“Sir! Sir!” A horseman was spurring up the ridge, coming from the west, and his horse was lathered with sweat. He jumped from the saddle, saluted, and offered a scrap of paper to the General. He was an aide-de-camp to General Leith and he did not wait for Wellington to read the paper. “Sir! They’re extending their left!”
“The devil they are! Give me a glass! Quickly!”
There was dead ground on the rolling plain, hollows in the wheat that hid themselves from the ridge, and the French were in the hollows. General Leith, off to the west, had seen the movement first, but now the French could be seen, climbing a track from the dead ground, and Sharpe, his own telescope extended, saw that the enemy was marching. The sheep were on the wolf-ground. Wellington rammed his glass shut, threw the chicken leg he had been eating over his shoulder, and his face was jubilant. “By God! That will do.!”
His horse was ready, he mounted, and he spurred off to the west, outrunning his staffofficers, and the dust spurted from behind his horse. Sharpe kept staring to the south-west, at the great plain that stretched so invitingly in front of the French, and he saw the troops come out of the dead ground and into plain view. It was a beautiful sight. Battalion after enemy Battalion had turned themselves into the order of march and they were going westward in the blistering heat. The attack on the village was supposed to do no more than pin down the British rearguard while the French left, safe in the knowledge that their foes had already marched, were now eagerly trying to outmarch them. The heat simmered the air above the plain, yet the French were full of heart, full of ambition, and they swung along the dirt tracks between the thistles and the wheat, and their weapons were slung and their hopes high. They marched further and further west, stringing the French army finer and finer, and none of them could know that their enemy was waiting, ready for battle, hidden to their north.
Hogan was replete with happiness. “We’ve got him! At last, Richard we’ve got him!”
CHAPTER 21
Battles rarely start quickly. They grow like grass fires. A piece of musket wadding, red hot, is spat onto grass, it smoulders, is fanned, and a hundred other such tiny sparks flicker on the dry ground. Some fade, others catch into flame and may be stamped out by an irritable skirmisher, but suddenly two will join and the wind catches the fire, blows it, swirls the smoke and then, quite suddenly, the little wadding sparks have become a raging flame that roasts the wounded and eats the dead. There was no battle yet at the Arapiles. There were sparks that could yet turn into an inferno, but the afternoon wore on and the officers watching from the farm at the southern end of the great ridge felt their elation turn to boredom. The French batteries still fired at the village over the heads of their troops who had settled in the grass and wheat, but the cannonade was slower, almost half-hearted, and the British used the lull to manhandle two guns back up the Lesser Arapile.
The afternoon smouldered. Three o’clock passed, then four, and to the men on the ridge, to the Battalions behind the ridge, the sound of battle was like a distant storm that had no effect on them. The French left wing, a quarter of the army, was marching westwards and it heard the guns behind and thought it was merely the bickering of the rearguard.
The British gunners of the Royal Horse Artillery who had dragged and forced two guns to the crest of the Lesser Arapile served their bucking monsters in the muck sweat of the heat. The guns crashed back on their trails, splintered rocks on the other Arapile hill, and after each shot the gunners had to lever the trails back into position, the monster had to be fed, and the smoke stung their eyes and fouled their breath. A gunner pushed a spherical case-shot into the barrel. It was Britain’s secret weapon, invented twenty-eight years before by Lieutenant Shrapnell, and still no other country had succeeded in copying the shell. This was a small case-shot because the gun, a six pounder, was the biggest that could be worked up the steep hill-slope. The hollow iron ball of Shrapnell’s invention had sixty musket balls packed round its central powder charge. The fuse had been cut so that the ball would explode over the Greater Arapile and the rammer thrust it down the gun’s throat, stood back, and the Sergeant who ruled this gun checked his crew, touched fire to fuse, and the gun wheels jarred off the rock, the trail slewed, the smoke slammed forward and the case shot thundered over the plain.
The battle was smouldering. It could ignite at any moment and Fate, who is the soldiers’ Goddess, was taking an interest in the sparks that flickered and threatened about the Arapiles. An artillery officer on the Lesser Arapile saw the case-shot leave the smoke, he saw it as the faintest trace of a grey pencil-like line in the air and then it exploded, just over the far edge of the Greater Arapile, and it was a black-grey air burst shot through with deep red and the ground beneath and ahead of the explosion was spattered by the lead balls and the shattered casing. Most went harmlessly to ground, some ricocheted off the hot stone, but two balls, with Fate’s malevolence, took Auguste Marmont in the side and France’s youngest Marshal was down. He was not killed, but he would not lead his army again this day, an army he had already pointed to destruction.
Wellington was far away. He had ridden to the Third Division and he had pointed them in a new direction, eastwards, and they had begun their march. The French marched west, thinking they were in a race to head off the British, but the British were coming towards them, and waiting behind them, and they could not know it. And the British, soured by the weeks of march and counter-march, of retreat, wanted to fight.
Between the Third Division and the Arapiles, hidden in a deep fold of ground, there were more British. Horsemen. The Heavy Cavalry, newly come from Britain and eager to try out their mounts and their long thirty-five inch straight blades, blades they said were too heavy for a swift parry, but wonderful for killing infantrymen.
The sun had bleached the plain pale. The killing ground was beginning to fill, as a stage might fill, but still it waited for the spark that would fan into a battle. It came in the west as the Third Division hit the head of the French column and to the men, up on the ridge by the farmhouse, it came as the distant muffled sound of muskets that were like a far-off thornbush fire. Smoke came from the west, and sound, and the dust that added to the smoke, and then the telescopes could make out a little of what was happening. The French column was being crumpled, thrown back, and the battle, that had started in the west was coming east, back to the Arapiles.
The French battalions recoiled. They were outnumbered, outgunned and outgeneralled. They had thought they were the vanguard of a march, and found they were the front line of a battle, and their defeat was about to become disaster.
Sharpe watched it. He hated the cavalry as all infantrymen hated cavalry and he was used to seeing the British cavalry ill-led and ineffective, but Fate was capricious to the French on that hot Spanish afternoon. The British Heavy Dragoons, some from the King’s own bodyguard, came on the French from the north. They wanted to fight. They came up from their dead ground in two ranks, trotting to keep their order, and the black horsetail plumes on their shining crested helmets rippled as they moved. Sharpe, watching through the glass, saw a shiver of light, a glitter, and the swords were up and the horsemen were booted knee to booted knee.