paces to Ford’s right, its mens’ faces visible to him as pale blurs in the smoke. Worse, the column was beginning to unfold, its rear ranks marching outwards to form a broad line that would challenge and crush the British muskets.
The French cannon fired.
The canister crashed into the battalion’s four ranks. Seven men went down. Two screamed foully until a sergeant told them to stop their damned noise. Ford, racked by the screams, could take no more. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and his hands were shaking. He tried to speak, but no sound came. The nearest Frenchmen were just fifty yards away and, even without his spectacles, he could see their moustaches and the bright streaks that were their bayonets. He saw their mouths open to shout their war cry. “ Vive I’Empereur!”
The battalion to Ford’s right was edging backwards. They, like Ford’s men, were survivors of Halkett’s brigade who had so nearly died with the men of the 69th at Quatre Bras. Now, their nerves shredded and their officers mostly dead, they gave ground. The French were just too huge, too threatening, and too close.
“Vive I’Empereur!”
Ford’s men smelt their neighbours’ panic. They too shuffled backwards. They looked for orders, but their Colonel could not stop them. His saddle was wet, his bowels were churning and his muscles twitching helplessly. He could see death coming at him in a myopic blur of long blue coats. He wanted to cry, because he did not want to die.
While for the Guard, for the Emperor’s immortal undefeated Guard, victory was so sweet. „Vive I’Empereur!“
“Now, Maitland! Now’s your time!” The Duke had stationed himself behind the survivors of the British Foot Guards who faced the larger of the two French columns. The Duke, who had learned his trade as a battalion officer, could not resist giving the orders himself. “Stand up, Guards!”
To the French Guardsmen it seemed as though the line of redcoats rose out of the mud like the reviving dead. They suddenly stood to make a barrier across the path of the larger French column which, instinctively, checked. One moment the ridge had appeared empty, now, suddenly,“ an enemy had risen from the ravaged earth.
“Forward!” the French officers shouted, while at the back of the Imperial Guard’s column the battalions began to spread outwards to form the musket line which would overpower the handful of men who dared to oppose them.
“Make ready!” It had been many years since the Duke had handled a single battalion in battle, but he had lost none of his skills and had judged the moment to perfection. The British muskets were suddenly raised, making it seem to the approaching Frenchmen as if all the waiting redcoats had made a quarter turn to the right. The Duke looked grim, waited a second, then shouted. “Fire!”
The British muskets flamed. They could not miss at fifty paces and the leading ranks of the French column were cut down in blood and screams. The dead were numbered in scores, making a barrier of blood and meat to block the following ranks.
More muskets crashed flame and smoke to fill the ridge with the sound of infantry volleys. On either flank of Maitland’s Guards other British battalions were closing on the deploying French. The 52nd, a hard and bloody- minded battalion that had learned its trade in Spain, was wheeling out of line and advancing to take the wounded column in its flank. They raked the French Guards with a lethal and practised volley fire. Fifteen thousand Frenchmen‘ might have crossed the valley, but only the handful of men at the head of each column could use their muskets, and that handful was faced by the rippling volleys of the red-coated battalions. Column had met line again, and the line was swamping the heads of the columns with fire. The rear flanks of the column tried but could not deploy into line; instead they shrank back from the relentless musketry.
The Imperial Guard could not go forward, nor could it form its own musket line, it could only stand stock still while its face and flanks were mauled by the redcoats’ fire. The French officers shouted at the ranks to advance, but the living were obstructed by the dead and under a lashing fire that made each new front rank into a barricade of corpses. The Emperor’s dream had begun to die.
The British Guards facing the column’s head reloaded. “Make ready! Fire!” The Guards of either nation were close enough to see each others’ faces clearly, close enough to see the pitiful agony in a wounded man’s eyes, to see the bitter anger of an officer’s broken pride, to see a man spit tobacco juice or vomit blood, to see resolve turn swiftly to fear. The undefeated, immortal, Imperial Guard was beginning to falter, beginning.to edge backwards, though still the drummer boys tried to beat them on with their desperate sticks.
“Make ready!” The voice of a British Guards officer rose cool and mocking. “Fire!”
The splintering, ripping sound of a battalion volley filled the sky as the musket-balls thudded home through the twitching smoke. The British Guards had stopped the French advance, while the ?2nd had closed on the column’s flank and was now turning it bloody with their pitiless and murderous fire. Hours of practice had gone into this column’s death; tedious hours of loading and ramming and priming and firing until the redcoats could perform the motions of firing a musket in their rum-sodden sleep. Now they grimaced with powder-blackened faces as their brass-bound musket butts crashed back into their bruised shoulders. They were the scum of the earth and they were turning the Emperor’s pampered darlings into bloody offal.
“Now’s your time!” The Duke’s voice pierced the noise. “Fix bayonets!”
The Imperial Guard had been stopped. Now it must learn defeat.
Then Wellington glanced to his left, and saw his own defeat.
The last of the British light cavalry had been drawn up in line a hundred yards behind Halkett’s brigade. They had been posted there in case of disaster. Some would escort the colours of the defeated army to safety, while the rest would protect the retreat of the surviving British infantry with a last suicidal charge.
They believed that suicidal charge was imminent for they could see the battalions of Halkett’s brigade edging back towards them. Beyond those scared troops, and dark on the crest, a column of French infantry was appearing from the smoky darkness of the valley. Far off to the right the British Guards were standing firm and pouring musket-fire at another enemy column, but here, closer to the centre of the British line, the redcoats were giving ground and the Emperor’s men were pounding relentlessly forward.
“Stop them!” a cavalry colonel shouted. He pointed, not at the French, but at the British infantry.
Sabres rasped from scabbards and the horsemen spurred forward to threaten their own infantry.
The redcoats were shuffling backwards. The wounded begged their comrades not to leave them. Some officers and men tried to staunch the spreading panic, but the battalions were leaderless and they knew this battle was lost for their colours had been taken away, and they knew that in a moment the long French bayonets would sear forward. The men of the Prince of Wales’s Own
Volunteers looked to their rear, searching for orders, and all they saw was their own terrified and half-blind Colonel riding backwards. Beyond the Colonel was the cavalry. The redcoats looked left towards the open space on the ridge where flight was still possible. They were no longer soldiers; they were a mob on the teetering edge of panicked flight, and then, above the noise of the drums and above the sound of the cavalry’s hooves and above the crash of the British Guards’ volleys and above the French cheers for their Emperor, one huge voice stilled the battlefield.
“South Essex! Halt!” The voice filled the space between the blood-reeking mud and the smoke. “Sergeant Harper!”
“Sir!” Harper’s voice answered from the rear of the battalion.
“You will kill the next man who takes a step backwards, and that includes officers!”
“Very good, sir!” Harper’s voice held a convincing edge of anger as an implicit promise that he would indeed murder any man who took another backwards pace.
Sharpe stood in front of the battalion and with his back to the French column. His horse, which d’Alembord had been riding, was being held by a sergeant in the Grenadier Company. Sharpe suspected the man had been ready to mount and flee from the expected defeat, and now the Sergeant stared with fear and defiance at Sharpe. “Bring the horse here!” Sharpe called to the Sergeant, but not angrily, instead keeping his voice almost matter-of- fact as though there was not a damned great column of victorious French infantry storming across the ridge’s crest not a pistol’s shot behind him. “Bring the horse here! Quickly now!” Sharpe wanted to be on horseback so that every man in the battalion could see him. These soldiers had no colours any more, they had precious few officers any more, so they must be able to see who led them and see that he was not flinching from the drum-driven threat which pounded so close.
