“Don’t know about you, sir, but I’d see to my horse,” the Captain of the Light Company cautioned. “Far from a thoroughbred, what, but do recall poor Richard the Third, ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!, hey? Besides, he ain’t battle-trained, most-like, and he’ll take fright and gallop off if he ain’t well-tended.”
“Good idea, sir,” Lewrie said, eying his nervous mount, which already was showing the whites of its eyes and tugging at the reins. Lewrie crossed the ridge to the reverse slope, where hundreds and hundreds of soldiers sat or lay in shelter, found this particular regiment’s officers’ mounts being tended by grooms, and bade them to look after his, then returned to the crest of the ridge.
The French cannonading continued for some time, but the only people that he could see harmed by it were the few skirmishing companies posted on the forward face of the ridge line, below the crest, and since the roundshot was slamming into the ground and caroming on, only one soldier in a group would suffer for it, while the rest were spared. At the crest of the ridge, there were enough men standing in two-deep ranks to make good targets, but very few were killed or injured; the balls might graze the crest, but then sailed off well over the sheltering men on the back slopes.
They can keep that up all day, but it won’t help ’em much, he told himself; Shootin’ uphill’s a total waste.
Artillery got its best results on flatter ground, where shot could strike a bit short, rise up from First Graze, then go skipping along at eight hundred feet per second or better to plough into tight ranks like a game of bowls, scattering broken bodies like nine-pins.
“Your poor horse run away, yet, sir?” the Captain from the Light Company asked as he strolled up to Lewrie, his sword out and whacking shoots of long grass.
“Not yet, no, sir,” Lewrie said with a smile, introducing himself at last.
“Captain Samuel Ford, sir, and happy to make your acquaintance,” the other fellow told him, offering his hand. “Wonder if the French gunners are growing as frustrated as we are, what? All that powder and shot, trundled here all the way from Lisbon … wasted.”
There were now at least ten of those massive blocks of troops below them on the upper plain, all standing at attention, it looked like, waiting stoically for … what?
“There, Captain Lewrie, a bit to our right,” Captain Ford said, pointing, after a long moment. “I do believe that two of the columns are advancing, at last. Not for us, more’s the pity. Damn all French, root and branch, but they do know how to stage a fine show.”
Those two massive columns were lurching forward, marching to the beat of drums, about three or four hundred yards apart from each other, with their light infantry out front as skirmishers and flank guards. They put Lewrie in mind of magic blue carpets creeping along as they began their slow ascent to the ridge. In his ocular, he could see them sway left and right, elbow to elbow, in perfect step, with their muskets held vertically against their right chests and shoulders, at Carry Arms. They were spiny creeping blue carpets, for the blades of their fixed bayonets winked and twinkled in waves as they swayed.
The drums thundered in an almost hypnotic beat, over and over, then came a brief pause as nigh two thousand men gave a great shout together, “Vive l’Empereur!” and the drums thundered Boom-buh-buh-boom. Then “Vive l’Empereur!”
Christ, what if they are unstoppable? Lewrie thought with a sudden chill in his innards; And if they are, can my bloody horse be made t’gallop?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The initial French thrust seemed aimed closer to the village of Vimeiro, off to Lewrie’s right, perhaps in hopes that those massive, bludgeoning columns would push through and cut the British lines in two, and reach the Maceira River valley to cut off any hope of extraction.
Boom-bub-buh-buh-boom, then the pause and the shout of “Vive L’Empereur!”, louder now as those two columns got closer, and Lewrie could begin to make out details, the brightly polished metal shako plates, and the differences between them from one regiment to the next, even the large brass numbers, the stiff plumes that rose from the sides of their shakoes in different colours. He could almost make out individual faces; tanned as brown as sailors from weeks or months in the field, coated with dust stirred up by their own boots, and the abundance of short beards or long mustachios among the soldiers.
“Scruffy lot,” Lewrie muttered, half to himself, and thinking that there was a great difference between the Sunday parade ground and the field. The French wore ragged, faded, and patched uniforms, stained and dusted, whilst a quick look down the line of the ridge showed the British troops still in mostly new-issued and clean kits.
“When’s our bloody artillery going to—?” Ford grumbled, cut off by the first, welcome, shots from British guns. Thin and sketchy trails of smoke marked the passage of their shot as they descended in quick arcs onto those massed columns.
“Shrapnel shot!” Lewrie crowed with delight when he realised what he was seeing. The fuses of the shrapnel shells, ignited by the explosions of the gunpowder in the artillery’s barrels, left those thin trails. A second later, and they burst, some at ground level among the French soldiers, but most exploded above their heads, scattering irregular chunks of the shells, and the musket balls packed inside them, to strew death, dismemberment, wounds, and consternation in a wider burst radius.
The French columns staggered and reeled for a second or so, but the insistent drums forced them onward, and ranks and files came back together, shoulder to shoulder, stepping over their casualties at the same implacable pace. Far behind those columns, the elegantly clad French cavalry units still came forward at a nervous, head-tossing gait, waiting their chance ’til the infantry had punched through, so they could charge into the confusion and exploit the breach in the British lines. A pair of artillery guns showed them some attention, too, emptying saddles and scything down screaming horses with their bursting shot, but it was the columns that were the guns’ main targets.
“What do they do when they get close?” Lewrie turned to ask Ford. “Do they just tramp straight on, or what?”
“Well, at some point, they bring the rear ranks out to form line, three or four deep, and open fire with musketry,” Ford told him. “’Til then, no more than the first two or three leading ranks … ninety men or so … and the men in the outer files down the flanks, can use their weapons.”
“Don’t make good sense, t’me,” Lewrie commented with a shake of his head. “’Til then, the columns are just big, walking targets.”
“They’ve worked for the French, so far, sir,” Ford replied. “Perhaps they think that they’ve such a large army that they can replace all their great losses. It’s brute and crude, but columns have broken everyone in Europe, even the Prussians.”
The few British guns with the army continued their cannonading of those two columns, the gunners stoically shrugging off the French guns’ attempts to silence them with solid shot. More shells burst over the columns, knocking down more soldiers in circles under them. Much like dropping pebbles into thin mud, the circles quickly disappearing as the French stepped over and round their dead and wounded comrades and marched on, to the harsh orders of the French version of “Close Up, Close Up!” Those two columns got a little shorter, and a bit thinner than thirty men across the front ranks, but still they came on as if nothing in the world could ever stop them.