He went back past the chestnuts, keeping in the shadows of the tall rye on the western side of the road. He ran steadily, getting ever closer to the village and to the approaching enemy. The French troops had not stopped in Frasnes, but were marching doggedly on towards Sharpe who supposed that their orders were to seize the crossroads at Quatre Bras before nightfall. If Saxe-Weimar could reach the crossroads first, and if his men would fight, the French would fail, but it would be a very close race.
Sharpe wanted to slow the French advance. Even a few minutes would help. He dropped in a shallow scrape by the roadside, half hidden by a hazel bush which had been invaded by pink dog roses. None of the approaching enemy seemed to have noticed him. He slid his rifle through the thick grass, then pushed his tricorne hat back so that its peak would not catch on the weapon’s doghead.
He waited. The pistol in his belt dug into his belly. The grass of the road’s verge was warm and dank. There had been rain earlier in the week and the soil under the thick vegetation was still damp. A ladybird crawled up a dry stalk, then stepped delicately across to the oiled and battered stock of the rifle. The enemy marched careless and unsuspecting. The shadows stretched long over the road. It was a summer’s evening as beautiful as God had ever blessed on a wicked world.
A hare appeared on the opposite verge, quivered for a second, then ran swiftly up the road only to leap sideways out of the path of the approaching French infantry. The enemy was three hundred yards away now and marching in a column of four ranks. Sharpe could hear their strong singing. An officer rode ahead of the column on a grey horse. The officer had a red plume on his blue shako and a tall red collar on his unbuttoned blue coat. The red plume was nodding to the rhythm of the horse’s steps. Sharpe aimed at the plume, suspecting that at this extreme range the bullet would drop to hit the horse.
He fired. Birds squawked and exploded out of the crops.
Smoke banged from the pan by Sharpe’s right eye and the burning scraps of powder flayed back to his cheek. The rifle’s heavy brass butt crashed back into his shoulder. He moved even before the singing stopped, rolling into the thick rye stalks where, without bothering to see what damage his shot had done, he began reloading. Prime the pan, close it, pour the cartridge powder down the smoking barrel, then ram in the cartridge’s paper and the ball. He slid the ramrod out, jammed it down the long barrel, then pulled it free. No one had shot back. He rolled again into the shadow of the hazel bush where his foul-smelling powder smoke still lingered.
The column had stopped. The officer had dismounted from the grey horse which was skittering nervously at the road’s edge. Birds wheeled overhead. The officer was unhurt, and none of the men seemed to have been hit. Perhaps the horse was wounded? Sharpe took the loaded pistol from his belt, cocked it, and laid it beside him. Then he aimed the rifle again, this time at one of the men in the front rank.
He fired. Within seconds he fired again, this time emptying the pistol towards the Frenchmen. The second shot would do no damage, but it might persuade the Frenchmen that there was a group of enemy in front of them. Sharpe rolled right again, this time plunging deeper into the rye stalks before reloading the rifle. He pushed the pistol into his belt.
French muskets banged. He heard the heavy lead balls flicking through the stalks of rye, though none went near him. Sharpe was loading fast, going through the drill he had first learned twenty-two years before. Another volley of musketry hammered from the French who were firing blind into the tall crops.
Sharpe did the same, simply aiming the rifle in the direction of the column, and pulling the trigger so that the bullet whipped off through the stalks. He tap-loaded the next cartridge, not bothering to use the cumbersome ramrod, but just slamming the rifle’s butt hard on the ground in hope that the blow would jar the ball down to the loose charge. He fired again, and felt the lesser kick which told him the ball had only lodged half-way down the barrel. That bullet would be lucky to go a hundred yards, but that was not the point. The point was to fire fast to persuade the French that they had run into a strong picquet line.
He fired one more tap-loaded bullet, then ran back parallel to the road. He forced his way through the rye till he was past the chestnuts, then turned to his right. He ran across the road and heard the French shout as they saw him, but by the time they had pulled their triggers, he was already in the shelter of the tall trees. The nervous horse rolled its eyes white and flicked its ears towards the crackling sound of the muskets.
Sharpe reloaded the rifle, this time ramming the bullet hard down against the charge, then released the horse. It was a big black stallion, one of the best in the Prince’s stable and Sharpe hoped the beast was battle trained. Men had died because an untrained horse had taken fright at the sound of musketry. He pulled himself into the saddle, settled his sore thighs, and pushed the rifle into its holster. He pulled the horse round to face eastwards, then spurred it into the tall field of rye. So far the French had been fired on from the field on their left, now they would see an officer on the right of their advance.
A shout told Sharpe he had indeed been seen. The rye hid him from the French rankers, and only those officers on horseback could see the Rifleman over the tall crop. Sharpe waved his right arm as though he was beckoning a skirmish line forward. For all the French officers knew the thick rye might have concealed two whole battalions of Greenjackets.
A trumpet sounded from the French. Sharpe trotted in a semicircle, going to the enemy’s flank to suggest an enfilading attack, then he turned and spurred back towards Quatre Bras. A wasteful volley was shot towards him, but the range was far too long and the balls spent themselves among the thick stalks. Three mounted officers rode into the field after the volley, but Sharpe had spurred well clear of any threat from the three men. He just trotted northwards, thinking to fire some more rifle shots from the farm by the ford.
Then hoofbeats pounded to Sharpe’s left and he saw another French officer galloping furiously down the high road. Sharpe urged the black stallion on, but the footing under the rye was treacherous; the soil was damp and still held the shape of the plough furrows, and the stallion could not match the Frenchman’s speed on the paved road. The stallion stumbled and Sharpe almost fell, and when he recovered himself he saw that the Frenchman had swerved off the road and, with drawn sabre, was charging straight for him. The man was young, probably a lieutenant.
Damn the bloody man. In all armies there were officers who needed to prove their bravery by single combat. The duel could also help a career; if this young French Lieutenant could take Sharpe’s horse and weapons back to his battalion he would be a hero. Maybe he would even be made into a captain.
Sharpe slowed his horse and dragged his big unwieldy sword out of its scabbard. ‘Go back!’ he shouted in French.
‘When you’re dead, monsieur!’ The Frenchman spoke cheerfully. He looked as young as Doggett. His horse, like Sharpe’s, had been slowed by the plough furrows in the rye field, but the Frenchman rowelled it on as he got close to Sharpe.
Sharpe stood his ground, his right arm facing the attack. The Lieutenant, like all French skirmishing officers, carried a light curved sabre; a good slashing weapon, but not the most accurate blade for the lunge. This man, eager to draw first blood, swerved as he neared Sharpe, then leaned out of his saddle to give a gut-slicing sweep with the glittering blade.
Sharpe simply parried the blow by holding his own heavy sword vertically. The clash of steel jarred up his arm, then he kicked his heels back to force the stallion towards the road. The Frenchman had swept past him, and now tried to turn in the clinging rye.
Sharpe only wanted to reach the road. He had no need to prove anything in single combat. He glanced over his left shoulder and saw the three other officers were still two hundred yards away, then a shouted challenge from his right revealed that the French Lieutenant had succeeded in turning his horse and was now spurring back to make a new attack. He was approaching from behind and slightly to the right of Shar
pe. That was foolish, for it meant the Frenchman would have to make his sabre cut across his own and his horse’s body. ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Sharpe called back to him.
‘Are you frightened, Englishman?’ the Lieutenant laughed.
Sharpe felt the anger then; the cold anger that seemed to slow the passage of time itself and make everything appear so very distinctly. He saw the Frenchman’s small moustache above the bared teeth. The man’s shako had a red, white and blue cockade, and some of the shako’s overlapping brass plates were missing from its leather chin-strap. The Lieutenant’s horse was tossing its head, snorting, raising its bright hooves high as it trampled the crop. Husks of rye and scraps of straw were being splintered aside by the charging horse. The Lieutenant’s sabre was raised, reflecting the dying sun in its brilliant polish and ready for the downwards cut that was supposed to hack into Sharpe’s skull. Sharpe was holding his own sword low beside his stirrup, almost as if he could not be bothered to fight. The long blade was whipped by the rye stalks. Sharpe was deliberately curbing the stallion to take shorter slower steps, thus letting the eager Frenchman overtake him, but, just a heartbeat before the sun-bright sabre whipped hard down, Sharpe jerked the long sword back and upwards.
The heavy blade smashed brutally hard into the mouth of the Lieutenant’s horse. The beast reared up on its hind legs, screaming, with blood showing at its lips and teeth. Sharpe was already turning the stallion across its front. The Lieutenant was desperately trying to stay in his saddle. He flailed for balance with his sabre arm, then screamed because he saw the heavy sword coming at his throat. He tried to twist away, but instead his horse plunged back onto its forefeet and threw the Lieutenant’s weight fast forward.
Sharpe held his straight-bladed sword pointed at the Lieutenant’s throat and locked his elbow as the Frenchman fell onto the blade. There was an instant’s resistance, then the sword’s point punctured skin and muscle to tear into the great blood vessels of the Frenchman’s neck. His scream of fear was silenced instantly. He seemed to stare at Sharpe as he died; offering the Englishman a look of mingled surprise and remorse, then a gout of blood, bright as the sun itself, slashed out to soak Sharpe’s right arm and shoulder. Specks of the blood spattered his face, then the Frenchman was falling away and his dying weight ripped his body clear of the long steel blade.
Sharpe twisted the stallion away. He thought briefly of taking the Lieutenant’s horse, but he did not want to be encumbered by the beast. He saw the other three French officers check their advance. He flourished the bloody sword at them in a mocking salute, then trotted back to the road.
He stopped there, wiped the blade on his overalls, and sheathed the sword. His right arm was soaked with the Frenchman’s blood that had saturated the flimsy green sleeve of his old uniform. He grimaced at the smell of fresh blood, then pulled the loaded rifle from its holster. The three officers watched him, but none tried to come close.
He watched the turn in the road by the chestnut trees. After a minute the first French skirmishers ran into sight. They stopped when they saw him, then dived right and left, but at fifty yards the rifle was lethal and Sharpe saw his bullet lift a man clean off the ground.
But at fifty yards the French muskets were almost as accurate as the Baker rifle. Sharpe slammed back his heels and took off down the road as if the demons of hell were at his heels. He counted to eight, then swerved hard left into the tall rye, just as the French volley whipped through the dust cloud left by the stallion’s hooves.
The small volley missed. Sharpe rode on down the slope till he reached the stream where, as the stallion drank, he reloaded the rifle and shoved the weapon into its holster. Then, satisfied that the French would check their advance till they were certain no picquet line waited in ambush, he stared westwards towards the clouds and let out a long heavy breath.
He was measuring the fear he had just felt. For months he had been haunted by his memories of the battle of Toulouse; reliving the bowel-loosening terror he had felt at that last conflict of the last war. There had been no horror particular to Toulouse to explain that extraordinary fear; the battle had been less threatening than a half-dozen of the Spanish engagements, yet Sharpe had never forgotten the awful fear, nor his relief when peace had been declared. He had hung the battered sword over the spice cupboard in Lucille’s kitchen, and had claimed to be glad that he would never again have to draw the war-dulled blade from its metal scabbard. Yet, ever since Toulouse, he had wondered whether his nerve had gone for ever.
Now, holding his blood-soaked right hand to the evening light, he found his answer. The hand was motionless, yet at Toulouse that hand had shaken like a man afflicted with the palsy of St Vitus’s dance. Sharpe slowly closed the hand into a fist. He felt an immense relief that his nerve had come back, but he also felt ashamed that he had enjoyed the discovery.
He looked up at the clouds. He had assured Lucille that he fought only because his pension would be jeopardized if he refused, but in truth he had wanted to know whether the old skills were still there or whether, like a cannon fired too fast and too often, he had simply worn himself out as a soldier. Now he knew, and it had all been so damned easy. The young Lieutenant had ridden on to the blade, and Sharpe had felt nothing. He doubted if his pulse had even quickened as he killed. Twenty-two years of war had honed that skill to near perfection, and as a result a mother in France would soon be weeping.
He looked southwards. Nothing moved among the tall crops. The French would be collecting their casualties, and their officers would be staring northwards in search of a non-existent picquet line.
Sharpe patted the stallion, then walked him downstream until he reached the ford where, once more, he waited for the enemy’s advance. The woman had come back to the farm’s archway from where she and two men stared nervously up the road towards Frasnes. A horsefly settled on the stallion’s neck. Sharpe slapped it bloody, then unsheathed the rifle and held it across his saddle. He would give the French one more shot before retreating back to the crossroads.
Then, from behind him, from the north, he heard the thump of heavy drums and the jaunty thin notes of a flute playing. He twisted in the saddle to see a column of infantry at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. For a second Sharpe’s heart leapt, thinking that a battalion of Riflemen had arrived, then he saw the yellow crossbelts over the green coats and he knew he was seeing Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s force of Nassauers. The German brigade officers were already spurring down the road towards Sharpe.
Saxe-Weimar had arrived at the very nick of time. On the long slope above Sharpe the French battalion had spread into skirmish order. They were invisible in the tall rye, yet their purposeful advance could be traced by the disturbance of the crop through which they moved. The Nassauers’ battalion was doubling down the road, while their officers spurred towards the stream to mark the place where the infantry would form a line.
Sharpe rode back behind the advancing troops. Some of the men gave him curious looks because of the blood that had sheeted his right side. He uncorked his canteen and took a long drink of water. More Nassauer infantry were running down the road, their heavy boots stirring a thick dust. Small drummer boys, their lips caked with the road’s dust, beat a ragged advance as they ran. The troops seemed eager enough, but the next few seconds would be the acid test of their willingness to fight against their old master, Napoleon.
The first Nassauer battalion was formed in a line of four ranks on the left-hand side of the road. The battalion’s Colonel stared at the thrashing of unseen men in the rye field on the stream’s far bank, then ordered his men to make ready.
The muskets were lifted to the men’s shoulders.
The Colonel paused. ‘Fire!’
There was a split second’s silence, then the volley crashed hugely loud in the still evening air. The musket-balls slammed across the small stream and bent the rye crop as though a squall of wind had struck the stalks. Rooks protested the disturbance by flapping angrily up from the r
oadside.
‘Reload!’ To Sharpe’s eyes the battalion’s musket drill was lamentably slow, but it did not matter; they were fighting.
A few French skirmishers returned the fire, but they were massively outnumbered and their shooting was wild. Another Nassauer battalion had formed a line to the right of the stream. ‘Fire!’ Again a volley hammered at the evening’s perfection. A bank of smoke, thick and vile smelling, rolled across the stream.
‘Fire!’ That was the first battalion again. Yet more men were coming from the crossroads and deploying left and right beyond the first two units. Staff officers were galloping busily behind the lines where the battalion’s colours were bright in the dusk. The drummers kept up their din.
‘How many of them?’ The Brigade Major, who spoke English with a thick German accent, reined in beside Sharpe.
‘I only saw one battalion of skirmishers.’
‘Guns? Cavalry?’
‘None that I saw, but they can’t be far behind.’
‘We’ll hold them here as long as we can.’ The Brigade Major glanced at the sun. It was not long now till nightfall, and the French advance would certainly stop with the darkness.
‘I’ll let headquarters know you’re here,’ Sharpe said.
‘We’ll need help by morning,’ the Brigade Major said fervently.
‘You’ll get it.’ Sharpe hoped he spoke the truth.
Lieutenant Simon Doggett waited at the crossroads and frowned when he saw the blood on Sharpe’s arm. ‘Are you hurt, sir?’
‘That’s someone else’s blood.’ Sharpe brushed at the bloodstain, but it was still wet. ‘You’re to go back to Braine-le-Comte. Tell Rebecque that the crossroads at Quatre Bras are safe, but that the French are bound to attack in greater strength in the morning. Tell him we need men here; as many as possible!’
‘And you, sir? Are you staying here?’
Sharpe's Waterloo Page 8