A shell plunged down to smash an howitzer’s wheel before bouncing up to explode harmlessly behind the ridge. The gunners quickly brought up a spare wheel and repaired the gun. The French began to mix more solid roundshot with the shells and one of the iron balls took the head off a staff officer, leaving his bloody body momentarily upright in its saddle before the terrified horse bolted and the headless body toppled to be dragged along by the left stirrup. The corpse was finally shaken loose and a group of redcoats scuttled forward to rifle the dead man’s pockets.
A shell landed on the ridge top, bounced, then exploded twenty yards to Sharpe’s left. A piece of red-hot casing, trailing smoke, smacked harmlessly against his thigh. “Go back,” Sharpe told Harper.
“I’m all right here, so I am.”
“You made your wife a promise! So bugger off!”
“Save your breath!” Harper stayed. The cannonade was heavy, but it was not overly dangerous. The French gunners were doubly hampered; first they were being blinded by their own smoke, and secondly their enemy was crouching behind the protection of the low ridge, and so most of their shells were exploding harmlessly if they exploded at all. Too many fuses were being extinguished by mud, yet the artillery was making a deal of noise, enough to terrify the Belgian troops who crouched under the sounds of hissing shells and banging explosions and thundering guns.
Sharpe moved to his right, going to a vantage point from where he could see the empty countryside on the army’s right flank. The move took Harper and himself away from the worst of the cannonade and to where another British staff officer was evidently posted on the same duty as Sharpe; to watch for a French outflanking march. The man, who was in the blue coat and fur Kolbak of the Hussars, nodded civilly to Sharpe, then consulted a notebook. “I made it ten of midday, did you?”
“Ten of midday?” Sharpe asked.
“When Bonaparte opened fire. It’s good to be accurate about these things.”
“Is it?”
“The Peer likes to be specific. I’m one of his family by the way.” By which the pleasant-faced young man meant he was one of the Duke’s aides. “My name is Witherspoon.”
“Sharpe. And this is my friend Mr Harper from Ireland.”
Captain Witherspoon nodded genially at Harper, then cocked an eye at the clouds. “I suspect it might well clear up. I detected a quite definite rise in the mercury this morning. I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Sharpe! You’re with the Young Frog, are you not?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Is he good for anything at all?”
Sharpe smiled at Captain Witherspoon’s disingenuous tone. “Not that I know of.”
The cavalryman laughed. “I was at Eton with him. He wasn’t any good there either, though he had a mighty fine opinion of himself. I remember him as being eternally dirty! But he liked the girls, and had a prolific fondness for wine.”
“What’s the time now?” Sharpe asked in apparently rude disregard of Witherspoon’s gossip.
Witherspoon hauled his watch from his fob and clicked open the lid. “Four minutes after midday, save a few seconds.”
“You’d best write down that the French are advancing, then.”
“They’re doing what? Oh, my soul! So they are! Thank you, my dear fellow! Good Lord, they advance, indeed they do!” He dashed a note into his book.
French skirmishers were swarming towards Hougoumont. They came in a loose mass of men; running, firing, running again. They were mostly among the trees, which gave cover from the foot of their ridge right up to the walls of the chateau, but some had overlapped onto the open flank where newly cut hay lay in sopping rows among the stubble. The skirmishers of the red-coated Cold-stream Guards were falling back fast, evidently ordered not to make a fight of it among the trees. With the redcoats were some Dutch and German troops, the Germans armed with long-barrelled hunting rifles. Sharpe saw at least two of the blue-coated Dutch-Belgian troops running towards the enemy, presumably seeking shelter.
The Guards skirmishers scrambled back into-the farm buildings or into the walled garden and orchard that lay alongside the chateau. The French skirmishers had advanced to the very edge of the wood and were hidden from Sharpe by the loom of the chateau’s buildings. “I’m going down there,” he told Harper, pointing to the field where a handful of the French skirmishers sheltered behind the rows of wet hay.