Sharpe's Waterloo Part 22

"I'm pleased too." D'Alembord spoke with a bitter sarcasm. He had wanted promotion, indeed it was the prime reason he had stayed with the battalion, but he resented the sudden price of his majority.

"You're alive, Peter," Sharpe consoled his friend, "you're alive."

"The b.l.o.o.d.y man." D'Alembord stared savagely towards Ford. "The b.l.o.o.d.y, b.l.o.o.d.y man. Why didn't he form square?"

Then, to the north, a bugle sounded. Fresh troops were visible at the crossroads, a ma.s.s of men who marched forward to make a new line across the battlefield. The horse artillery was among the infantry and, to their left, there was an impressive nia.ss of hors.e.m.e.n. The British cavalry had at last arrived.

"I suppose we've won this battle!" D'Alembord slowly sheathed his sword.

"I suppose we have," Sharpe said.

But it felt horribly like a defeat.

Drums sounded, bayonets were levelled, and the newly formed British line marched forward. The infantry trod across the scorched straw, over the smears of blood, and around the dead and the dying bodies of horses and men.

From the southern end of the wood, where Saxe-Weimar's men had held through the day, the Guards division attacked the western farms. The French infantry fought back, but could not hold. In the centre the redcoats marched through the stream, recaptured Gemioncourt farm, and went on up the slope. At the far left of the battlefield the Rifles drove the French back to recapture the eastern farms.

Every inch of ground that Marshal Ney had taken during the afternoon was regained. The British line, supported by guns and cavalry, ground on like a behemoth. The French, suddenly outnumbered, were forced to retreat towards Frasnes. Quatre Bras had held and the road to the Prussians was still open. The battle between Napoleon and Blcher still sounded loud in the summer's evening, but that too faded away as the shadows of the western clouds lengthened dark across the landscape.

Lord John Rossendale, riding behind the British light cavalry, stopped where a Cuira.s.sier's body was sprawled beside the road. The man's guts had been flayed clean from his belly and now lay in a blue-red dribble across fifteen feet of the highway's churned surface. Lord John wanted to vomit, but only choked. He gasped for breath and twisted his horse away. A dead British skirmisher lay in the trampled rye. his skull laid open by a bullet. Flies were thick on the exposed brains. Next to the dead man was a French Voltigeur, blood thick in his belly and lap. The man was alive, but s.h.i.+vering with the trauma of his wound. He stared up at Lord John and asked for water. Lord John felt faint with shock. He turned his horse and galloped towards the crossroads where his servants were preparing supper.

In the barns behind the crossroads the surgeons were at their grisly work with knives and saws and probes. The amputated arms, hands, and legs were tossed into the farmyard. Lanterns were hung from the barn beams to light the operations. A Highlander, his right calf shattered by a French cannon-ball, refused to bite the leather gag and made not a sound as a surgeon took his leg off at the knee.

Sharpe and Harper, knowing they were not welcome to stay near the brooding Lieutenant-Colonel Ford, walked their horses back down the flank of the wood, but stopped well short of the crossroads. "I suppose I'm out of work," Sharpe said.

"The b.u.g.g.e.r'll want you back in the morning."

"Maybe."

The two Riflemen tethered their horses in a clearing among the trees, then Sharpe walked out to the b.l.o.o.d.y patch of ground where the 69th had died. He picked up four discarded bayonets and took the leather bootlaces off two corpses. Back in the wood he made a fire with twigs and gunpowder. He stuck the bayonets into the ground at the four corners of the fire, then pulled the straps off the Cuira.s.sier's breastplate that Harper had scavenged earlier. He threaded the bootlaces into the holes at the shoulders and waist of the breastplate, then waited.

Harper had taken his own knife out to the battlefield. He found a dead horse and cut a thick b.l.o.o.d.y steak from its rump. Then, the steak dripping in his left hand, he crossed to one of the silent British guns and, ignoring its crew, stooped under the barrel to sc.r.a.pe away a handful of the gun's axle grease.

Back in the wood Harper slapped the axle grease into the upturned breastplate, ripped the pelt off the steak, then dropped the meat into the cold grease. "I'll water the horses while you cook."

Sharpe nodded acknowledgement. He fed the fire with branches he had cut and split with his sword. In the morning, before the army marched to join Blcher, he would find a cavalry armourer to put an edge back on the blade. Then he wondered whether he would even be with the army next day. The Prince had dismissed him so he might as well ride back to Brussels and take Lucille to England.

Sharpe tied the breastplate to the four bayonets so that it hung like a steel hammock above the flames. By the time Harper brought the horses back from the stream the steak was sizzling and smoking in the bubbling grease.

Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads, and some of the injured still moaned and cried in the darkness. Some bandsmen still searched for the wounded, but many would have to wait till the next day for rescue.

"Rain tomorrow." Harper sniffed the air.

"Like as not."

"It's good to smell proper food again." A dog ranged near the fire, but Harper drove it away by shying a clod of earth at it.

Sharpe burned the meat black, then carefully cut it in halves and speared one piece on his knife. "Yours."

They held their meat on knife points, gnawed it down, and shared a canteen of wine that Harper had taken from a dead French Lancer. In the east the first stars p.r.i.c.ked pale against a sky still misted by battle smoke. In the west it was darker, made so by the towering clouds. Men sang behind the crossroads while somewhere in The wood a flautist made a melancholy music. The trees sparkled with camp-fires, while to the south, and reflecting against the spreading clouds, a red glow showed where Marshal Ney's troops made their bivouacs.

"c.r.a.pauds fought well today," Harper said grudgingly.

Sharpe nodded, then shrugged. "They should have attacked with their infantry, though. They'd have won if they had."

"I suppose we'll be at it again tomorrow?"

"Unless the Prussians have beaten Boney and won the war for us."

Sharpe fetched a flask of calvados from his saddlebag, took a swig and handed it to Harper. The flute music was plangent. He had once wanted to learn the flute, and had thought to make an attempt this last winter, but instead he had spent the evenings making an elaborate cradle from applewood. He had meant to decorate the cradle's hood with carvings of wild flowers, but he had found their intricate curves too difficult to cut so had settled for the straight stark lines of piled drums and weapons. Lucille had been hugely amused by her baby's martial cot.

"Shouldn't you go and see the Prince?" Harper asked.

"Why the h.e.l.l should I? b.u.g.g.e.r the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Harper chuckled. He sat with his back propped against his saddle and stared into the dark void where the battle had been fought. "It's not the same, is it?"

"What isn't?"

"It's not like Spain." He paused, thinking of the men who were not here, then named just one of those men. "Sweet William."

Sharpe grunted. William Frederickson had once been a friend almost as close as Harper, but Frederickson had tilted a lance at Lucille, and lost, and had never forgiven Sharpe for that loss.

Harper, who disliked that the two officers were not on speaking terms, offered the flask to Sharpe. "We could have done with him here today."

"That's true." Yet Frederickson was in a Canadian garrison, just one of the thousands of veterans who had been dispersed round the globe, which meant that the Emperor must be fought with too many raw battalions who had never stood in the battle line and who froze like rabbits when the cavalry threatened.

Far to the west a sheet of lightning flickered in the sky and thunder grumbled like a far sound of gunnery. "Rain tomorrow," Harper said again.

Sharpe yawned. Tonight, at least, he was well fed and dry. He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to have been given Lord John's promissory note, but it had not come. That was a problem best left for the morning, but for now he wrapped himself in the cloak that was Lucille's gift and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

And the Emperor's campaign was forty-one hours old.

CHAPTER 10.

More battalions, cavalry squadrons and gun batteries arrived at the crossroads throughout the short night until, at dawn, the Duke's army was at last almost wholly a.s.sembled. In the first sepulchral light the newcomers stared dully at the small shapes which lay in the mist that shrouded the hollows of the battlefield. Bugles roused the bivouacs, while the wounded, left all night in the rye, called pitifully for help. The night sentries were called in and a new picquet line set to face the French camp-fires at Frasnes. The British camp-fires were revived with new kindling and a scattering of gunpowder. Men fished in their ammunition pouches for handfuls of tea leaves that were contributed to the common pots. Officers, socially visiting between the battalions, spread the cheerful news that Marshal Blcher had repulsed Bonaparte's attack, so now it seemed certain that the French would retreat in the face of a united Prussian-British army.

"We'll be in France next week!" an infantry captain a.s.sured his men.

"Paris by July, lads," a sergeant forecast. "Just think of all those girls."

The Duke of Wellington, who had slept in an inn three miles from Quatre Bras, returned to the crossroads at first light. The Highlanders of the gand made him a fire and served him tea. He cupped the tin mug in both hands and stared southwards towards Marshal Ney's positions, but the French troops were silent and unmoving beneath the heavy cloud cover that had spread from the west during the short hours of darkness. One of the Duke's stafFofficers, heavily protected by a troop of King's German Legion cavalry, was sent eastwards to learn the morning's news from Marshal Blcher.

Officers used French Cuira.s.siers' upturned breastplates as shaving bowls; the senior officers having the privilege of the water when it was hot and the Lieutenants and Ensigns being forced to wait till the water was cold and congealed. The infantrymen who had fought the previous day boiled yet more water to clean their fouled musket barrels. Cavalry troopers queued to have their swords or sabres ground to a killing edge on the treadled stones, while the gunners filled the shot-cases of their field carriages with ready ammunition. There was an air of cheerfulness about the crossroads; the feeling that the army had survived an ordeal the previous day, but that now, and thanks largely to the victory of the Prussians, it was on the verge of triumph. The only grumble was that in the desperate hurry to reach Quatre Bras the army had left its commissariat wagons far behind so that most of the battalions started their day hungry.

The battlefield was searched for bodies. The wounded who still lived were taken back to the surgeons, while the dead were collected for burial. Most of the dead officers had been buried the previous night, so now the diggers would look after as many rank and file as they could. Sharpe and Harper, waking in the overcast dawn, found themselves just a few yards away from a work party that was scratching a wide and shallow trench in which the slaughtered men of the 69th would be interred. The waiting bodies lay in such natural poses that they almost seemed to be asleep. Captain Harry Price of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers found the two Riflemen drinking their morning tea just as the first corpses were being dragged towards the inadequate grave. "Any tea for a gallant officer?" Price begged.

Harper cheerfully scooped another mug of stewed tea out of the breastplate kettle. The dead, who had been stripped of their uniforms, stank already. It was only an hour after dawn yet the day threatened to be humid and sticky and the grave diggers were sweating as they hacked at the soil. "They'll have to dig deeper than that," Harper commented as he handed Price the tin mug.