Joseph understood and laughed. `You’re that hopeful?’
Jourdan was that hopeful. He had won, he knew it, and he could taste the victory already.
The guns made the silver cutlery quiver on the white linen in Vitoria’s grandest hotel. The waiters had laid one hundred and fifty places in the dining room. The bottles of wine, standing in thick groups on all the tables, clinked together and sounded like a thousand small bells.
Flowers had been cut and were now being put on the high table. That was where King Joseph would sit for this feast of victory ordered by the French. A tricolour was hung from the ceiling. The crystal chandeliers vibrated with the sound of the cannon. The whole great room was filled with clinking, ringing, shaking things.
The hotel’s owner looked at the room and knew his men had done well. He wrung his hands. He should have dared ask the French to pay for this feast in advance. They had ordered the best Medoc, burgundy and champagne, and the kitchens were preparing five bullocks, two score sheep, two hundred partridges, and a hundred chickens. He groaned. The patriot in him prayed for a British victory, but the businessman feared that the British might not pay for what their enemy had ordered. He listened to the guns and, his purse more important than his pride, prayed that they would win the day.
The Marquess of Wellington, sitting his horse on the lower slopes of the western hills, watched the French gun line flame and smoke and shatter his men in the killing ground. None of Wellington’s staff officers spoke to him. The whole sky seemed to vibrate with the great blows of the guns.
Staff officers spurred on the slope beneath him. To a casual eye the western hill and the defile seemed like chaos. Wounded men dragged themselves towards surgeons, while other men waited for battle. To someone who had never seen a battle, there seemed no order in the casual disposition of men. They might have hoped for a plan to help them understand.
There was a plan. Jourdan planned to stop the attack with his guns, and Wellington planned to grip those guns in a fist and squeeze.
The English General thought of his plan like a left hand placed palm downwards on the map.
The thumb was the attack on the heights.
The index finger was the troops who had advanced beneath the heights into the guns’ thunder, the troops who had been stopped by the French artillery, the troops who suffered minute by horrid minute.
The thumb and index finger were supposed to do no more than pin the enemy’s attention, to draw his reserves across to the south and west, and, when that was done, the remaining three fingers would curl in from the north.
But where were they? The men on the plain were dying because the left hand columns were late and Wellington, who hated to see men die unnecessarily, would not even allow himself to be consoled by the fact that the longer he waited, the more his enemy would be convinced that the main attack was coming from the west.
He rode a small way up the slope and stared northwards. The land seemed empty. He clicked his fingers. An aide spurred forward.
The General turned. `Hurry them!’
`My Lord.’
There was no need to explain who should be hurried. There should be three columns coming from the northern hills, columns that would trample the crops over the river, carry the bridges, and fall on the French right. Wellington wondered why in God’s name the French had left the bridges intact. His cavalry scouts had reported no signs of powder ready to blow the arches sky high. It made no sense. The General had feared that his northern attacks would have to wade the fords, their bodies drifting downstream in bloodied water, but the French had left the bridges open.
Yet the three columns which, like fingers, would squeeze the life from the French army, had not appeared and their lateness meant that the French gans were taking a heavy toll on the plain. The fingers of Wellington’s right hand drummed on the pommel of his saddle. He waited, while beneath him the guns shivered the warm morning.