And then a trumpet called.
Lord John Rossendale, riding close to the Earl of Uxbridge, had watched the advance of the columns in sheer disbelief. He had heard of such attacks, and he had listened to men describe a French column, yet nothing had prepared Lord John for the way such an attack filled a landscape, or how its music made the skin crawl and stretched the nerves, or how irresistible such an assault seemed; as though each column was not made up of individual men, but instead was some ponderously articulated beast that crawled out of nightmare to ooze across the earth.
Yet, even as the columns filled him with dread, he marvelled at the calm of the men with whom he rode. The calmness, Lord John observed, came from the Duke, to whom men were irresistibly attracted as though his confidence would somehow communicate by proximity. The Duke watched the approaching columns with a keen eye, but still had time to laugh at some jest made by Alava, the Spanish commissioner. The only time Rossendale saw the Duke frown was when a brief shower of rain, gone almost as soon as it arrived, made him shake out his cloak and drape it round his shoulders. “I cannot bear a drenching, nor will I abide umbrellas,” he spoke to Alava in French.
“You could have a canopy held by four stout men?” Alava, an old and valued friend from the Duke’s Spanish battles, suggested. “Like some Mohammetan potentate?”
The Duke gave his odd horse-neigh of a laugh. “That would serve very well! I like that notion! A Mohammetan canopy, eh?”
“And a harem, why not?”
“Why not, indeed?” The Duke gently drummed his fingers on the small writing desk that was built onto the pommel of his saddle. To Lord John the gesture did not seem to be a nervous reaction, but rather to express the Duke’s impatience at the lumbering French columns. By now the enemy skirmishers were close enough to annoy the Duke’s party. Their bullets whiplashed and hummed about the horsemen. Two of the Duke’s aides were hit; one fatally just two paces to the Duke’s left. The Duke gave the dead man a glance, then frowned towards the French galloper guns. “They’ll never do a damn thing with those light cannon,” he complained, as though his enemy’s inefficiency offended him, then, switching into French, he asked Alava whether he did not agree that the French were deploying more skirmishers than usual.
“Definitely more,” Alava confirmed, but with no more excitement in his voice than if he was sharing a day’s rough shooting with the Duke.
The Dutch-Belgians ran, which caused a compression of the Duke’s lips, but then, knowing what could and could not be mended, he simply ordered a British battalion into the gap. He rode further to his left, cantering his horse behind the waiting redcoats. The Earl of Uxbridge and his staff followed. The Duke frowned again as the French columns began to unfold into line, but the unexpected manoeuvre did not seem to rattle him. “Now’s your time!” the Duke called to the nearest redcoat battalion.
The redcoats stood and the volleys began. Lord John, trailing with his master behind the Duke, saw how the French attempt to form line was never completed because of the destructive British fire. The French flanks would not wheel up the slope into the face of the musket volleys, so instead the whole enemy mass edged uphill in neither line nor column, but in a half-way formation instead. To Lord John’s untutored eye, and despite the momentary French confusion, it still looked like a frighteningly unequal battle; a mass of Frenchmen poised just beneath the thin and fragile line of redcoats. The mass was also still advancing. Its leading ranks were being bled and beaten by the flail of the British volleys, but still the French pressed uphill, stepping over their dead, and shouting their war cry. Worse, the Cuirassiers who had just destroyed the Red Germans now rode west of the high road to escape the cannon-fire and threatened to attack the thin British line.,
The Duke had seen it all, and understood it all. He turned to Uxbridge. “Your Heavies are ready, Uxbridge?”