CHAPTER 13
It stopped raining during the night.
At four in the morning the dawn revealed a valley mist which was stirred by a gusting damp wind. The mist was swiftly thickened by the smoke of the new morning fires. Shivering men picked themselves out of the mud like corpses coming to shuddering life. The long day had begun. It was a northern midsummer’s day and the sun would not set for another seventeen hours.
Men on both sides of the shallow valley untied the rags which had been fastened round their musket locks, and took the corks out of the guns’ muzzles. The sentries scraped out the grey damp slush which had been the priming in their pans and tried to empty the main charge with a fresh pinch of priming. All they achieved was a flash in the pan, evidence that the powder in the barrel was damp. They could either drill the bullet out, or else keep squibb-ing the gun with fresh priming till enough of the powder inside the touchhole dried to catch the fire. One by one the squibbed muskets banged, their sound echoing forlornly across the shallow valley.
The staff and general officers in Waterloo rose long before the dawn. Their grooms saddled horses, then, like men riding to their business, the officers took the southern road through the dark and dripping forest.
Sharpe and Harper were among the first to leave. The Prince was not even out of his bed when Sharpe wearily hauled himself into his saddle and shoved his rifle into its bucket holster. He was wearing his green Rifleman’s jacket beneath Lucille’s cloak and riding the mare which had recovered from her long day’s reconnaissance about Charleroi. His clothes were clammy and his thighs sore from the long days in the saddle. The wind whipped droplets of water from the roofs and trees as he and Harper turned south into the village street. “You’ll keep your promise today?” Sharpe asked Harper.
“You’re as bad as Isabella! God save Ireland, but if I wanted someone else to be my conscience I’d have found a wife out here to nag me.”
Sharpe grinned. “I’m the one who’ll have to give her the news of your death, so are you going to keep your promise?”
“I’m not planning on being a dead man just yet, so I’ll keep my promise.” Harper was nevertheless dressed and equipped for a fight. He wore his Rifleman’s jacket and had his seven-barrelled gun on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. Both men had left their packs at the Prince’s billet, and neither man had shaved. They rode to battle looking like brigands.
As they neared Mont-St-Jean they heard a sound like the sucking of a great sea on a shelving beach. It was the sound of thousands of men talking, the sound of damp twigs burning, the noise of squibbed muskets popping, and the sound of the wind rustling in the stiff damp stalks of rye. It was also a strangely ominous sound. The air smelt of wet grass and dank smoke, but at least the clouds of the previous day had thinned enough so that the sun was visible as a pale pewter glow beyond a cloudy vapour that was being thickened by the smoke of the camp-fires.
There was one ritual for Sharpe to perform. Before riding on to the ridge’s crest he found a cavalry armourer close to the forest’s edge and handed down his big sword. “Make it into a razor,” he ordered.
The armourer treadled his wheel, then kissed the blade onto the stone so that sparks flowed like crushed diamonds from the steel. Some of the nicks in the sword’s fore edge were so deep that successive sharpenings had failed to obliterate them. Sharpe, watching the sparks, could not even remember which enemies had driven those nicks so far into the steel. The armourer turned the blade to sharpen the point. British cavalrymen were taught to cut and slash rather than lunge, but wisdom said that the point always beat the edge. The armourer honed the top few inches of the backblade, then stropped the work on his thick leather apron. “Good as new, sir.”
Sharpe gave the man a shilling, then carefully slid the sharpened sword into its scabbard. With any luck, he thought, he would not even need to draw the weapon this day.
The two Riflemen rode on through the encampment. The battalions’ supply wagons had not arrived so it would be a hungry day, though not a dry one, for the quartermasters had evidently arranged for rum to be fetched from the depot at Brussels. Men cheered as the barrels were rolled through the mud. Equally to the day’s purpose were the wagons of extra musket ammunition that were being hauled laboriously across the soaking ground.
A drummer boy tightened the damp skin of his drum and gave it an exploratory tap. Next to him a bugler shook the rain out of his instrument. Neither boy was more than twelve years old. They grinned as Harper spoke to them in Gaelic, and the drummer boy offered a reply in the same language. They were Irish lads from the 29th, the Inniskillings. They look good, don’t they?“ Harper gestured proudly at his coutrymen who, in truth, looked more like mud-smeared devils, but, like all the Irish battalions, they could fight like demons.
“They look good,” Sharpe agreed fervently.
They reined in at the highest point of the ridge, where the elm tree stood beside the cutting in which the highway ran north and south. Just to Sharpe’s left a battery of five nine-pounder guns and one howitzer was being prepared for the day. The charges for the ready ammunition lay on canvas sheets close to the guns; each charge a grey fabric bag containing enough powder to propel a roundshot or shell. Near the charges were the projectiles, either roundshot or shells, which were strapped to wooden sabots that crushed down onto the fabric bags inside the gun barrels. Gunners were filling canisters, which were nothing but tubular tins crammed with musket-balls. When fired the thin tin canisters split apart to scatter the musket-balls like giant blasts of duckshot. Beside the guns were the tools of the artillerymen’s trade: drag-chains, relievers, rammers, sponges, buckets, searchers, rammers, wormhooks, portfires and handspikes. The guns looked grimly reassuring until Sharpe remembered that the French guns would look just as businesslike and were probably present on the field in even greater numbers.
The smoke of the enemy’s camp-fires lay like a low dirty mist over the southern horizon. Sharpe could see a knot of horsemen close to the inn, but otherwise the enemy was hidden. In the valley itself patches of the tall rye had been beaten flat by the night’s rain, leaving the fields looking as though they suffered from some strange and scabrous disease.
There were Riflemen positioned some two hundred paces down the road in the valley, just opposite the farm of La Haye Sainte. Sharpe and Harper trotted towards those Greenjackets, who were occupying a sandpit on the road’s left, while the farm on the right was garrisoned by men of the King’s German Legion.
“A bad night?” Sharpe asked a Greenjacket sergeant.
“We’ve known worse, sir. It’s Mr Sharpe, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Nice to know you’re here, sir. Cup of tea?”
“The usual smouch?”
“It never changes, sir.” Smouch was a cheap tea which was rumoured to be made from ash leaves steeped in sheep’s dung. It tasted even worse than its alleged recipe sounded, but any hot liquid was welcome on this damp cold morning. The Sergeant handed Sharpe and Harper a tin mug each, then stared through the dawn gloom at the enemy-held ridge. “I suppose Monsewer will start the ball early?”
Sharpe nodded. “I would if I was in his boots. He needs to beat us before the Prussians come.”
“So they are coming, sir?” The Sergeant’s tone betrayed that even these prime troops realized how precarious was the British predicament.
“They’re coming.” Sharpe had still not heard any official news of the Prussians, but Rebecque had been confident the night before that Blücher would march at dawn.
The Sergeant suddenly whipped round, proving he had eyes in the back of his head. “Not here, George Cullen, you filthy little bastard! Go and do it in the bloody field! We don’t want to be tripping over your dung all day! Move!”