A man turned and saw the bared teeth of a horse. He heard a sword hissing above the sound of the trumpet. The Rifleman screamed.
Then came chaos and slaughter.
The horsemen split the greenjackets apart then wheeled to the killing. The great swords chopped and speared. The new Lieutenant had a glimpse of a man with pigtails swinging beneath his helmet’s rim. He twisted aside and felt the wind of the Dragoon’s sword on his face. Another horseman rode at him, but he swung his rifle by its muzzle to crack the horse over the mouth. The horse screamed, reared, and the Lieutenant ran on. He was shouting for men to close on him, but the greenjackets were scattered and running for their lives. The Battalion’s mule bolted eastwards and Cooper, stubbornly trying to save his belongings which were strapped to the beast’s panniers, was killed by a sword stroke.
Major Dunnett was ridden down to the turf. A seventeen-year-old Lieutenant was caught by two Dragoons. The first blinded him with a slashing backstroke, the second stabbed into his chest. Still the horsemen came. Their horses stank with saddlesores because they had been ridden too hard, but they had been trained to this work. A Rifleman’s cheek Was flensed from his face and his mouth bubbled with blood and saliva. The French grunted as they hacked. This was a cavalryman’s paradise; broken infantry and firm ground.
The new Lieutenant still shouted as he climbed. “Rifles! To me! To me! To me!” The chasseur must have heard him, for he turned his big black horse and spurred towards the Englishman.
The Lieutenant saw him coming, slung his empty rifle, and drew his sabre. “Come on, you bastard!”
The chasseur held his own sabre in his right hand and, to make his killing cut easy, directed his horse to the left of the Rifleman. The Lieutenant waited to swing his curved blade at the horse’s mouth. The cut would stop its charge dead, making it rear and twist away. He had seen off more horsemen than he could remember with such a stroke. The skill lay in the timing, and the Lieutenant hoped that the horse’s panicked evasion would shake the rider loose. He wanted that clever chasseur dead.
A touch of the Frenchman’s spurs seemed to make the horse lunge forward for the killing stroke and the Lieutenant swung his sabre and saw he had been fooled. The horse checked and swerved in a manoeuvre which spoke of hours of patient training. The sabre hissed in empty space. The chasseur was not right-handed but left, and he had changed hands as his horse broke to the right. His blade glittered as it swept down, aimed at the Rifleman’s neck.
The Lieutenant had been fooled. He had swung early and into nothing, and he was off balance. The chasseur, knowing this Englishman was dead, was planning his next kill even before his sabre stroke went home. He had killed more men than he could remember with this simple trick. Now he would add a Rifle officer to all the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and Spaniards who had not been skilful enough.
But the chasseur’s sabre did not cut home. With a speed that was astonishing, the Rifleman managed to recover his blade into the parry. The sabres met with a clash that jarred both men’s arms. The Lieutenant’s four-guinea blade shattered, but not before it had taken the force from the Frenchman’s slashing cut.
The momentum of the chasseur’s horse took him past the Englishman. The Frenchman turned back, astonished by the parry, and saw him turning to run uphill. For a second he was tempted to follow, but there were other, easier, targets down the hill. He spurred away.
The Lieutenant threw away his broken sabre and scrambled towards the low cloud. “Rifles! Rifles!” Men heard and closed on him. They scrambled uphill together and made a large enough group to deter the enemy. The Dragoons went for individuals, the men most easily killed, and they took pleasure in thus avenging all the horsemen who had been put down by rifle bullets, all the Frenchmen who had jerked and bled their lives away on the long pursuit, and all the jeers that the Riflemen had sent through the biting air in the last bitter weeks.