“He’s a prince,” Rebecque said in uncomfortable reproof. “You should remember that, Sharpe.”
“At best, Rebecque, he might make a half-decent lieutenant, and I even doubt that.”
Rebecque did not respond. He just turned away and stared through tearful eyes at the western half of the valley that was a mangled ruin of dead infantry, dead cavalrymen and dead horses beneath the skeins of cannon smoke. He sneezed again, then cursed the hay fever.
“Rebecque! Did you see it? Wasn’t it glorious?” The Prince spurred his horse from the knot of men who marked Wellington’s position at the elm tree. “We should have been there, Rebecque! My God, but the only place for honour is in the cavalry!”
“Yes, sir.” Rebecque, still unnaturally subdued, did his best to match his monarch’s high spirits.
“They took two Eagles! Two Eagles!” The Prince clapped his hands. “Two! They’ve brought one to show the Duke. Have you ever seen one close up, Rebecque? They’re not gold at all, just tricked out to look like gold. They’re just a shabby French trick, nothing else!” The Prince noticed Sharpe’s presence for the first time and generously included the Englishman in his excitement. “You should go and take a look, Sharpe. It’s not every day you see an Eagle!”
“Sergeant Harper and I once captured an Eagle,” Sharpe’s voice was filled with an unmistakable loathing. “It was five years ago when you were still at school.”
The Prince’s happy face changed as though someone had just struck him. Rebecque, startled by Sharpe’s egregious rudeness, tried to drive his horse between the Rifleman and the Prince, but the Prince would have none of his Chief of Staff’s tact. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked Sharpe instead. “I told you to stay in Hougoumont.”
“They don’t need me there.”
“Sir!” The Prince shouted the word, demanding that Sharpe use the honorific. The other staff officers, Doggett among them, backed away from the royal anger.
“They don’t need me there,” Sharpe said stubbornly, then he could no longer resist his dislike and derision of the Prince. “The men at Hougoumont are proper soldiers. They don’t need me to teach them how to unbutton their breeches before they piss.”
“Sharpe!” Rebecque yelped helplessly.
“So what happened to them?” Sharpe pointed at the Red Germans but looked at the Prince.
“Rebecque! Arrest him!” the Prince screamed at his Chief of Staff. “Arrest him! And his man. What the hell are you doing here anyway?” The question was screamed at Harper, who gazed placidly back at the Prince without bothering to offer any answer.
“Sir – , Rebecque knew he had neither the authority nor the cause to make any arrests, but the Prince did not want to listen to any reasoned explanations.
“Arrest him!”
Sharpe raised two fingers into the Prince’s face, added the appropriate words, and turned his horse away.
The Prince screamed at the Riflemen to come back, but suddenly the French cannons, which had paused while the British cavalry were being slaughtered in the valley, opened fire again, and it seemed to Sharpe as though every gun on the French ridge fired at the same instant, making a clap of doom fit to mark the world’s ending and even sufficient to divert a prince’s outrage.
The shells and roundshot raged at the British ridge. Explosions and fountains of earth shook the whole line. The noise was suddenly deafening; a melding of cannon-fire into one long thunderous roll that hammered at the sky. The Prince’s staff instinctively ducked. A gunner officer, not ten paces from where Sharpe was cantering away from the Prince, disappeared in an explosion of blood as a twelve-pound ball struck him clean in the belly. One of his guns, struck full on the muzzle, bucked backwards into the deep wheel ruts made by its own recoil. The French were serving their guns with a frenetic and desperate speed.
Which could only mean one thing.
Another assault was coming.
It was two minutes past three, and the Prussians had not come.
Belgian soldiers, fugitives from the battle, streamed into Brussels. This was not their war; they had no allegiance to a Dutch Stadt-holder made King of the French-speaking province of Belgium, nor did they have any love for the British infantry that had jeered their departure.