The four columns crossed the eastern half of the valley. The column which attacked in the valley’s centre advanced up the high road and threatened to envelop the farm of La Haye Sainte. A watery sun gleamed faintly on the fixed bayonets of the column’s front rank. The Riflemen in the sandpit opposite the farm were dropping the first French skirmishers who had spread out across the rye fields. Behind the skirmishers the boots of the column trampled the crop, then the drummers paused in unison to let the whole column shout its battle cry, “ Vive I’Empereur!“
On the ridge above the farm a British gunner officer gave the elevating screw of his nine-pounder a last half twist. The fabric bag of gunpowder was crushed in the breech by its roundshot. A stiff quill stood proud of the touchhole. The quill, which was filled with a finely mealed gunpowder, had been rammed hard down into the fabric bag so that the fire would flash deep down into the charge. The gun was pointing downhill, so the roundshot had to be restrained from rolling out of the barrel by a grommet wad; a circle of rope that had been rammed hard up against the shot. When the gun was fired the rope would be annihilated in the explosion. The officer, satisfied that the roundshot would plunge murderously into the ap’proaching French column, stepped well back. The firer stood with his smoking portfire by the gun’s right wheel, while the other six men of the crew waited for the orders to reload.
Red-coated and green-jacketed skirmishers ran over the top of the British ridge, then down the long slope where they spread into the skirmishing chain. Riflemen crouched in the rye and dragged back their weapons’ flints. The job of the British skirmishers was to hold the French Voltigeurs away from the vulnerable gun crews. Whistles sounded as the light company officers dispersed their men. The Voltigeurs were wading through the half-crushed crops like men struggling through waist-deep water.
A bugle ordered the men in green jackets to open fire. The Baker rifle, with its seven grooves twisting a quarter turn in the barrel, had both a longer range and a deadlier accuracy than the smoothbore musket. The Emperor had refused to arm his Voltigeurs with rifles, claiming that the far quicker rate of musket-fire more than compensated for the loss of range and accuracy, but his officers now paid for that decision, for they were the Riflemen’s target. “Kill the officers!” the Greenjacket Sergeants ordered their men. “Don’t waste your powder! Find their officers and kill the scum!” The first French officers were falling, flung backwards by the force of the spinning balls.
“Run! Run!” a French officer shouted at his men and the Voltigeurs sprinted forward to shorten the range and overwhelm the Riflemen with the threat of their bayonets.
The redcoats opened fire. The muskets made a heavier coughing sound than the sharper crack of the rifles. The French were firing now; so many muskets crashing on both sides that the skirmish sounded as though a horde of small boys were dragging sticks along park railings. Patches of white smoke drifted and coalesced above the slope. This was the private war of the light infantryman; a bitter war fought in the shrinking gap between the columns and the waiting British guns.
A Rifleman fired, and immediately ran back behind his partner who advanced at a crouch, loaded rifle ready to protect his partner who laboriously rammed the bullet down past the tight-gripping grooves of the rifle’s barrel.
“Watch left, Jimmy!” a sergeant shouted in warning. “There’s a Jack Pudding and I want the bastard dead!”
Before the French officer could be killed a group of his blue-coated skirmishers dashed forward with bayonets fixed to their muskets.
“Back, lads! back!” The Rifles, so slow to reload, were vulnerable to such determined rushes, but they fell back through the crouching figures of a redcoat light company who suddenly rose out of the rye and fired a blast of musketry that threw down a half-dozen of the Frenchmen. A ragged answering volley splintered the thigh of a red-coated lieutenant who swore, fell, and watched in disbelief as his blood soaked his white breeches. Two of his men seized the shoulders of his coat and unceremoniously dragged the Lieutenant back up the slope towards the surgeons.
All across the valley’the skirmishers fought, but the French Voltigeurs far outnumbered their opponents and slowly, bitterly, the redcoats and Riflemen retreated. Behind them, beyond the crest of the ridge, the rest of the British infantry waited. They were lying flat, hidden both from the light French guns and from the mass of the four advancing columns. The hidden British battalions were in two ranks; a perilously thin formation that would soon have to stand and face the crashing impact of the advancing columns.
Those columns began to step over the dead and dying skir-mishers. The drummer boys, deep in the heart of each column, drove their sticks down as if their youthful fervour could drive this vast assault clear on to Brussels itself.
This was the old way of war, the Emperor’s way, the attack in column that relied on sheer weight to smash through the enemy’s battle line. Yet the French were not fools, and enough of them had fought against British muskets to know that the old way had never worked against the red-coated lines. The British were just too fast with their guns, and every fast musket in a British line could fire at the attacking column, whereas only the men in the first two ranks of the French formation could return the fire, so every time the British had met the columns, the British had won. The British line looked so very frail, but it overlapped the column and drowned it in fire. Against the troops of other nations the column worked beautifully, but the British had learned to pour a destructive blast of musketry that turned the columns into butchers’ messes.
So this time the French would do it differently. This time they had a surprise of their own, something to counter the overlapping line and the overpowering musket-fire.
But that surprise must wait till the two sides were close enough to stare into each other’s eyes. That confrontation was still some minutes away for the British lines were still in hiding, and the French columns still had to climb the gentle slope in the face of the waiting guns.
“Fire!” The gunner officers shouted along the ridge.
The portfires touched the fire to the quills of mealed powder that flashed the flame down to the charge in the fabric bags, and the guns crashed back on their trails, their wheels jumping clear out of the mud before smashing down yards back from where they had started.
Smoke instantly blotted the ridge.
The nine-pounder balls screamed down the hill and slashed into the marching files. One ball could kill a score of men. The missiles drove into the massed ranks; flensing, smashing, breaking tones, spattering flesh and blood deep into the heavy masses.
“Close up! Close up!” the French Sergeants shouted.
The marching ranks clambered over the writhing bodies to close the ranks. The drummers beat harder and faster, quickening the bloody moment. The men in the centre raised their bayonet-tipped muskets as they cheered their hero. “ Vise I’Emperor!“
On the ridge the gun crews worked like whipped slaves. The spongeman, his rammer tipped with a soaking wet sleeve of fleece, forced the wet material down the smoking barrel. The gun had to be cleared of the scraps of still burning powder and canvas that could ignite and explode the next charge. The sudden compression of air as the rammer thrust with the fleece could explode the residues of unburnt powder that was caked to the breech walls, so a gunner, wearing a leather thumbstall, pressed his thumb over the vent to stop the airflow.