“Fire!” The Guards Major snapped the command, a blast of smoke blotted out the charging Lancers so that the only evidence of their existence was a terrible high-pitched scream of either man or horse, and as the smoke cleared Sharpe saw only the butchered horses and a man crawling away, and a lance shaft quivering with its point buried in the mud and a horse shaking as it tried to stand.
“Platoon fire!” the Guards Colonel called.
“Aim for the horses!” A sergeant strolled behind the square’s face. “Aim for the horses!”
“Number One Platoon!” another major shouted. “Fire!”
Now the platoons in the faces of the square fired one after another so that the blasts of smoke and flame seemed to be driven like the hand of a clock. Each volley thickened the smoke about the square’s faces so that the compass of the battle shrank to the few yards visible through the choking white cloud. The other squares were invisible, hidden behind their own banks of fog. Sharpe could hear their volleys, and hear a piper playing some skirling weird music somewhere to the west. The stream of horsemen galloped through the smoke, and sometimes a brave man would hurl himself at the Guards’ square in a suicidal attempt to force victory out of stalemate. A Lancer tried to ride obliquely at a square’s flank, but a corporal shot him down three paces before his blade would have struck home. Two young Guards Lieutenants competed with their pistols, wagering a month’s pay on who could kill more Frenchmen. A sergeant spotted a Guardsman surreptitiously discarding part of the powder from his cartridge to lessen the pain of the musket’s recoil and the Sergeant struck the man with his cane and promised him real punishment when the battle was over.
Still the horsemen came, the uniforms changing as the rear ranks of the charge followed in the bloody path of the Cuirassiers and Lancers. Carabiniers and Dragoons raced madly through the corridors of slaughter. The attacking streams divided and subdivided as they sought safer passages between the squares.
“Aim at the horses!” the Guards Major called to his men. “Aim at the horses!”
Harper had his rifle at his shoulder. He tracked a French officer’s horse, fired, and watched man and beast tumble down. A horse was an easier target to hit, and a wounded or dead horse removed a cavalryman just as effectively as shooting the man.
“Fire!” Another frontal volley. A horse reared in the smoke between two of the abandoned cannon. Its rider fell backwards and his helmet struck a gun-wheel with a sickening crack. A dying horse drummed the turf with its hooves. An unhorsed Cuirassier scrabbled at his buckles to remove the weight of his armour. Another Cuirassier, fallen on his back, jerked to twist his huge weight of steel out of the cloying mud. A musket bullet spurted mud beside the struggling man. “Leave those lobsters alone!” the Guards Major shouted. “They’re out of it! Go for the live `uns!”
Sharpe watched a cavalryman beating impotently at a captured gun with his sword. The French, like the British cavalry earlier, had brought no implements to disable the guns. A French Hussar officer fired a pistol at a flank of the Guards’ square and was hit by a full platoon’s volley in revenge.
“Cease fire! Front ranks reload!” The charge had streamed clear past these foremost squares; all except for a few timid horsemen who were reluctant to risk the fatal corridors and had therefore hung back at the ridge’s crest. The bravest and luckiest horsemen had already succeeded in riding clean right through the staggered squares, only to be faced by a line of British and Dutch cavalry. The French troopers, scattered and broken, knew they would be cut down by the waiting sabres, so turned to race back towards the safety of the valley. Like a great wave the cavalry had broken and divided about the squares, now it must ebb back before reforming. The smoke began to shred and clear, revealing that the other squares were unbroken. Dead men and horses littered the spaces between the squares. An unhorsed Lancer, reeling with concussion or weakness, staggered like a drunk towards the ridge crest.