“You claim there’s a more tedious game than cricket?” D’Alembord did not want to think about fuses or shells.
Price nodded. “Have you ever seen men play golf?”
D’Alembord shook his head. Off to his left he could see French skirmishers advancing among the Hanoverian dead towards La Haye Sainte. The distinctive sound of rifle-fire betrayed that the farm’s garrison had seen the danger, then the French muskets began to add their own smoke to the battle’s fog. “I’ve never seen golf being played,” d’Alembord said. The effort of controlling his fear made his voice sound very stilted, like a man rehearsing a strange language. “It’s a Scottish game, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bloody weird Scottish game.” Price blinked and swallowed as a roundshot went foully close, fanning both men with the wind of its passing. “You hit a small ball with a bent stick until you get it near a rabbit hole. Then you tap it into the hole, fish it out, and hit it towards another hole.”
D’Alembord looked at his friend who was keeping a very straight face. “You’re inventing this, Harry. You’re making it up just to make me feel better.”
Harry Price shook his head. “God’s honour, Peter. I might not have mastered the finer points of the game, but I saw a man with a beard playing it near Troon.”
D’Alembord started to laugh. He did not quite know why it was so funny, but something about Harry’s solemnity made him laugh. For a few seconds his laughter rang loud across the battalion, then a shell cracked apart with what seemed unusual violence, and Sergeant Huckfield was shouting at his men to stay down. D’Alembord turned and saw three of his old light company men had been turned into blood-stained rag dolls. “What were you doing in Troon, for God’s sake?”
“I have a widowed aunt who lives there, the childless relict of a lawyer. Her will is not yet decided and the lawyer’s fortune was far from despicable. I went to persuade her that I am a godly, sober and deserving heir.”
D’Alembord grinned. “She doesn’t know you’re a lazy, drunken rogue, Harry?”
“I read her the psalms every night,” Price said with a very fragile dignity.
A thudding of hooves turned d’Alembord round to see a staff officer galloping along the ridge crest. The man slowed his horse as he neared the two officers. “You’re to pull back! One hundred yards, no more!” The man spurred on and shouted the order over the prone battalion to Colonel Ford. “One hundred yards, Colonel! Back one hundred yards! Lie down there!”
D’Alembord faced the battalion. Far in the rear a shell had exploded an ammunition wagon that now burned to send a plume of boiling smoke up to the low clouds. Colonel Ford was standing in his stirrups, shouting his orders over the din of shells and guns. The Sergeants rousted the men to their feet and ordered them to pace back from the crest. The men, glad to be retreating from the cannonade, went at the double, leaving their bloodied dead behind.
“We walk, I think.” D’Alembord heard a shakiness in his voice, and tried again. “We definitely walk, Harry. We don’t run.”
“I can’t run in these spurs.” Price admitted. “I suppose the thing about spurs is that you need a horse to go with them.”
The small retreat took the leading companies away from the lip of the ridge onto the hidden reverse slope, yet even so, and even lying flat in the trampled corn, the shells and roundshot still found their marks. The wounded limped to the rear, going to the forest’s edge where the surgeons waited. Some men, unable to walk, were carried by the bandsmen. A few shrunken bands still played, but their music was overwhelmed by the hammering of the massive bombardment. More ammunition wagons were struck, their fire and smoke thickening until the forest’s edge looked like a giant crucible in which the flames spat and flared. Frightened horses, cut from the traces of the burning wagons, galloped in panic through the wounded who limped and crawled to the surgeons.
On the southern ridge the French general officers sought vantage points from where their guns’ smoke did not obscure the view and from where they could search the British lines for clues to the effectiveness of their bombardment.