The victorious cavalry charged on to the crossroads where the newly arrived artillery greeted them with double-shotted barrels, and the infantry battalions waited in square, and thus it was the Frenchmen’s turn to die. The infantry aimed at the horses, knowing that a dead horse was a. dismounted man who could be picked off afterwards. For a few moments the cavalry milled about in front of the guns and volley fire, but then Kellerman’s trumpeters called for the retreat and the French, their charge done, turned for home.
Slowly, the few survivors of the 69th crept from their shelter in the trees or pushed the dead away. One man, driven to near madness by the memory of the swords and by his brother’s blood that had near choked him as he lay beneath the corpse, knelt in the stubble and wept. A sergeant, holding his guts into his sabre-slashed belly, tried to walk to the rear, but fell again. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he told a rescuer. Another sergeant, blinded by a Cuirassier and pierced in the belly by a lance, cursed. A lieutenant, his arm hanging by a shred of gristle, weaved as if drsunk as he staggered among the bodies.
Survivors pulled the bodies of the living and the dead away from the King’s colour. Next to it was the Major who had made the last despairing effort to save the regimental colour. He was dead, pierced deep through his stomach by a lance that was still embedded in his spine. The Major was wearing white silk stockings and gold-buckled dancing shoes, while stuck in his shako’s badge, and strangely untouched by any of the blood which had sheeted and soaked and drenched the pile, was an ostrich feather. A soldier plucked the grey feather loose, decided it was of no value, and tossed it away.
A quarter mile to the south a bleeding French Hussar on a wounded horse rode slowly back to his lines. In his right hand he carried the captured colour which he punched again and again at the smoke-skeined air, and with each triumphant punch he called aloud an incoherent shout of victory. His friends followed and applauded him.
From the trees Sharpe watched the Frenchman ride south. Sharpe had dismounted and was standing at the tree line with his loaded rifle. The Hussar was easily within range. Harper, with his own rifle, stood beside Sharpe, but neither man raised his gun. They had once come off a field of battle with an enemy colour, and now they must watch another man have his triumph.
“He’ll be an officer by nightfall,” Harper said.
“Bugger deserves it.”
Behind Sharpe the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were white-faced and scared. Even the veterans who had endured the worst of the Spanish battles stood silent and bitter. They were frightened, not of the enemy, but of their own officers’ incompetence. Colonel Ford would not go near Sharpe, but just sat his horse under the trees and wondered why his right hand was shaking like a leaf.
D’Alembord, his sword still drawn, walked up to the two Riflemen. He stared past them at the captured colour of the 69th, then shook his head. “I came to thank you. If you hadn’t given the order to run, we’d be dead. And I’ve just been made a major.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’m pleased too.” D’Alembord spoke with a bitter sarcasm. He had wanted promotion, indeed it was the prime reason he had stayed with the battalion, but he resented the sudden price of his majority.
“You’re alive, Peter,” Sharpe consoled his friend, “you’re alive.”
“The bloody man.” D’Alembord stared savagely towards Ford. “The bloody, bloody man. Why didn’t he form square?”
Then, to the north, a bugle sounded. Fresh troops were visible at the crossroads, a mass of men who marched forward to make a new line across the battlefield. The horse artillery was among the infantry and, to their left, there was an impressive nia.ss of horsemen. The British cavalry had at last arrived.
“I suppose we’ve won this battle!” D’Alembord slowly sheathed his sword.
“I suppose we have,” Sharpe said.
But it felt horribly like a defeat.
Drums sounded, bayonets were levelled, and the newly formed British line marched forward. The infantry trod across the scorched straw, over the smears of blood, and around the dead and the dying bodies of horses and men.
From the southern end of the wood, where Saxe-Weimar’s men had held through the day, the Guards division attacked the western farms. The French infantry fought back, but could not hold. In the centre the redcoats marched through the stream, recaptured Gemioncourt farm, and went on up the slope. At the far left of the battlefield the Rifles drove the French back to recapture the eastern farms.
Every inch of ground that Marshal Ney had taken during the afternoon was regained. The British line, supported by guns and cavalry, ground on like a behemoth. The French, suddenly outnumbered, were forced to retreat towards Frasnes. Quatre Bras had held and the road to the Prussians was still open. The battle between Napoleon and Blücher still sounded loud in the summer’s evening, but that too faded away as the shadows of the western clouds lengthened dark across the landscape.
Lord John Rossendale, riding behind the British light cavalry, stopped where a Cuirassier’s body was sprawled beside the road. The man’s guts had been flayed clean from his belly and now lay in a blue-red dribble across fifteen feet of the highway’s churned surface. Lord John wanted to vomit, but only choked. He gasped for breath and twisted his horse away. A dead British skirmisher lay in the trampled rye. his skull laid open by a bullet. Flies were thick on the exposed brains. Next to the dead man was a French Voltigeur, blood thick in his belly and lap. The man was alive, but shivering with the trauma of his wound. He stared up at Lord John and asked for water. Lord John felt faint with shock. He turned his horse and galloped towards the crossroads where his servants were preparing supper.
In the barns behind the crossroads the surgeons were at their grisly work with knives and saws and probes. The amputated arms, hands, and legs were tossed into the farmyard. Lanterns were hung from the barn beams to light the operations. A Highlander, his right calf shattered by a French cannon-ball, refused to bite the leather gag and made not a sound as a surgeon took his leg off at the knee.
Sharpe and Harper, knowing they were not welcome to stay near the brooding Lieutenant-Colonel Ford, walked their horses back down the flank of the wood, but stopped well short of the crossroads. “I suppose I’m out of work,” Sharpe said.
“The bugger’ll want you back in the morning.”
“Maybe.”
The two Riflemen tethered their horses in a clearing among the trees, then Sharpe walked out to the bloody patch of ground where the 69th had died. He picked up four discarded bayonets and took the leather bootlaces off two corpses. Back in the wood he made a fire with twigs and gunpowder. He stuck the bayonets into the ground at the four corners of the fire, then pulled the straps off the Cuirassier’s breastplate that Harper had scavenged earlier. He threaded the bootlaces into the holes at the shoulders and waist of the breastplate, then waited.
Harper had taken his own knife out to the battlefield. He found a dead horse and cut a thick bloody steak from its rump. Then, the steak dripping in his left hand, he crossed to one of the silent British guns and, ignoring its crew, stooped under the barrel to scrape away a handful of the gun’s axle grease.