Sharpe's Waterloo

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Love makes us vulnerable,’ Sharpe admitted.

  ‘Doesn’t it just?’ d‘Alembord said warmly. ‘But virtue should give us confidence.’

  ‘Virtue?’ Sharpe wondered just what moral claims his friend was making for himself.

  ‘The virtue of our cause,’ d‘Alembord explained as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘The French have got to be beaten.’

  Sharpe smiled. ‘They’re doubtless saying the same of us.’

  D‘Alembord was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a sudden and impassioned rush. ‘I don’t count Lucille, of course, and you mustn’t think I do, but it is a filthily evil nation, Sharpe. I cannot forget what they did to my family or to our co-religionists. And think of their revolution! All those poor dead innocent people. And Bonaparte’s no better. He just attacks and attacks, then steals from the countries he conquers, and all the time he talks of virtue and law and the glories of French civilization. Their virtue is all hypocrisy, their law applies only to benefit themselves, and their civilization is blood on the cobblestones.’

  Sharpe had never suspected that such animosity lay beneath his friend’s elegant languor. ‘So it isn’t just the majority, Peter?’

  D‘Alembord seemed embarrassed to have betrayed such feelings. ‘I’m sorry, I truly am. You must think me very rude. I heartily like Lucille, you know I do. I exaggerate, of course. It is not the French who are essentially evil, but their government.’ He stopped abruptly, evidently stifling yet more anti-French venom.

  Sharpe smiled. ‘Where Lucille and I live they will tell you that France is blessed by God but cursed with Paris. They perceive Paris as an evil place inhabited by the most loathsome and grasping people.’

  ‘It sounds like London.’ D‘Alembord smiled wanly. ‘You won’t tell Lucille my thoughts? I would not like to offend her.’

  ‘Of course I won’t tell her.’

  ‘And perhaps you will do me one more favour?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  D‘Alembord took a creased and damp letter from his pocket. ‘If

  I do become rye dung tomorrow, perhaps you’ll deliver this to Anne? And tell her I didn’t suffer? No tales of surgeon’s knives, Sharpe, and no descriptions of nasty wounds, just a clean bullet in the forehead will do for my end, however nasty the truth will probably be.’

  ‘I won’t need to deliver it, but I’ll keep it for you.’ Sharpe pushed the letter into a pocket, then turned as a spatter of musket fire sounded from the right of the line, about the château of Hougoumont.

  A scatter of French infantry were running back from the orchard where British musket flames sparked bright in the dusk. Sharpe could see redcoats going forward among the trees south of the farm. The French must have sent a battalion to discover whether the farmstead was garrisoned, or else the enemy was merely foraging for firewood, but, whatever their mission, the blue-coated infantry had run into a savage firefight. More redcoats ran from the farm to take their bayonets into the woodland.

  ‘What angers me’, d‘Alembord was taking no notice of the sudden skirmish, ‘is not knowing how it will all end. If I die tomorrow, I’ll never know, will I?’

  Sharpe shook his head in scornful dismissal of his friend’s fears. ‘By summer’s end, my friend, you and I will sit in a conquered Paris and drink wine. We probably won’t even remember a day’s fighting in Belgium! And you’ll go home and marry your Anne and be happy ever after.’

  D‘Alembord laughed at the prophecy. ‘And you, Sharpe, what happens to you? Do you go back to Normandy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the local people won’t mind that you fought against France?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ That worry was never far from Sharpe’s thoughts, nor indeed, from Lucille’s. ‘But I’d like to go back,’ Sharpe went on. ‘I’m happy there. I’m planning to make some calvados this year. The château used to make a lot, but it hasn’t produced any for twenty or more years. The local doctor wants to help us. He’s a good fellow.’ Sharpe suddenly thought of his meeting with Lord John and of the promissory note that, if it was honoured, would make so many things possible in Lucille’s château. ‘I met bloody Rossendale today. I took the promissory note off him direct. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not,’ d’Alembord said.

  ‘Oddly enough,’ Sharpe said, ‘I rather liked him. I don’t know why. I think I felt sorry for him.’

  “Love your enemies”,’ d’Alembord quoted mockingly,‘ “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you”? I told you we were getting more pious, even you.’

  ‘But we’ll still slaughter the bloody French tomorrow.’ Sharpe smiled and held out his hand. ‘You’ll be safe, Peter. Tomorrow night we’ll laugh at these fears.’

  They shook hands on the promise.

  The musket-fire at Hougoumont died away as the French yielded possession of the woodland to the British. A roll of thunder sounded in the west and a spear of lightning glittered brief and stark on the horizon. Then the rain began to pelt down hard again.

  The armies had gathered, and now waited for morning.

  The lintel of every house in Waterloo’s street bore a chalked inscription, put there by the Quartermaster-General’s department to identify which general and staff officers would be billeted inside. The inn opposite the church bore the chalked words ‘His Grace the Duke of Wellington’, while three doors away a two storey house was inscribed ‘The Earl of Uxbridge’. Another substantially built house was marked ‘His Royal Highness the Prince William of Orange’. Thatched cottages with dungheaps hard under their windows were this night to be the homes for marquesses or earls, yet such men counted themselves fortunate to be sheltered at all, and not to be enduring the numbing cold misery of the rain that thrashed the ridge.

  In the Earl of Uxbridge’s house the staff officers crammed themselves about a table to share the Earl’s supper of boiled beef and beans. It was an early supper, for the whole staff was on notice to rise long before dawn. In the centre of the table, propped against the single candelabra, was Lord John Rossendale’s broken sword. One of the staff officers had discovered the snapped blade after Lord John had tried to throw it away and had demanded to know just how the weapon had been broken. The truth was too painful, and so Lord John had invented a rather more flattering account.

  ‘It was after the rocket explosion,’ he explained to the assembled staff at supper. ‘The damned horse bolted on me.’

  ‘You should learn to ride, John.’

  Lord John waited for the laughter to subside. ‘Damn thing ran me into a wood off to one side of the road, and damn me if there weren’t three Lancers lurking there.’

  ‘Green or red?’ The Earl of Uxbridge, just returned from a conference with the Duke of Wellington, had taken his place at the head of the supper table.

  ‘The green ones, Harry.’ That bit was easy for Lord John to invent, for he had watched the green-coated Lancers running from the attack of the Life Guards. ‘I shot one with the pistol, but had to throw it down to draw my sword. Damn shame, really, because it was an expensive gun.’

  ‘A Mortimer percussion pistol, with a rifled barrel.’ Christopher Manvell confirmed the value of the lost pistol. ‘A damn shame to lose it, John.’

  Lord John shrugged as though to suggest the loss was nothing really. ‘The second fellow charged me, I got past his point and gave him the sword in the belly, then the third one damn nearly skewered me.’ He gave a modest smile. ‘Thought I was dead, to be honest. I slashed at the fellow, but he was damned fast. He drew a sabre and had a good hack at me, I parried, and that’s when my sword broke. Then, damn me, if the fellow didn’t just turn tail and run!’

  The assembled officers stared at the broken sword which lay like a trophy on the supper table.

  ‘The trick of it’, Lord John said, ‘is to get past the lance point. Once you’re past the spike it’s a bit like killing rabbits. Too easy, really.’

  ‘So
long as your sword doesn’t break?’ Christopher Manvell asked drily.

  ‘There is that, yes.’

  The Earl frowned. ‘So if the fellow ran away, why didn’t you pick up the pistol, Johnny? You said it was expensive.’

  ‘I could hear more of the scoundrels among the trees. I thought I’d better give them a run.’ Lord John gave a small disarming smile. ‘To tell you the truth, Harry, I was frightened! Whatever, I whipped my damn horse and ran like the devil!’

  Christopher Manvell, who had seemed somewhat less impressed by Lord John’s ordeal than the other officers about the table, at least confirmed the story’s ending. ‘He came back to the road white as a sheet.’

  ‘You did well, Johnny, damned well.’ The Earl of Uxbridge spoke gruffly. ‘You killed a brace of the buggers, eh? Damn good.’ There was a spatter of applause, then Christopher Manvell asked the Earl what news he had gleaned from his conference with the Duke of Wellington.

  The truth was that the Earl had gleaned nothing at all. He was second in command to the Duke and had thought that appointment entitled him to know just what the Duke planned for the next day, but his enquiry had met with a very dusty answer indeed. The Duke had said his plans depended entirely on Napoleon, and as Napoleon had not yet confided in the Duke, the Duke could not yet confide in the Earl, and so good-night.

  ‘I think we’ll just let the bugger attack us, then see him off, eh?’ the Earl said lazily, as though the events of the next day were really not very significant at all.

  ‘But the Prussians are coming?’ Manvell insisted.

  ‘I think we can do the business without a few damned Germans, don’t you?’ The Earl pushed a box of cigars into the table’s centre. ‘But one thing’s certain, gentlemen. No doubt our cavalry will make England proud!’

  ‘Bravo!’ A drunken staff officer pounded the table.

  After supper Christopher Manvell found Lord John standing in the open front porch from where he was staring into the wet dusk. ‘I wish I’d been there to help you against those Lancers,’ Manvell said.

  For a few seconds it seemed that Lord John would not reply at all, then he just shrugged the subject away. ‘Harry seems very sanguine about our chances tomorrow.’

  Manvell blew a stream of cigar smoke into the drizzle. ‘It’s strange, Johnny. I saw you come out of the wood, then not a moment later I saw Colonel Sharpe in the same place. You were lucky not to meet him.’

  Again Lord John was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a rush of quiet bitterness. ‘Of course I met him. And of course there were no bloody Lancers. What was I supposed to do? Admit to Harry and everyone else that I was humiliated by a Rifleman?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Manvell was embarrassed by the tortured admission he had provoked from his friend.

  ‘I gave him his damned note. Not that it will do me any good. Jane won’t give me the money unless I marry her, but Sharpe doesn’t know that.’ Lord John laughed suddenly. ‘He gave me a length of rope and told me it was a peasant divorce. He says I’m free to marry her.’

  Manvell smiled, but said nothing. The gutters either side of the paved high road were gurgling and flooding. Across the street a sentry ran cursing through the puddles to open a gate for a mounted officer. An orderly hung a lantern outside the stable entrance of the house where the Prince of Orange was billeted.

  ‘It’s a matter of honour.’ Lord John was staring into the darkening street.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Tomorrow’, Lord John said, ‘has become a rather desperate matter of honour.’ He was very slightly drunk, and his voice held a hint of hysteria. ‘I never realized before today how very simple battle is. There’s no compromise, is there? It’s victory or defeat, and nothing in between, while real life is so damned complicated. Perhaps that’s why the best soldiers are such very simple souls.’ He turned in the porch to stare at his friend. ‘You see, if I want to keep the woman then I have to kill a man, and I don’t have the nerve to face him. And he’s done nothing to deserve death! It is his money! But if I do the honest thing to the man, then I lose the woman, and I don’t think I can live with that loss-’

  ‘I’m sure you can -’ Christopher Manvell interrupted and, in his turn, was cut off.

  ‘No!’ Lord John did not even wish to discuss Jane. He frowned in puzzlement at his friend. ‘Do you think lost honour can be retrieved on a battlefield?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s the very best place to retrieve it.’ Manvell felt a surge of pity for his friend. He had never realized till this moment just how Lord John’s honour had been trampled and destroyed.

  ‘So tomorrow’s become rather important to me,’ Lord John said. ‘Because tomorrow I can take my honour back by fighting well.’ He smiled as if to soften the overdramatic words. ‘But to do it I’ll need a sword, and my spare blade is in Brussels. I suppose you don’t have one you could lend me?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  Lord John stared into the drenching twilight. ‘I wish it was over. The rain, I mean,’ he added hurriedly.

  ‘I think it’s slackening.’

  Lightning flickered in the west, followed a few seconds later by thunder that crashed across the far sky like the passage of a cannon-ball. Laughter and singing sounded from a house further up the street, temporarily drowning the ominous and repetitive scraping noise of a stone putting an edge onto a sword. A dog howled in protest at the thunder and a horse whinnied from the stables behind the Earl of Uxbridge’s billet.

  Lord John turned back into the house. He could retrieve his honour and he could retrieve Jane by becoming a hero. Tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 12

  Captain Harry Price, commander of the first company of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, climbed onto a makeshift platform constructed from spare ammunition boxes. In front of him, standing in the rain-soaked field, were forty or fifty infantry officers who had assembled from the various battalions bivouacked nearby. The last light was draining in the west, while the rain had slackened to a drizzle.

  ‘Are we ready, gentlemen?’ Price called.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  Price, enjoying himself, bowed to the hecklers, then took the first article from Colour Sergeant Major Huckfield. It was a silver-cased watch that Harry Price held high into the last vestiges of the light. ‘A watch, gentlemen, property of the late Major Micklewhite! The item is only very slightly blood-stained, gentlemen, so a good cleaning will have it ticking in no time. I offer you a very fine fob watch, gentlemen, made by Mastersons of Exeter.’

  ‘Never heard of them!’ a voice shouted.

  ‘Your ignorance is of no interest to us. Mastersons are a very old and reputable firm. My father always swore by his Mastersons watch and he was never late for a rogering in his life. Do I hear a pound for Major Micklewhite’s ticker?’

  ‘A shilling!’

  ‘Now, come along! Major Micklewhite left a widow and three sweet-natured children. You wouldn’t want your wives and little ones left derelict because some thieving bastards weren’t generous! Let me hear a pound!’

  ‘A florin!’

  ‘This isn’t a dolly-shop, gentlemen! A pound? Who’ll offer me a pound?’

  No one would. In the end Micklewhite’s watch fetched six shillings, while the dead Major’s signet ring went for one shilling. A fine silver cup that had belonged to Captain Carline went for a pound, while the top price went for Carline’s sword that fetched a full ten guineas. Harry Price had to auction sixty-two articles, all the property of those officers of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers who had been killed by the French cavalry at Quatre Bras. The prices were low because the French had caused a glut on the market by killing so many officers; at least four other auctions had already taken place this evening, but this night’s glut, Harry Price thought, would be as nothing compared to tomorrow night’s supply of goods.

  ‘A pair of Captain Carline’s spurs, gentlemen! Gold if I’m not mistaken.’ That claim was greeted by jeers of de
rision. ‘Do I hear a pound?’

  ‘Sixpence.’

  ‘You’re a miserable bloody lot. How would you feel if it was your belongings I was giving away for tuppence? Let us be generous, gentlemen! Think of the widows!’

  ‘Carline wasn’t married!’ a lieutenant shouted.

  ‘A guinea for his whore, then! I want some Christian generosity, gentlemen!’

  ‘I’ll give you a guinea for his whore, but sixpence for his spurs!’

  Micklewhite’s effects made eight pounds, fourteen shillings and sixpence. Captain Carline’s belongings fetched a good deal more, though all the items had been knocked down at bargain prices. Harry Price, who had always wanted to look like a cavalry officer, bought the spurs himself for ninepence. He also bought Carline’s fur-edged pelisse; an elegantly impractical garment that high fashion imposed on wealthy officers. A pelisse was a short jacket that was worn from one shoulder like a cloak, and Harry Price took immense satisfaction in draping Carline’s expensively braided foible about his own shabby red coat.

  He took the money and the promissory notes to the battalion’s paymaster who, after he had taken his share, would send the balance on to the bereaved families.

  Harry Price fixed the spurs onto his boots and splashed back to the hedge where the officers shivered in their miserable shelter. He saw Major d‘Alembord sitting further up the hedge. ‘You didn’t bid, Peter?’

  ‘Not tonight, Harry, not tonight.’ D’Alembord’s tone was distinctly unfriendly, discouraging conversation.

  Price took the hint and walked a few paces up the hedgerow before sitting and admiring his newly decorated heels. The spurs should cut a dash with the ladies of Paris, and that was the best reason Harry Price knew for fighting; because the girls could be so very obliging to a foreign soldier, and especially a soldier with a pelisse and spurs.

  Men were singing in the bivouacs. Their voices came strongly through the ever-present sound of the rain that had begun to fall harder again. Peter d‘Alembord, attempting to stir himself from his misery, saw Harry Price’s new spurs and perceived the childish delight which they had evidently given to their new owner. D’Alembord was tempted to start a conversation in the hope that Harry Price’s usual foolery would distract him from his fears, but then the terror surged up again, strong and overwhelming, and d‘Alembord almost sobbed aloud under its impact. Lightning flickered to the north, and d’Alembord touched the pocket where his fiancée’s letters were stored. He was going to die. He knew he was going to die. He closed his eyes so that no tears would show. God damn it, he knew he was going to die, and he was afraid.