Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Waterloo

Dunnett did not hurry his men. He must have been tempted to urge them to fire quickly, for the French skirmishers were regrouping at the foot of the slope, but instead he trusted his men and they did not disappoint him.

The first rifles crashed their brass butts into shoulders bruised raw by a day’s fighting. White smoke spurted across the slope. The French skirmishers began firing uphill and two Greenjackets lurched backwards. Other Riflemen still took careful aim. A gunner stared over his rammer at the slope and a bullet took him in his open mouth. A French artillery officer spun backwards, half clambered up, then began crawling under his gun’s trail. More rifles fired. The officer slumped flat. A handful of gunners fled to the farmhouse where they crowded and obstructed each other in the narrow door, and where they were struck by a flail of rifle-fire. Those Greenjackets who had already fired reloaded, not with the fine powder and wrapped bullet, but by tap loading with a normal cartridge. Then they turned their weapons on the skirmishers.

“Withdraw!” Dunnett, the executions neatly carried out, shouted at his men.

“Got the bastard!” Harper shouted.

“Where?”

“Look at the tree, then left thirty yards!“

Sharpe was downhill of Harper. “Kneel down. Aim your rifle at the farm.”

Harper, bemused, obeyed. He braced his left leg forward, knelt on his right knee, and aimed his rifle at the kitchen garden which seemed to be filled with dead artillerymen. The first Riflemen were already running uphill. “Hurry, for Christ’s sake!” Harper muttered.

Sharpe lay flat on the ground and thrust his rifle between Harper’s right thigh and left calf. Now Sharpe was effectively hidden from the staff officers close to the Prince who were all staring at the slaughtered gunners in the farm’s garden. The Prince’s horse was sideways on to the valley, presenting the Prince’s left shoulder to Sharpe’s rifle sights.

Sharpe had not had time to load with the good powder, or wrap a ball in leather. Instead he was using the commonplace coarse-powder cartridge, but if God_was good this evening then an ordinary musket cartridge would suffice to avenge a thousand dead men and perhaps to save the lives of a thousand more.

“God save Ireland,” Harper hissed, “but will you bloody hurry yourself?”

“Don’t fire till I do,” Sharpe said calmly.

“We’ll bloody die together if you don’t hurry!” Sharpe and Harper were almost the last Riflemen on the slope. The rest were sprinting back to safety, while the enraged Voltigeurs were hurrying after them. Harper changed his aim to point his rifle at a French officer who seemed particularly lively.

Sharpe aimed at the Prince’s belly. The Young Frog was no more than a hundred paces away, close enough for Sharpe to see the ivory hilt of his big sabre. The rifle bullet would fall a foot over a hundred paces, so Sharpe raised the muzzle a tiny fraction.

“For the love of Ireland, will you bloody kill the bastard?”

“Ready?” Sharpe said. “Fire!”

Both men fired together. Sharpe’s rifle hammered his shoulder as smoke gouted to hide the Prince.

“Let’s get out of here!” Harper saw his target plucked backwards, and now he hauled Sharpe to his feet and both men sprinted away towards the crest. Sharpe had just staged an assassination in full view of an army, but no one shouted at him and no one gaped in astonishment because no one, it seemed, had noticed a thing. A French roundshot screamed low overhead. A Voltigeur’s-bullet clipped Sharpe’s sword scabbard and thudded into the ground.

Sharpe began laughing. Harper joined him. Together they reeled over the crest, still laughing. “Right in the bloody belly!” Sharpe said with undisguised glee.

“With your bloody marksmanship, you probably killed the Duke.”

“It was a good shot, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke as fervently as any young Rifleman first mastering the complex weapon. “I felt it go home!”

Major Warren Dunnett saw the two Riflemen grinning like apes and assumed they shared his pleasure at a task well done. “A successful venture, I think?” Dunnett said modestly, but he was clearly eager for praise.

Sharpe gave it gladly. “Very. Allow me to congratulate you, Dunnett.” The efficient Greenjacket foray had taken the French cannon at La Haye Sainte out of the battle. Their gunners were dead, cut down by the best marksmen in either army.

Sharpe led Harper to the rear of a British battery from where he could see Rebecque and a group of other Dutch officers helping the Prince away. The Prince had slumped sideways, and was only being held in his saddle by the support of his Chief of Staff. “Harry!” Sharpe shouted at Lieutenant Webster, the Prince’s only remaining British aide. “What happened, Harry?”

Webster spurred across to Sharpe. “It’s bad news, sir. The Prince was hit in the left shoulder. It isn’t too serious, but he can’t stay on the field. One of those damned skirmishers hit him, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, shit,” Sharpe spoke with obvious remorse.

“It is indeed bad news, sir.” Webster offered sympathetic agreement. “But his Highness will live. They’re taking him to the surgeons, then back to Brussels.”

Harper was trying not to laugh. Sharpe scowled. “A pity.” His voice was fervent. “A damned bloody pity!”

“It’s decent of you to be so upset, sir, especially after the way he’s treated you,” Webster said awkwardly.

“But you’ll present my regards, Lieutenant?”

“Of course I will, sir.” Webster touched his hat, then turned to ride after the wounded Prince.

Harper grinned and mocked Sharpe with imitation. “It was a good shot. I felt it go home.”

“The bugger’s gone, hasn’t he?” Sharpe said defensively.

“Aye,“ Harper admitted, then looked ruefully along the British line. ”And it won’t be long before we’re all gone either. I’ve never seen the like, nor have I.“

Sharpe heard the Irishman’s despair of victory and was tempted to offer agreement, except that a small part of Sharpe refused to give up hope even though he knew victory would need a miracle now. The British army was reduced to a ragged line of shrunken, bleeding battalions who crouched in the mud near to the ridge’s crest that was crowned with smoke and riven by the explosions of mud thrown up by the continuing cannonade. Behind the battalions the rear of the ridge was empty but for the dead and the dying and the broken guns. At the edge of the forest the ammunition wagons burned to ash. There were no reserves left.

The two Riflemen trudged through the smoke towards the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers while the French cannon, all but for the two that had been emplaced in La Haye Sainte’s garden, fired on. The valley was shrouded by the cloud of smoke which flickered with the unearthly light of the guns.

By La Belle Alliance a tentative drum tap sounded. There was a pause as the drummer rammed the leather rings down the white ropes to tighten his drumskin, then the sticks sounded a jaunty and confident flurry. There was another pause, a shouted order, and a whole corps of drummers began to beat the pas de charge.

To tell the French that the Imperial Guard was about to fight.

The Emperor left La Belle Alliance, deigning to ride his white horse down the high road almost as far as La Haye Sainte. He stopped a few yards short of the captured farmhouse and watched his beloved Guard march past. To Napoleon’s immortals would go the last honour of this day. The undefeated Guard would cross the pit of hell and break the final remnants of a beaten army.

The Guard marched with bayonets fixed. The flash of French cannon-fire reflected off the thicket of steel blades and from the glossy black sheen of their bearskin hats. The Guard wore the bearskins undecorated for battle, but each man had a waxed canvas sheath, eighteen inches long, strapped to his sabre-briquet, and in the sheaths were the plumes which they would fix to the bearskins for their victory parade in Brussels.