“Bugger this!” Harper picked up one of the French muskets and lunged with its bayonet to finish the Sergeant. The yard was a chaos of shouting men, but beyond the wild-faced French attackers Sharpe could see a disciplined group of Guardsmen struggling to close the huge gates. God alone knew how the small group of Coldstreamers had reached the gates, but they had and, with the strength of desperation, they were now forcing the two heavy doors shut against a renewed rush of enemy infantry. By a miracle none of the Frenchmen already inside the chateau’s yard saw what was happening behind them. A Coldstreamer sergeant had retrieved the broken bar and dropped it into the brackets as, at last, the doors were rammed shut. Most of the Guardsmen pushing on the gates had been officers who now turned with drawn swords to take the intruders from the rear.
“Now kill the bastards!” A voice with a Scots accent shouted the command. “Kill them all!”
A French drummer boy ran screaming past Sharpe. A French corporal followed, saw the Rifleman, and turned to fire his musket. The flint fell on an empty pan. The man’s eyes widened with fear, Sharpe lunged, the man tried to pull the blade from his ribs, but Sharpe drove it forwards, twisting it, forcing the man down to the cobbles where he kicked the sword free before slamming the blade back into the Frenchman’s throat. The armourer who had honed Sharpe’s blade had done a good job, for the weapon was wickedly sharp, and it needed to be for none of the men who clawed and stabbed and struggled in the courtyard had been given time to reload their muskets, so this fight would now have to be done with steel alone. The importance of Hougoumont gave the fight an extra and brutal bitterness, for every man knew that whoever held the chateau held the western flank of the battlefield. The Coldstreamers fought to rescue a battle, while the French under their giant Lieutenant fought for immortal glory.
But their prospect of glory was fading. The closing of the gate had cut the French off from aid, so now, trapped on the yard’s cobbles, they retreated into a rally square about the huge Lieutenant who stood with a bloody axe above the bodies of four Guardsmen. Outside the chateau, and giving the fight the desperation of urgency, volleys of French musket-fire witnessed that the building’s perimeter was again under heavy assault.
“Finish them off!” a British officer ordered. The Guardsmen in the yard were desperately needed to defend the chateau’s outer walls so there would be no time now for delicacies like trying to persuade the huge Lieutenant to surrender.
Guardsmen tore into the group of Frenchmen. A redcoat went down beneath a French bayonet, then the Coldstreamers seemed to swarm over the blue-coated enemy. An elegant officer lunged with his sword, kicked a Frenchman in the crutch, then lunged again. The yard echoed with the clang and scrape of blades, the scuff of boots on cobbles, and the screams of men slashed or pierced by blades. Patrick Harper, mindless of the promise made to his wife, shouted a Gaelic war cry as he stabbed his captured bayonet forward in the short savage lunges of a professional soldier. One of the Guards’ officers in the front rank of the fight was a colonel; the expensive gold lace of his uniform was sheeted with blood as he stamped his foot forward to lunge his sword with a clinical exactitude.
The huge Lieutenant with the axe saw the Coldstreamer Colonel and shouted at his men to make way. He drove a path through them, the axe glittering above the press of men, then Sharpe saw the axe crash down. The Colonel had stepped safely back, now he lunged. The Lieutenant brushed the sword thrust aside with his free hand as though the blade was no more dangerous than a riding crop. He grunted as he began a backswing with the axe calculated to split the Colonel up from the groin to the breastbone, then gasped as a pain exploded behind his knee. Sharpe had rammed his sword forward to hamstring the Frenchman’s leg, now he kicked at the crippling wound to topple the huge man sideways. The Lieutenant’s scarred face snarled as he tried to swing the huge axe round at his new attacker, but Sharpe was slicing the sword forward again, this time to split the grimacing face into a bloody and broken mask. The Colonel’s sword lunged, taking the Lieutenant in the ribs. Still the Frenchman would not give up. The axe rang on the ground as he dragged the blade forward, then two Guardsmen pushed past the Colonel to stab their bayonets hard down. The huge body jerked for a few seconds, then was still.