,Nein. Franqais, peut-etre?"

They spoke in French. The Hussar Captain's anger had been prompted by the French refusal to fight him. "No one is allowed to fight today! We were ordered out of Charleroi. Why do we even come to the Netherlands? Why don't we just give Napoleon the keys to Berlin and have done with it? Who are you, monsieur?"

"My name is Sharpe."

"A Britisher, eh? My name's Ziegler. Do you know what the h.e.l.l is happening?"

Ziegler and his men had been driven westwards by a whole regiment of Red Lancers. Like the Dragoons on the pasture, Ziegler had retreated rather than face unequal odds. He and his men had been resting in the farm when they saw Sharpe's ignominious flight. "At least we killed one of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

Sharpe told Ziegler what he knew, which merely confirmed what the Prussian Captain had already discovered for himself. A French force was advancing northwards from Charleroi, probably aiming at the gap between the British and Prussian armies. Ziegler was now cut off on the wrong side of the Brussels road, but that predicament did not worry him. "We'll just ride north till there are no more d.a.m.ned French, then go east." He turned baleful eyes on the captured Dragoon. "Do you want the prisoner?" he asked Sharpe.

,I'll take his horse."

The terrified young Frenchman tried to answer Sharpe's questions, but either he knew very little or else he was cleverly hiding what he did know. He said he believed the Emperor was with the troops on the Brussels road, but he had not personally seen him. He knew nothing of any advance further to the west near Mons.

Ziegler did not want to be slowed down by the prisoner, so he ordered the Frenchman to strip offhis boots and coat, then ordered his Sergeant to cut the man's overall straps. "Go! Be grateful I didn't kill you!" The Frenchman, in bare feet and clutching his overalls, hurried southwards.

Ziegler gave Sharpe a length of cold sausage, a hard-boiled egg, and a piece of black bread. "Good luck, Englishman!"

Sharpe thanked him. He had mounted the Dragoon's horse and was leading the tired mare by her reins. He a.s.sumed that by now the allied Generals must be aware of the French advance, but it was still his duty to report what he had seen and so he kicked back his heels, waved farewell to the Prussians, and rode on.

CHAPTER 4.

Clouds were showing in the west. The vapour, rising over the North Sea, drifted slowly eastwards to heap white and grey thunderheads above the coast. The farmers feared heavy rain that would crush their ripening crops.

No such worries crossed the mind of the Prussian Major who had been sent to Brussels with news of the French advance and details of the Prussian response. The despatch told how the Prussian garrison at Charleroi was falling back, not on Brussels, but north-east to where the main Prussian army was a.s.sembling. The Major's news was vital if the British and Dutch troops were to join the Prussians.

The Major faced a journey of thirty-two miles. It was a sunny and very hot day, and he was tired and monstrously fat. The exertions of the first five miles when he had thought the Dragoons might burst from behind every hedgerow or farmhouse had exhausted both the Major and his horse, so once he felt safe he sensibly slowed to a contemplative and restoring walk. After an hour he came to a small roadside inn that stood on the crest of a shallow hill and, twisting in his saddle, he saw that the inn gave him a good view of the road right to the horizon so that he would see any French pursuit long before it represented any danger. Nothing moved on the road now except for a man driving eight cows from one pasture to another.

The Major eased himself out of the saddle, slid heavily to the ground, and tied his horse to the inn's signpost. He spoke pa.s.sably-good French and enjoyed discussing food with the pretty young serving girl who came out to the table by the roadside, which the Major had adopted as his vantage point. He decided on roast chicken and vegetables, with apple pie and cheese to follow. He requested a bottle of red wine, but not of the common kind.

The sun shone on the long road to the south. Haymakers scythed steadily in a meadow a half-mile away, while much further off, far beyond the blur of fields and woods, dust whitened the sky. That was the artificial cloud kicked up by an army, but no troops threatened the Major's peaceful rest and so he saw no reason to make undue haste, especially as the roast chicken proved to be excellent. The chicken's skin was crisped nicely and its yellow flesh was succulent. When the girl brought the Major his pie, she asked him if Napoleon was coming.

"Don't you worry, my dear! Don't you worry."

Far to the Major's north, in Brussels, a detachment of Highland soldiers had been ordered to the Duke of Richmond's house, where they were shown into the dazzling ballroom hung with the Belgian colours. Before supper was served the Highlanders would offer the guests a display of their dancing.

The Highlander Lieutenant asked that one of the unlit chandeliers be raised from floor level so he could make certain there would be adequate room for his dancers' crossed swords. The d.u.c.h.ess, intent that every particular of her ball should be arranged to perfection, insisted on a demonstration. "You are bringing pipers tonight?" the d.u.c.h.ess demanded.

"Indeed, Your Grace."

Which only gave the d.u.c.h.ess a new detail to worry over: how would the orchestra leader know when to stop his men playing so that the pipers could begin?

Her husband averred that doubtless the orchestra and the pipers would arrange things to their own satisfaction, and further opined that the d.u.c.h.ess should leave the ball's arrangements to those who were paid to worry about the details, but the d.u.c.h.ess was insistent on voicing her concerns this afternoon. She earnestly asked her husband whether she should request the Prince of Orange not to bring Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe?

"Who's Sharpe?" the Duke asked from behind his copy of The Times.

"He's the husband of Johnny Rossendale's girl. She's coming, I'm afraid. I tried to stop him bringing her, but he's clearly besotted."

"And this Sharpe is her husband?"

"I just told you that, Charles. He's also an aide to Slender Billy."

The Duke grunted. "Sharpe's clearly a fool if he lets an idiot like Johnny Rossendale cuckold him."

"That's precisely why I think I should talk to the Prince. I'm told this Sharpe is an extremely uncouth man and is more than likely to fillet Johnny."

"If he's uncouth, my dear, then doubtless he won't wish to attend your ball. And I certainly wouldn't mention the matter to Orange. That b.l.o.o.d.y young fool will only bring Sharpe if he thinks it'll cause trouble. It's a sleeping dog, my dear, so let it lie."

But it was not in the d.u.c.h.ess's nature to let anything remain undisturbed if it was amenable to her interference. "Perhaps I should mention it to Arthur?"

The Duke snapped his newspaper down to the table. "You will not trouble Wellington about two d.a.m.ned fools and their silly strumpet."

"If you say so, Charles."

,I do say so." The rampart of newspaper was thrown up, inviting silence.

The other English Duke in Brussels, Wellington, would have been grateful had he known that Richmond had spared him the d.u.c.h.ess's worries, for the Commander-in-Chief of the British and Dutch armies already had more than enough worries of his own. One of those worries, the smallest of them, was the prospect of hunger. Wellington knew from bitter experience that he would be required to make so much conversation at the d.u.c.h.ess's ball that his supper would inevitably congeal on its plate. He therefore ordered an early dinner of roast mutton to be served in his quarters at three o'clock that afternoon.

Then, noting that clouds were building to the west, he took his afternoon walk about the fashionable quarter of Brussels. He took care to appear blithely unworried as he strolled with his staff, for he knew only too well how the French sympathizers in the city were looking for any sign of allied defeatism that they could turn into an argument to demoralize the Dutch-Belgian troops.

The quality of those troops was at the heart of the Duke's real worries. On paper his army was ninety thousand strong, but only half of that paper force was reliable.

The core of the Duke's army was his infantry. He had thirty battalions of redcoats, but only half of those had fought in his Spanish campaigns and the quality of the other half was unknown. He had some excellent infantry battalions of the King's German Legion, and some enthusiastic troops from Hanover, but together the German and British infantry totalled less than forty thousand men. To make up the numbers he had the Dutch-Belgian army, over thirty thousand infantrymen in all, which he did not trust at all. Most of the Dutch-Belgians had fought for the Emperor and still wore the Emperor's uniforms. The Duke was a.s.sured by the King of the Netherlands that the Belgians would fight, but, Wellington wondered, for whom?

The Duke had cavalry too, but the Duke had no faith in hors.e.m.e.n, whether Dutch or English. His German cavalry was first cla.s.s, but sadly few in numbers, while the Duke's English cavalrymen were mere fools on horseback; expensive and touchy, p.r.o.ne to insanity, and utter strangers to discipline. The Dutch-Belgian hors.e.m.e.n, for all the Duke cared, could have packed their bags and ridden home right now.

He had ninety thousand men, of whom half might fight well, and he knew he would likely face a hundred thousand of Napoleon's veterans. The Emperor's veterans, fretting against the injustices of Bourbon France, had welcomed Napoleon's return and flocked to the Eagles. The French army, which the Duke still thought was ma.s.sing south of the border, was probably the finest instrument that Napoleon had ever commanded. Every man in it had fought before, it was freshly equipped, and it sought vengeance against the countries that had humbled France in 1814. The Duke had cause for worry, yet as he strolled down the rue Royale he was forced to put a brave face on the desperate odds lest his enemies took courage from his despair. The Duke could also cling to one strong hope, namely that his scratch army would not fight Napoleon alone, but alongside Prince Blcher's Prussians. So long as the British and Prussian armies joined forces, they must win; separately, the Duke feared, they must be destroyed.

Yet twenty-five miles to the south the French were already pushing the Prussian forces eastwards, away from the British. No one in Brussels knew that the French had invaded; instead they prepared for a d.u.c.h.ess's ball while a fat Prussian major paid for his roast chicken, finished his wine, then ambled slowly northwards.

At one o'clock in the afternoon, eight hours after the first shots had been fired south of Charleroi, Sharpe met more cavalrymen; this time a patrol in red-faced dark blue coats who thundered eagerly across a pasture to surround Sharpe and his two horses. They were men from Hanover, exiles who formed the King's German Legion that had fought so hard and well in Spain. Now the German soldiers stared suspiciously at Sharpe's strange uniform untill one of the troopers saw the Imperial 'N' on the horse's saddle-cloth and the sabres rasped out of their metal scabbards as the hors.e.m.e.n shouted at Sharpe to surrender.

"b.u.g.g.e.r off," Sharpe snarled.

"You're English?" the KGL Captain asked in that language. He was mounted on a fine black gelding, glossy coated and fresh. His saddle-cloth bore the British royal cipher, a reminder that England's King was also Hanover's monarch.

"I'm Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe, of the Prince of Orange's staff."

"You must forgive us, sir." The Captain, who introduced himself as Hans Blasendorf, sheathed his sabre. He told Sharpe his patrol was one of the many that daily scouted south to the French border and beyond; this particular troop had been ordered to explore the villages south and east of Mons down as far as the Sambre, but not to encroach on Prussian territory.

"The French are already in Charleroi," Sharpe told the German.

Blasendorf gaped at Sharpe in shocked silence for a moment. "For certain?"

"For certain!" Tiredness made Sharpe indignant. "I've just been there! I took this horse off a French Dragoon north of the town."

The German understood the desperate urgency of Sharpe's news. He tore a page from his notebook, offered it with a pencil to Sharpe, then volunteered his own patrol to take the despatch to General Dornberg's headquarters in Mons. Dornberg was the General in charge of these cavalry patrols which watched the French frontier, and finding one of his officers had been a stroke of luck for Sharpe; by pure accident he had come across the very men whose job was to alert the allies of any French advance.