This was the critical moment: one side or the other had to break now. I watched the column for any sign of retreat but it did not seem to be moving. Then someone dragged me clear as the men who had run down the slope with me set about reloading the cannon with more canister shot. Perhaps the sight of that was the final straw for those at the rear of the column, for in the blink of an eye where men had been pushing forward, they were now starting to step back. A few seconds later and where they had been edging back, they were now running. Then, as though the floodgates had been opened, hundreds of the Imperial Guard were streaming back down the slope like the earlier column before them.
For the French, it was a shocking sight. This was the unbeaten Imperial Guard, sent to deliver the deathblow to a battered and diminished enemy. Instead of bringing them victory it was retreating, no running, back across the valley. On top of this, across the battlefield, I could see more soldiers in dark uniforms: The Prussians had finally arrived. The French on the eastern side of the road were swiftly discovering that instead of joining with Grouchy’s reinforcements, they were facing a new wave of fresh and unexpected enemies. Napoleon’s deception would have hit their morale hard and on top of the retreat of the Imperial Guard, it was too much. Everywhere I looked the French were starting to retreat.
The volley firing stopped, orders were shouted and then I watched as the 52nd fixed bayonets and was released into the valley to drive the enemy from the field. The men around the guns followed suite; victory and loot were there for the taking.
I rolled to one side and crawled over to the nearest gun to sit with my back resting against the wheel. I had no inclination to move further and certainly no wish to complete the defeat of the French. I watched as Wellington signalled a general advance and the pitifully small number of allied soldiers left started to appear on the ridge and move forward.
If they thought that they were to have an easy time of it they were to be mistaken, for fresh volleys crashed out from the valley floor and I saw the squares of the Old Guard were covering the French retreat. They were now the only organised resistance left as French guns, infantry and cavalry all started to stream towards the road back to France. Instead of following, the Old Guard spread their squares out to cover each other and seemed to dare the allies to take them on. I watched as a cavalry regiment charged one square only for the veterans to shoot them with contemptuous ease at virtually point-blank range. Half the troopers were left dead and dying at their feet. Grey-moustachioed men stepped out of the ranks to casually despatch the wounded before more horsemen could return. Infantry regiments began to trade volleys with them and what little artillery the allies had left was brought forward to blast canister at them, but still the Old Guard showed little sign of retreating.
I was glad that my view was obscured by the growing skeins of musket smoke that surrounded their squares. I remembered many of them, such as the man who had been given the bearskin and promised to show it glory or his death. I wondered if he still lived as they seemed determined to die where they stood. Quite why Napoleon had kept these granite-hard men in the valley was beyond me. But I was bloody glad he had as they would have broken the British line for certain. The defenders would have been spread too thinly to resist them.
I sat there for ages watching the final act in this drama. Beaten French soldiers streamed back towards the road to Charleroi and France beyond. Their empire had been vanquished and Napoleon’s great gamble had failed. Hobhouse’s tree of liberty had been well and truly felled and while I did not give a fig about that, I struggled to celebrate the return of the fat king and his courtiers.
It was dusk and when all the French army that could get away had done so, only then did the Old Guard squares slowly start to pull back. They left a mound of dead and injured in their wake; at least one square had been battered into a triangle. But still their muskets rippled fire at anyone who got within range. I didn’t see it, but I heard that they made a final stand at the top of the French ridge and then those that were left slipped away into the night.
I sat there with nowhere to go and nothing to do other than simply celebrate my survival of that extraordinary day. There were shouts for help from the wounded and occasional single shots. Dark figures were moving across the battlefield alone or in small groups but whether they were offering aid or simply robbing the dead and the wounded it was hard to say. As the first star appeared in the sky, my thoughts were interrupted by a gargling sound close at hand. I turned to see, lying on his side between the guns, the artillery captain. He must have been unconscious and it would have been better for him if he had stayed that way for the ground around him was covered in blood that also soaked his clothes. He was dying for certain and with the last of his energy he was reaching out across the blood-covered grass as though grasping for something.
He had been a good professional soldier and I did not feel proud about deceiving him, even if his death had helped tip the balance of the battle. I got to my feet and only then noticed that the heel of my right boot had been torn off in that final burst of canister as I had pressed myself into the ground. I felt slightly sick when I realised how close the ball must have come to the top of my skull. A fraction of an inch lower and I would have been dead or dying like the poor bastard scrabbling near my feet.
Suddenly nations and sides did not matter compared to common humanity and I dropped down again and gripped the man’s hand. He made another gargling noise as he tried to speak and his eyes stared at me but with little recognition.
“It is all right,” I told him in French. “You are not alone.”
His mouth opened and more blood gushed out before he took another noisy breath. “Did we win?” he gasped.
I stared about me at the scene of devastation and shattered dreams with the last of the fighting on the far horizon. He was going to die anyway so what did it matter. “Yes, we won,” I told him in his own language.
His grip tightened as he exerted the very last of his strength and I heard his voice rasp “Vive l’E…” before his breath died away in a rattle.
Epilogue
Lobsters are vicious creatures. I do not mean British redcoats, who are sometimes called lobsters, no I am talking of the crustaceans. I remember thinking that on the harbour wall at Boulogne as I waited to board one of the troop ships that would take me home. From the cliff top on my way into the town I had already seen the shore of England, as a smudge on the horizon. Perhaps because it was so close I felt the pang of homesickness all the sharper. I had been ten months in France and had not seen Louisa and my son for five of them. I yearned to be safe back in Leicestershire. Having learned my lesson from this adventure, I was determined never to leave it again, even if it meant a lifetime talking about two-headed calves. Bolougne was packed, of course, full of soldiers just as eager to get home and recount their own tales of our famous victory.
Oh, I was pleased we had won but I could not share their pleasure in quite the same way. I had too many friends on both sides of the battle to celebrate. In the days after the conflict I had been part of the force that had escorted Louis XVIII back to his waiting subjects. Neither party seemed pleased with the arrangement, the king waving somewhat nervously from his carriage at a sullen populace. At Charleroi, where I vividly remembered the genuine welcome for Napoleon, the people had been forced at bayonet point to line the king’s route and any cheers were at best desultory.
Now I just wanted to be alone, which on a crowded troopship was not going to be easy. But I had my own cabin, well, it was more of a canvas-sided pen, but it had a cot, a table and a chair that doubled as a commode to save officers going to the heads in rough weather. I had decided that I would eat by myself that night, which was why I was standing by a Boulogne fishmonger as he opened a wooden trunk half filled with water and some twenty lobsters. As they sensed the change in light all of the creatures jostled about and put their claws up in the air to defend themselves.
“See they are fresh. Careful sir, they
could break a finger if they catch you.” I had reached down to grab one, but the little tartar had moved faster than I expected. “I’ll get him for you, sir,” offered the shopkeeper grabbing it deftly down the body just out of reach of the pincers. “Would you like me to kill it or will you take it fresh?”
“Fresh please. Do you have a box I can take it in?” I already had some good wine in my luggage, which was loaded aboard, and I could get the galley to boil the creature. Fresh lobster with some melted butter would be a nice treat and something I could arrange without difficulty to enjoy alone. Soon I was striding up the gangplank with a box of wet straw containing a lobster in one hand and a small pot of butter in the other.
Colborne had arranged a berth for me on the troopship being used by the 52nd. We stood together on its deck as the ropes were cast off and the tide started to pull it out into the harbour as the sails were unfurled.
“I trust you will join us for dinner, Flashman,” Colborne said, gripping my shoulder. “It might be our last together for some time.”
“If you don’t mind, I would rather not. I am not really in the mood for celebrations and I don’t want to dampen your party. I will just eat in my cabin.”
“If you are sure,” said Colborne grinning. “But you may change your mind when you know who is in the cabin next to yours. I have had to give Grant a berth home too, but I doubt he will want to join us either.”
The thought of spending an evening just the other side of a canvas screen from Grant was too much to bear and so I agreed to join the officers for their final dinner of the campaign. We had just got settled and the first bottles were passing when the door was pulled back and Grant stood in the threshold. He gazed around the table. A look of irritation crossed his face as he saw me. I thought he would turn away again, but Colborne was up and welcoming him to the gathering.
“Please, Colonel, join us,” he cried steering Grant to a place at the opposite end of the table from me. “I wanted us all to be together on our final night.” With that he winked at me and I realised that the cunning bastard had probably tricked Grant into attending in much the same way as he had me.
The talk around the table was inevitably about that great final battle and much of it was centred on the efforts of the 52nd to subdue the last defence of the Old Guard. Everyone has probably heard the story of their reply when called upon to surrender. “The Guard dies, it does not surrender,” was the response; often attributed to Cambronne although he had been captured by then.
Colborne turned to me and asked, “You know them, Flash, why do you think they did it?” Heads turned curiously in my direction. Many had seen me charging them with Marshal Ney. They knew I had a better understanding of the French than most, but few knew what I had been doing on the French side of the valley.
“Those were the veterans who had built the French empire,” I told them. “They had never been defeated in battle and you know how close that final attack was to a success. “If the emperor had committed the Old Guard too it might have made all the difference.”
“Nonsense,” interrupted Grant. “The Prussians would still have helped us win the battle.”
“The Prussians were not on the ridge then,” pointed out Colborne. “If they had broken our line… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. There would have been a general advance by the French through the gap and God knows what state we would be in when the Prussians got there. They would probably have been just in time to cover our retreat.”
“But why didn’t the Old Guard just surrender when we had them beat? asked another officer called Jennings. “The other columns of the Imperial Guard retreated. There was nothing that the Old Guard could have done then, they could see that the battle was lost.”
“That is the point I am trying to make,” I said. “They stood because they knew the battle was lost. You have to understand what these men had been through. Many of them had been with Napoleon from the start. They were drilled to perfection, but it was not the discipline that ensured that they were unbeaten, it was their pride. They were their emperor’s most trusted troops and they would never let him down.”
“Well they certainly knew how to fight at Plancenoit,” said an officer I did not know. “They say that two battalions of the Old Guard defeated fourteen Prussian battalions when they retook the town.”
“But at the end,” persisted Colborne, “when they were the last French soldiers standing on the battlefield, well there was no dishonour in surrendering then.”
I thought back to those huge men weeping as they re-joined the ranks on our march to Paris and was at a loss to know how to explain it. As I paused Grant interjected again.
“Our Guards regiments are just as brave but I am sure that they would not behave as foolishly.”
“Our Guards regiments have not been disbanded,” I told them. “Their men have not had to watch the empire they built torn apart by their enemies. They have not lost the status of honoured guardians of the empire and had to find whatever work they could. I watched those hard men cry with joy as they saw their empire reborn. I think that they stood there defiant because they would have rather died as members of the Old Guard with their comrades, than lived on in a whipped France under a hated king.”
There was silence after that for a few moments as most around the table reflected on what I had said. Then Grant sneered, “Well I still think that they were fools. As I have said before, Flashman, when you spend too long in a French uniform you tend to go native.”
Several shifted uncomfortably around the table at that and Colborne muttered, “I think Major Flashman has proved his value to this army many times over.” But at that moment I did not care what any of them thought. I had taken my fill of armies and wars and diplomacy.
“If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I need the jakes.” I got up and walked around the table and was on my way to the heads when I remembered the commode in my cabin. Now I was moving the swell of the sea under the ship became more apparent and so I staggered to this nearer convenience. There was a curtain doorway and I pushed it back. The lantern in the passage provided enough light in the cabin through the canvas screens to make out the chair. Soon I had lifted the cover off the seat and was sitting comfortably listening to my piss splash into the chamberpot underneath.
God I hated Grant. The arrogant, opinionated little swine had no idea what he was doing and had risen entirely on the efforts of others. Surely, I reflected, Wellington could not be that blind to his faults. My musing was interrupted by a strange rustling nearby. It was that wretched lobster, which must have heard my noise. Well, I thought, I would have it for breakfast. But then as I put the lid back on the seat of the commode, I had a much better idea.
A few minutes later and I was walking back into the wardroom with a bottle in each hand. “Friends,” I called out to still their conversation. “It occurs to me that this will probably be my last night in uniform and I could not think of a better bunch of fellows to spend it with. Here are a couple of bottles I have been saving for a special occasion and I would be honoured if you would share them with me.”
There were cheers at that and general back-slapping. We had spent too long around that table in serious conversation, much of it depressingly gloomy. We all knew that many regiments would be reduced or disbanded now the war was over and several around the table were likely to be dismissed from the army or languish on half pay. There was a general feeling that it was time to celebrate and lighten the mood. I said a ‘general’ feeling but it was not absolute. Grant glared disapprovingly from his side of the table, as though he were a Calvinist minister and I had just suggested a bacchanalian orgy on the Sabbath. He had barely drunk anything all night and had a glass of what I suspected was watered-down wine before him. I was not the only one who noticed, though.
“Come now, Grant,” called out Colborne. “We have won a war and beaten the most feared soldier in Europe, surely that deserves celebrating?”
He still looked stuffy and
uncomfortable, but I knew just the angle to take. “Why, Colonel Grant is understandably suspicious as I will own that we have both used each other poorly in the past. But for my part, I would like to apologise. As I leave the army I do not want any bad feelings.” And here I looked him squarely in the eye. “So what do you say, old fellow, will you share a drink with me?”
Of course, after an invitation like that, he had no choice. He smiled agreement, no doubt through gritted teeth, and warily watched as his old glass was swept away and a fresh, well-filled one put in its place. Oh, he knew me well enough and he must have suspected that my good humour was fishier than a mackerel gutter’s apron. But while the others were calling out what a bluff sound fellow I was and how it had been an honour to serve alongside me, well he could hardly disagree without appearing mean-spirited. So once all glasses were charged young Jennings raised his and proposed a toast, “To the final victory.” Glasses were drained and then refilled before Colborne offered ‘Mrs Mulligan’, who, it transpired, was some fearsome army wife who had once chased off two French infantrymen while armed with just a ladle. More stories and laughter followed while I settled down to watch and wait. One by one, officers got up to go to the jakes but Grant stayed put. Jennings went twice and I was beginning to give up hope when at last Grant staggered to his feet.
“If you will excuse me,” he said primly before making his way to the door. I pictured him staggering his way down the passage. If anything the sea was even rougher now and he would probably be reaching for the wooden beams for support. There was not a chance someone as punctilious as Grant would be seen using the heads with the common seamen. No, he would go to his cabin and, like me, make out the layout of the little room from the light shining through the curtained doorway and canvas walls.
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