Sharpe's Waterloo

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sharpe moved to his right, going to a vantage point from where he could see the empty countryside on the army’s right flank. The move took Harper and himself away from the worst of the cannonade and to where another British staff officer was evidently posted on the same duty as Sharpe; to watch for a French outflanking march. The man, who was in the blue coat and fur Kolbak of the Hussars, nodded civilly to Sharpe, then consulted a notebook. ‘I made it ten of midday, did you?’

  ‘Ten of midday?’ Sharpe asked.

  ‘When Bonaparte opened fire. It’s good to be accurate about these things.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘The Peer likes to be specific. I’m one of his family by the way.’ By which the pleasant-faced young man meant he was one of the Duke’s aides. ‘My name is Witherspoon.’

  ‘Sharpe. And this is my friend Mr Harper from Ireland.’

  Captain Witherspoon nodded genially at Harper, then cocked an eye at the clouds. ‘I suspect it might well clear up. I detected a quite definite rise in the mercury this morning. I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Sharpe! You’re with the Young Frog, are you not?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Is he good for anything at all?’

  Sharpe smiled at Captain Witherspoon’s disingenuous tone. ‘Not that I know of.’

  The cavalryman laughed. ‘I was at Eton with him. He wasn’t any good there either, though he had a mighty fine opinion of himself. I remember him as being eternally dirty! But he liked the girls, and had a prolific fondness for wine.’

  ‘What’s the time now?’ Sharpe asked in apparently rude disregard of Witherspoon’s gossip.

  Witherspoon hauled his watch from his fob and clicked open the lid. ‘Four minutes after midday, save a few seconds.’

  ‘You’d best write down that the French are advancing, then.’

  ‘They’re doing what? Oh, my soul! So they are! Thank you, my dear fellow! Good Lord, they advance, indeed they do!’ He dashed a note into his book.

  French skirmishers were swarming towards Hougoumont. They came in a loose mass of men; running, firing, running again. They were mostly among the trees, which gave cover from the foot of their ridge right up to the walls of the château, but some had overlapped onto the open flank where newly cut hay lay in sopping rows among the stubble. The skirmishers of the red-coated Coldstream Guards were falling back fast, evidently ordered not to make a fight of it among the trees. With the redcoats were some Dutch and German troops, the Germans armed with long-barrelled hunting rifles. Sharpe saw at least two of the blue-coated Dutch-Belgian troops running towards the enemy, presumably seeking shelter.

  The Guards skirmishers scrambled back into the farm buildings or into the walled garden and orchard that lay alongside the château. The French skirmishers had advanced to the very edge of the wood and were hidden from Sharpe by the loom of the château’s buildings. ‘I’m going down there,’ he told Harper, pointing to the field where a handful of the French skirmishers sheltered behind the rows of wet hay.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Harper said obstinately.

  ‘Take care!’ Captain Witherspoon called after the two Riflemen.

  Sharpe cantered his horse down the farm track, past a haystack that stood outside the château’s rear gates, and then into the open field to the west. The few French skirmishers who had been sheltering behind the cut hay had gone back to the wood, evidently scoured from the field by muskets fired from loopholes hacked in Hougoumont’s barns. Sharpe was only a hundred yards from the fight, but he was as safe from it as if he had been on the moon. The French had only one object, and that was to capture the buildings from where they could rake the British-held ridge behind with close-range cannon-fire. They had taken the woods, and now the mass of blue-coated infantry readied themselves for the final rush at the sprawling farm. Some of the French used axes to chop big holes in the hedge that bordered the wood. More French battalions filed into the trees until the woods were filled with enemy infantry waiting for the bugle, which would throw the attack forward.

  The bugle sounded, the French cheered, and the great mass rushed at the gaps in the hedge.

  The defenders opened fire.

  The Guards were behind ditches and hedges, safe behind walls, or firing from the windows in the château’s upper floors. A blast of musketry crashed down on the French attack, and every musket fired was immediately replaced by another loaded weapon that fired and in turn was replaced at the loophole or firing step. The crackle of the muskets was incessant, drowning the cannon-fire from the ridge beyond. Smoke filled the space south of the château’s walls; smoke that was twitched and torn by new musket blasts that glowed red and sudden inside the acrid cloud. Somehow enough Frenchmen survived the musket volleys to reach the château’s walls where they clawed to drag the British muskets clean out of the loopholes. Instead the muskets fired, hurling attackers back into the faces of the men who advanced behind.

  There seemed more hope of capturing the kitchen garden that was protected by a wall only a few inches taller than a man. Some of the French held their muskets over their heads to fire blindly down across the wall’s coping. Others fired through the British loopholes, while the bravest tried to climb the wall and some even straddled it to stab down with their long bayonets.

  Yet the Guards knew how to defend. For every French musket fired into a loophole a dozen British shots replied, while those brave Frenchmen who gained the wall’s top were either shot back or else pulled over to be bayoneted among the broken pea plants or in the trampled rose beds. Outside the garden the foot of the wall became treacherous with the bodies of the dead and dying French. Inside the garden files of men queued to take their turn at the loopholes so that the musket-fire never slackened and the heavy lead balls smashed into the mass of Frenchmen who still ran forward from the trees to be baulked by the wall. Bugles and shouts urged them on.

  The château’s orchard, beyond the garden, had no walls, but only a thick blackthorn hedge. The Guards fired through and over the hedge, but the French brought up pioneers’ axes and defended each axeman with a group of muskets, and it seemed that the Emperor’s men would have to win here by sheer weight of numbers. The axes crashed at the thick thorn trunks, ripping and shredding and tugging the obstacle away. A redcoat lunged his bayonet at an axeman, lunged too far, and was dragged screaming over the thorns to be ripped by a dozen bayonets.

  Then a shell exploded above the French.

  Sharpe looked up. High in the sky was a tangle of arcing smoke trails, evidence that the howitzers on the ridge were firing Britain’s secret weapon: the spherical case shell invented by Major-General Shrapnel. The shell was a five-and-a-half-inch sphere packed with musket-balls and a powder explosive that, if its fuse was cut to a precise length, would explode lethally in the air above its target. The difficulty lay in cutting the fuses which were affected by humidity as well as by the exact length of the shell’s flight, yet these fuses had been cut by a genius for the salvoes were murderously precise. Common shell burst into a few big fragments, but spherical case showered a killing rain of thin casing and musket-balls, and now caseshot after caseshot was crashing apart above the French infantry and the musket-balls and jagged iron fragments were slashing down to cut swathes of bloody flesh in the French attackers.

  ‘That is pretty work! ‘Pon my soul, but that’s very well done!’ Captain Witherspoon had followed Sharpe and Harper to their vantage point and now applauded the skill of the gunners who were dropping the spherical case exactly in the right place; none falling short on the Guards, but all arcing onto the French attackers.

  The musket-fire still hammered from the château’s walls. The French were faltering now, assailed from above and from their front. Some edged backwards, seeking the shelter of the trees, but the howitzers seemed to anticipate the move and the shrapnel blasts moved away from the château to flense the oaks in the wood of their leaves and branches. Each shell cracked apart with a sharper bang than common shell. In
Spain Sharpe had noticed how the spherical case caused more wounds then deaths, but the sight of wounded men streaming back through the trees would shake the confidence of the French troops advancing in support of the first attack.

  British skirmishers ran from the château’s northern flank into the field where Sharpe and Harper watched. The skirmishers ran south and added their fire from the corner of the farm buildings. The French were retreating fast now, going deep into the woods to escape the explosions and musketry.

  ‘Opening honours to the Duke, wouldn’t you say?’ Witherspoon was scribbling his comments in his notebook.

  ‘It’ll be a very long day,’ Sharpe warned.

  ‘Not too long, I’m sure. Good old Blücher’s coming. He must be here soon. Did you hear about the poor fellow’s ordeal?’

  ‘No.’ Nor was Sharpe much interested, but Witherspoon was a friendly fellow and it would have been churlish not to have listened.

  ‘Seems he was unhorsed and ridden over by the French cavalry at Ligny. He was lucky to survive at all, and the old boy must be seventy if he’s a day! Anyway, he rubbed himself with a liniment of garlic and rhubarb and now he’s on his way here. God speed his smelly march, I say.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Sharpe said.

  The howitzer-fire ceased, one last shell leaving a wavering trail of smoke from its burning fuse that crashed the charge apart inside the wood. The French attack had failed, leaving the space between the wood and château sifted with smoke above a sprawl of blue-coated bodies. Some of those bodies cried for help. The failed attack had left an overpowering smell of rotten eggs, which was the familiar stench of exploded gunpowder. The smell of blood would follow, mingling with the sweeter scent of crushed grasses and crops.

  British skirmishers advanced into the wood again, preparing to challenge the next attack. Beyond the château, in the wide valley that was now hidden from Sharpe, the noise of the French cannonade rumbled and cracked. Sharpe, his ears tuned to the familiar sounds of a battlefield, could tell that nothing there had changed. In battle, once the smoke had shrouded the field, the ears were often more useful than the eyes.

  ‘I do believe’, Witherspoon said, ‘that we should be departing hence.’ He gestured right, to where a battery of French eight-pounder guns was being dragged into the upper end of the hayfield. Other French troops, skirmishers, were filing from the woods into the rows of cut hay. Clearly these troops were destined for the château’s next ordeal, and just as clearly it was time to yield the hayfield to them.

  Sharpe, Harper and Witherspoon trotted briskly out of the hayfield and up the earthen track to the ridge top. The battery of five-and-a-half-inch howitzers that had caused such damage to the French skirmishers stood with their stubby and blackened barrels elevated steeply upwards. Sharpe congratulated the battery’s commander, the same man who had fidgeted with his watch waiting for the battle to begin and who was now clearly pleased by the Rifleman’s compliment. A few more scraps of French shell casing smoked in the damp crops, and a few more infantry casualties caused by the shells were being helped back to the regimental surgeons, but otherwise there was no new threat to the ridge. It seemed as if the Emperor was content to keep up his cannonade on the main British line while his infantry struggled to capture the bastion of Hougoumont.

  Reinforcements from the 2nd Guards Brigade were posted to the ridge close behind the château. The Guardsmen were a part of the Prince of Orange’s dispersed corps and the Prince could not resist galloping forward to watch the battalions deploy in column of companies. They looked a brave sight as they advanced beneath their huge colours and with their bands playing. The Prince returned their salutes and called out his best wishes for a brave day. The Young Frog was in high spirits, elated by the music of the fifes and drums that mingled with the fizzing sound of French shell-fuses and the crash of their explosions. His gloom of the previous night seemed to have been dissipated by battle. He spoke cheerfully with the commander of the Guards, then saw Sharpe waiting higher on the ridge. ‘What are you doing there?’ he shouted.

  ‘Obeying your orders, sir. Watching the right flank.’

  ‘I think we can abandon that idea, Sharpe!’ The Prince’s tone implied utter scorn for anyone who seriously believed the French might attempt a flanking march. ‘It’s going to be a straightforward mill. You can tell that from their gun placements. From now on it will be toes on the scratch and heavy thumping!’ The Prince feinted a punch at Sharpe to illustrate his prize-fighting metaphor, then pointed at the château. ‘I want you in Hougoumont.’

  ‘To do what, sir?’ Sharpe had ridden close to the Prince whose horse skittered sideways as a shell exploded higher up the slope.

  ‘To report to me, of course. I’ll need to know when to send the reserves in.’

  Sharpe had assumed that the château’s defenders were quite capable of deciding that for themselves, but he recalled Rebecque’s lecture on the need for tact, so just nodded. ‘Very good, sir.’

  The Prince suddenly looked past Sharpe. ‘Witherspoon! Is that really you? My dear Witherspoon! We haven’t met since Eton! I thought you were destined for the Church, not the army! Or are you a vicar in disguise today? Isn’t this a splendid day? Such good sport!’

  Sharpe left the happy reunion behind as he spurred towards the château. Harper, despite his sworn promise that he would not expose himself to danger, followed. The two Riflemen could hear the splintering crackle of musketry from the woods beyond the château, evidence that a new attack was gathering force. They galloped past the huge haystack that was built close to the northern entrance and Sharpe shouted at the defenders to open the gates. A startled Coldstreamer sergeant poked his head over the farmyard wall, saw the two men galloping towards him, and hastily shouted for the huge double gates to be unbarred. Once inside the farmyard Sharpe slid out of his saddle and unsheathed his rifle. Harper took the reins of both horses and tied them to a metal ring embedded in the stable wall.

  A Coldstreamer captain, alarmed by the Rifleman’s sudden arrival, ran from the farmhouse to greet Sharpe. ‘You bring orders?’

  ‘Ignore us.’

  ‘Gladly!’ The Captain ran back to the house which faced towards the woods where the French infantry was massing for their next rush.

  A French roundshot crashed into the farmhouse roof, showering slates and splinters into the yard. Sharpe looked up at the damaged rafters and grimaced. ‘God knows what we’re doing here.’

  ‘You’re keeping the wee boy happy, sir.’ Harper looked at the nearest defenders. ‘My God, but we’re in high and mighty company, so we are. I’ve never fought with the Coldstreamers before. I’d better polish my boots.’

  ‘You’d better stay out of bloody trouble.’ Sharpe rammed the charge down his rifle barrel, then slotted the ramrod back into place. The cobbled yard was long and thin, surrounded by sturdy farm buildings amongst which was a small chapel where the wounded from the first attack were being tended. A dungheap was piled against the chapel’s wall, while barrels of unripe apples lay beside a pigsty that had lost its inhabitants, presumably to the Coldstreamers’ cooking pots. A cat, clearly sensing that the troubled times could only get worse, was carrying her kittens one by one from a huge barn to the main house. Three bandaged Guardsmen sat outside the chapel. The only other Guardsmen in sight were a lieutenant and his squad of men who were evidently the garrison’s reserve, and thus ready to reinforce any part of the château’s perimeter that was dangerously threatened by the imminent French attack.

  ‘It’s a grand place, so it is.’ Harper looked approvingly round the farm buildings. Men had started to fire from the upper rooms of the farmhouse, while a volley of musketry sounded loud from the walled garden beyond the barn. The noise of the fighting forced Harper to raise his voice. ‘They must own a lot of land to fill all these barns!’

  ‘It’s good land, too!’ Sharpe agreed.

  Muskets crashed close behind them, coming from the stables which formed the western defences
. Sharpe ran into the stables to see Guardsmen taking their turns at the loopholes. Other men were awkwardly perched on the roof beams, firing through holes they had made in the slates. Smoke from the muskets was thick among the empty stalls.

  Sharpe climbed onto a manger, then hauled himself to a vacant beam where he punched a hole in the slates. French skirmishers were flooding past the stables, running through the hayfield from where he and Harper had watched the first attack. He levelled his rifle through his makeshift loophole, tracked a man carrying an officer’s sword, led him by a few inches, then fired.

  The rifle’s smoke prevented him seeing whether he had done any damage. He ducked as a deafening crash announced the strike of an eight-pound cannon-ball that splintered viciously through the stable rafters and struck two Guardsmen down in gouts of blood. Another cannon-ball smacked against the stable’s outer wall, ringing like a sledgehammer but doing no damage to the thick masonry. Sharpe, too cramped in the roof space to reload his rifle, shouted for Harper to give him his.

  There was no answer.

  Sharpe twisted round. Harper was standing at the stable entrance, staring towards the northern gate through which he and Sharpe had entered the château.

  ‘Patrick! Give me your rifle!’

  Still Harper did not reply. Instead, and without taking his eyes off the gate, he unslung his seven-barrelled gun.

  Sharpe dropped from the beam and ran to the stable door.

  The northern gates were juddering. The French had somehow reached the rear of Hougoumont and were straining and heaving at the two gates which were held shut by a wooden locking bar slotted into twin iron brackets. The gates were old and rickety, and every heave creaked them further apart. A French musket fired through the crack between the gates, then an axe-blade appeared in the gap. The axe chopped down with massive force, biting into the exposed locking bar. A Coldstreamer lieutenant was leading the garrison reserve towards the gate, but before the squad could reach the danger point, the axe struck again and this time with such brute force that the bar splintered and one end jumped clear out of its bracket so that the double gates scraped back and a flood of screaming Frenchmen charged into the courtyard. The charge was led by a huge lieutenant who was even taller than Harper. It was the huge Lieutenant who was carrying the massive pioneers’ axe that had broken through the gate.