shot their vents, leaving a gaping hole where their touchholes had been, while others broke their carriages, and one twelve-pounder exploded as an air bubble in its cast barrel finally gave way. Yet more than enough French cannon remained in service to sustain the killing. The surviving British infantry was numbed and deafen^ ed by the fire. Less than half of Wellington’s army was still capable of fighting. Their faces were blackened by battle and streaked white with sweat, while their eyes were reddened from the irritation of the powder residues that had sparked from their musket pans.
Yet, battered and bleeding, they clung to the ridge beneath the dwarfing pall of churning smoke that belched from the burning ammunition wagons. The French cannonade had long assumed an inhuman inevitability; as though the gunners had sprung free some malevolent force from within the earth itself; a force which now dispassionately ground the battlefield into blood and embers and ragged soil. No humans were visible on the French-held ridge; there was just the bank of smoke into which the guns flashed fire that was diffused into lurid flares that erupted bright, then slowly faded into gloom.
Sharpe, standing a few feet to one side of his old battalion, watched the ominous bursts of red light ignite and die, and each unnatural glow marked a few more seconds survived. The fear had come with inactivity, and each minute.that Sharpe waited motionless on the ridge made him feel more vulnerable as though, skin by skin, his bravery was peeling away. Harper, crouching silent beside Sharpe, shivered as he stared wide-eyed at the strange inhuman fires that pulsed amidst the smoke.
This was unlike any battlefield that either man had known before. In Spain the fields had seemed to stretch
