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 sc.r.a.ped 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 a.s.sumed an inhuman inevitability; as though the gunners had sprung free some malevolent force from within the earth itself; a force which now dispa.s.sionately 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 away to infinity, but here the combat was held tight within the c.o.c.kpit of the small valley above which the smoke made an unnatural early dusk. Beyond the battle's margin, out where the crops stood unharmed and no blood trickled in the plough furrows, the sunlight shone through ragged clouds on peaceful fields, but the valley itself was a piece of h.e.l.l on earth, flickering with flame and belching smoke.

Neither Sharpe nor Harper spoke much. No one was speaking much in the British line any more. Sometimes a sergeant ordered the files to close, but the orders were unnecessary now. Each man was simply enduring as-best he could.

The French skirmishers were falling back as their ammunition became exhausted. That, at least, gave some relief, and let the British battalions lie down on the crushed mud and straw. The Voltigeurs did not retire all the way to their own ridge, but waited on the valley floor for a fresh supply of cartridges to be brought forward. Only in the British centre; in front of the newly captured

La Haye Sainte, were newly committed skirmishers advancing up the slope beneath the raking canister fire of the two eight-pounder guns that the French had placed in the farm's kitchen garden.

Peter d'Alembord, insisting that he was well, had returned to Colonel Ford's side. He still rode Sharpe's horse that he now stood beneath the battalion's colours, which had been torn to yellow shreds by the skirmishers' bullets. Colonel Ford's ears were so dulled by the incessant percussion of the guns that he could hardly hear the small remarks d'Alembord made. Not that Ford cared. He was clutching his horse's reins as though they were his last hold on sanity.

A single hors.e.m.e.n rode slowly in the emptiness behind the British battalions. His horse picked a slow path through the broken gun carriages and past the rows of red-coated dead. Sh.e.l.l fragments smoked on the scorched and trampled crops. The horseman was Simon Doggett who now sought his own battalion of Guardsmen, but as he rode westwards he saw the two Riflemen crouching close to the ridge's crest. Doggett turned his horse towards the Greenjackets and reined in close behind them.

"He did it again, sir. He d.a.m.n well did it again," Doggett's outraged indignation made him sound very young, "so I told him he was a silk stocking full of s.h.i.t."

Sharpe turned. For a second he blinked in surprise as though he did not recognize Doggett, then he seemed to snap out of the trance induced by the numbing gun-fire. "You did what?"

Doggett was embarra.s.sed. "I told him he was a silk stocking full of s.h.i.t."

Harper laughed softly. A sh.e.l.l whimpered overhead to explode far in the rear. A roundshot followed to strike the ridge in front of Sharpe and spew up a shower of wet earth. Doggett's horse jerked its face away from the spattering mud.

"He killed them," Doggett said in pathetic explanation.

"He killed who?" Harper asked.

"The KGL. There were two battalions, all that was left of a brigade, and he put them in line and sent them to where the cavalry were waiting."

"Again?" Sharpe sounded incredulous.

"They died, sir." Doggett could not forget the sight of the swords and sabres rising and falling. He had watched one German running from the slaughter; the man had already lost his right arm to a sabre's slice, yet it had seemed that the man would still escape, but a Cuira.s.sier had spurred after him and chopped down with his heavy blade and Doggett could have sworn that the dying man threw one hateful look up the slope to where his real killer was. "I'm sorry, sir. There's no point in telling you. I tried to stop him, but he told me to go away."

Sharpe did not respond, except to unsling his rifle and probe a finger into its pan to discover whether the weapon was still primed.

Doggett wanted Sharpe to share his anger at the Prince's callous behaviour. "Sir!" he pleaded. Then, when there was still no reply, he spoke more self-pityingly. "I've ruined my career, haven't I?"

Sharpe looked up at the young man. "At least we can mend that, Doggett. Just wait here."

Sharpe, without another word, began walking towards the centre of the British line while Harper took Doggett's bridle and turned his horse away from the valley. "There are still a few skirmishers who wouldn't mind making you into a notch on their muskets," the Irishman explained to Doggett. "Did you really call the skinny b.a.s.t.a.r.d a silk stocking filled with s.h.i.t?"

"Yes." Doggett was watching Sharpe walk away.

"To his face?" Harper insisted.

"Indeed, yes."

"You're a grand man, Mr Doggett! I'm proud of you." Harper released Doggett's horse a few paces behind the colour party of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers. "Now just wait here, sir. The Colonel and I won't be long."

"Where are you going?" Doggett shouted after the Irishman.

"Not far!" Harper called back, then he followed Sharpe into a drifting bank of powder smoke and disappeared.

Sharpe was half-way to the elm tree when Harper caught him. "What are you doing?" the Irishman asked.

"I'm sick of the royal b.a.s.t.a.r.d. How many more men will he kill?"

"So what are you doing?" Harper insisted.

"What someone should have done at his b.l.o.o.d.y birth. I'm going to strangle the b.u.g.g.e.r."

Harper put a hand on Sharpe's arm. "Listen - ,

Sharpe threw the hand off and turned a furious face on his friend. "I'm going, Patrick. Don't stop me!"

"I don't give a b.u.g.g.e.r if you kill him." Harper was just as angry. "But I'll be d.a.m.ned if you hang for it."

"d.a.m.n the b.l.o.o.d.y rope." Sharpe walked on, carrying his rifle in his right hand.

The ridge's centre was more thickly smothered with smoke than its flanks. The muzzle blast of the two cannon that the French had placed in La Haye Sainte's kitchen garden carried almost to the ridge's summit, and every shot pumped a filthy stinking fog to blanket the slope. The French were firing canister, punching a ma.s.sive weight of musket-b.a.l.l.s into the heart of the British defences. The British gunners, exposed on the skyline as they tried to return the fire, had been killed or wounded, allowing the enemy skirmishers to creep ever closer to the bullet-scarred elm tree from which every leaf and most of the bark had been blasted away.

Those staff officers who still lived, and they were not many, had sensibly retreated from the ravaged tree and now stood their horses well back from the ridge's summit. Sharpe could not see the Duke, but he found the Prince in his fur-edged uniform. The Prince was two hundred paces off, close to the highway and surrounded by his Dutch staff. It was a long shot for a rifle loaded with common cartridge instead of the extra-fine powder, and it would be a tricky shot because of the men who crowded close to the Prince.

"Not here!" Harper insisted.