Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Waterloo

The British sabres broke the square. The horsemen did what all the cavalry of France had failed to do, they broke a square. They died in their scores to do it, but nothing would stop them now. This was victory. This was better than victory, this was revenge, and so the rum-soaked horsemen hacked their sabres down at the bearskins and forced their horses across the dead to cut the living into bloody ribbons with their blades. The Prussians were marching from the left, the British were advancing across the valley, and the Emperor fled into the dusk as his Eagles fell.

The Inniskillings alone did not advance. Those who were not dead were wounded, for the Irishmen had held the weak spot in the Duke’s thin line, and they had held it to the end. They had died in their ranks, they had never stopped fighting, and now they had won. Their dead lay in a perfect square and their colours still flew in the shredding smoke as their last living soldiers stared across a valley stinking with blood and palled by fire, a valley plucked from hell; a battlefield.

The wounded lay beneath a smoky moon while the living, exhausted, slept.

It was a warm night. A small west wind slowly took the stench of powder away, though the smell of blood would linger in the soil for weeks. Plunderers crept into the darkness. To the Belgian poor every scrap of litter was worth money; whether it was a Cuirassier’s bullet-punctured breastplate, a broken sword, a pair of boots, a trooper’s saddle, a bayonet, or even a strip of cloth. They stripped the dead naked, and killed the wounded to get their uniforms. Injured horses neighed pitifully as they waited for death in a field which rustled with thieves and murderers. A few fires flickered among the carnage. More than forty thousand men lay dead or wounded in the valley, and the survivors could not cope.

Lord John Rossendale still lay in the valley where he drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain had lessened in the night, but so had his lucidity. He dreamed. At times he was even happy in his dreams, but then hands began pulling at his chest and he moaned and tried to ward off the grasping fingers that were causing him such pain. A woman told him to lie still, but Lord John jerked as the pain stabbed and shrieked at him. The woman, a villager from Waterloo, was trying to drag Lord John’s coat from his body. Her child, an eight-year-old girl, kept watch for the few sentries who tried to stop the plundering.

Lord John thought the woman was Jane. He was blind so he did not know it was still the heart of a dark night; instead he thought it was morning and that Jane had found him and he began to sob for joy as he reached up to hold her hand. The woman cursed Lord John for making her life so difficult, but she was not unprepared for such unco-operative victims. She carried a ten-inch knife that she used to slaughter the pigs she raised in her back yard. “Lie still!” she told Lord John in French.

“Jane!” he cried desperately, and the woman feared that his noise would bring the sentries so she sawed the knife quick and hard across his moon-whitened throat. Blood jetted black. He choked, jerked once like a landed fish, then was still.

The woman took Lord John’s coat with its precious epaulettes, but left his shirt because it was too drenched in blood. In a pocket of the coat she found a ragged length of dirty rope that she used to bind up her bundle of plundered clothing. Beyond the southern ridge a vixen howled at the sky that was suffused with the smoke of the victors’camp-fires.

The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers slept on the ridge they had defended. Peter d’Alembord’s leg had been taken off, so he might yet live. Private Clayton was dead; killed by the Imperial Guard at the very moment of victory. Charlie Weller lived, as did Colonel Ford, though the Colonel had been sent back to Brussels and whether he wanted to stay alive any longer was another matter. Harry Price was the next most senior living officer, so Sharpe had made him into a Major and given Simon Doggett a Captaincy, though he had warned both men that the promotions might not stand up to the scrutiny of the civil servants in Whitehall. Men might fight and bleed and write a chapter of history for Britain, but still the evil-minded soft-bummed bastards of Whitehall would have the last say.

Sharpe slept for an hour, then woke to sit beside a fire that he had made from fragments of lance shafts and the broken spokes from a shattered gun wheel. The first light came early; a sickly grey that dispersed the plunderers and brought the black-winged carrion birds to feast on the dead. The air was already humid, promising a day of stifling heat. In the west the fires of the Prussian bivouacs made thin skeins across the wash of high cloud. Somewhere behind the ridge a bugle called the Rouse and other buglers took up the call that seemed to be echoed by the crowing of cockerels from distant villages.

“Orders, sir?” Harry Price looked red-eyed, as though he had been crying, though it was probably just tiredness.

Sharpe felt tired and emptied, so it took an immense effort to think of even the simplest tasks. “I want a proper butcher’s list, Harry.” That was the list of the dead and wounded. “Give Sergeant Huckfield a work party to salvage muskets, and see what other equipment you can filch.” The aftermath of battle was a prime time to stock the battalion’s equipment needs. “We need some food. Remind me who’s guarding the prisoners?”

“Sergeant Ryan.”

“Tell him to march the buggers back to brigade. If they don’t want them, then turn them loose without any boots or belts.”

“We’re going to need more sergeants,” Harry Price warned.

“I’ll think about it.” Sharpe turned to stare at the newly stripped bodies of the dead which lay so white among the charred stalks of rye. “And start digging a grave, Harry. A big one.”

“Yes, sir.”

A soldier brought Sharpe a scorching mug of tea that he drank as he gazed into the valley. Smoke still drifted from the remains of the chateau of Hougoumont and from the farm of La Haye Sainte. The chateau had been burnt right out, leaving nothing but blackened roof beams above a scorched stone shell, while the corridors of La Haye Sainte were still choked with dead. At the foot of the slope beneath Sharpe a horse that had survived the night without its back legs sat on its gory haunches and whinnied pathetically for help.

The first soldiers went down from the ridge. Some went to bury the dead while others searched for loot. A man found a French sword knot, its gilt braid beautiful and intricate, and kept it as a gift for his girl. Another man picked a silver-handled shaving brush from a stiff pool of congealed blood. Flies buzzed above the dead. A redcoat carefully collected a pack of playing cards that had been strewn around the body of a French skirmisher. The pages of a blood-stained book riffled in the small wind. Pistol shots sounded flat as men put horses out of their long misery. A group of cavalry officers, their uniforms oddly bright in the dull dawn, cantered down from the ridge to search the slew of bodies that marked the ride of the British horse from glory to defeat.

The first civilians arrived from Brussels. They parked their carriages near the elm tree and walked in horrified silence into the valley where the working parties searched for the wounded. Crows were ripping at the white-skinned dead. A woman found her husband and vomited. A local priest, come to minister to the injured French, reeled hopelessly towards the road with a hand clapped to his mouth.

Simon Doggett’s work party came back to the battalion with two tubs of salt beef, a sack of bread, and a barrel of rum. He proudly told Sharpe that he had stolen the food from the cavalry. “So what happens now?” Doggett asked.