“More ammunition? Can you find a wagon of the stuff and have it sent down?”
“With pleasure.” Sharpe was glad to have a proper job to do.
MacDpnneli looked around the courtyard and grimaced at the remnants of the massacre. “I think we can hold here, so long as we’ve got powder. Oh good! She’s alive.” He had spotted the cat carrying the last of her kittens across the slaughteryard. The captured French drummer boy, his face stained with tears, held one hand over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the bodies which were being searched for plunder by the victorious Guardsmen. The boy’s instrument was lying smashed beside the chapel door, though he still had his drumsticks stuffed into his belt. “Cheer up, lad!” MacDonnell spoke to the boy in colloquial and genial French. “We gave up eating captured drummer boys last year.”
The boy burst into tears again. A big Coldstreamer sergeant with a Welsh accent barked at his men to start clearing the enemy bodies away. “Pile the buggers by the wall there. Look lively now!”
Sharpe and Harper retrieved their horses which had miraculously survived the fighting in the courtyard unhurt. The gate was swung open and the Riflemen rode to find the cartridges that would hold the chateau firm.
While on the far ridge the Emperor was turning his eyes away from Hougoumont. He was looking towards the British left, to the enticing and empty gentle slope east of the high road. He assumed that the Sepoy General would already have sent his reserves to help the beleaguered garrison at Hougoumont, so now the master of war would launch a thunderbolt on the British left. Marshal d’Erlon’s corps, unblooded so far in the brief campaign, could now have the honour of winning it. And when the corps had smashed through the British line, the Emperor would unleash his cavalry, fresh and eager, to harry the fleeing enemy into offal.
It was half-past one. The day was becoming warmer, even hot, so that the thick woollen uniforms were at last drying out. The clouds were thinning and errant patches of sun illuminated the smoke which drifted across the valley from the French guns, but in the eastern fields, where the Prussians were supposed to be arriving, the intermittent sunlight shone on nothing. Gneisenau had done his work well, and the British were alone.
CHAPTER 15
The French gun-fire suddenly ceased. The smoke from the hot gun muzzles drifted in dirty skeining clumps above the rye and wheat. Muskets still fired at Hougoumont, and the howitzers crashed their shells over the chateau to explode in the wood beyond, but without the French cannon-fire something that seemed very like silence filled the battlefield with foreboding.
Then a slight wind rippled the crops in the valley and swirled the smoke away from the French crest to reveal that men in blue coats, their white crossbelts bright, were marching down the far slope. The first French infantry were advancing to attack the British ridge. They came in four great columns accompanied by eight-pounder galloper guns drawn by horse teams.
Each column was two hundred men broad; four wide phalanxes that marched stolidly down the slope of the French ridge to leave crushed paths of rye or wheat in their trail. A loose mass of skirmishers ran ahead of each formation. The thousands of trampling boots were given their rhythm by the drummers hidden deep inside each column; the drummer boys were beating the pas de charge, the old heartbeat of the French Empire that had driven the Emperor’s infantry beyond the Vistula and down to the plains beyond Madrid. The massed drums sent a shiver through the valley. The veterans on the British ridge had heard it before, but for most of Wellington’s men it was a new and sinister sound,
The four columns crossed the eastern half of the valley. The column which attacked in the valley’s centre advanced up the high road and threatened to envelop the farm of La Haye Sainte. A watery sun gleamed faintly on the fixed bayonets of the column’s front rank. The Riflemen in the sandpit opposite the farm were dropping the first French skirmishers who had spread out across the rye fields. Behind the skirmishers the boots of the column trampled the crop, then the drummers paused in unison to let the whole column shout its battle cry, ” Vive I’Empereur!”