The Emperor had stirred himself, and now the British would learn just how he could fight.
All along the British line the flail of the cannon-fire struck and killed. The British battalions were ordered to lie down, but the French gunners had the range to perfection now and their round-shot skimmed the ridge to plough bloody furrows through the prone ranks. British guns were shattered; their barrels blasted off carriages and their wheels splintered. Shells exploded on the ridge to add their burden of smoke to the thickening air. Burning ammunition wagons added their stench to the sour smell of blood.
This was how an emperor fought. He would kill and kill and kill with his guns, and when the British were screaming to be released from the torrent of death he would send their quietus in the hands of his immortals.
The air quivered with the impact of the guns. Sharpe, abandon-ing his mare into Harper’s care, walked forward from the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers as far as the ridge’s crest where the percussion of the heavy French artillery was like a succession of physical punches in the belly. The roundshot plucked at the thick skeins of smoke, grazed the ridge to fleck the sky with mud, then screamed and whined and hummed and crashed home behind him. In twenty-two years Sharpe had never known a cannonade like it, nor had he ever breathed air so heated and thickened by smoke and flame that to stand at the valley’s rim was like facing the open door of some gigantic and red-hot kiln. The rye crop on the crest, where it had not been obliterated into quagmire, had been trampled to the consistency of the woven mats he remembered from India.
A shell traced its trail of smoke over his head. A roundshot ricocheted up from the ridge a dozen yards to his left. To his right, where the cavalry had advanced to their vain attacks, the slope was a horror of dead horses and men. A yellow dog dragged a length of gut from a corpse, though whether it was of man or beast Sharpe could not tell.
Beyond the slaughtered cavalry Sharpe could see the smoke illuminated by the flaring glow made by the burning chateau of Hougoumont. He could see nothing in the smoke to his left. Behind Sharpe the red-coated battalions had been deployed into line again, but all were lying flat so that for a strange moment he had the impression that he was the only man left alive on all the battlefield.
Then, in the valley’s smoke in front of him, he saw more live men; thousands of live men, skirmishers, Frenchmen, a swarm of Voltigeurs running forward in loose order and Sharpe knew that added to the ordeal of cannon-fire the battalions must now endure an onslaught of musketry. He turned and shouted a warning. “Skirmishers!”
The British light companies ran forward to take their places on the forward slope, but they were horribly outnumbered. Peter d’Alembord persuaded Ford to release a second company, and sent Harry Price’s men to face the Voltigeurs. Price had been a skirmisher himself once, and understood what was needed, but not all the skirmishers in Wellington’s army could have defeated such an overwhelming number of French Voltigeurs. Behind the French skirmishers were the remnants of their cavalry who had been advanced to check any British cavalry charge that might threaten the loose formation of Voltigeurs.
Peter d’Alembord had brought the two companies forward himself and, once they were deployed, he crossed to Sharpe’s side. The two officers strolled half-way down the forward slope, then stopped to stare at the vast spread of enemy troops. “Not a very encouraging sight,” d’Alembord said quietly.
The first muskets spat, yet for every British shot, two or three French muskets replied. To Sharpe’s left some Riflemen held up the French advance for a few moments, but the French overwhelmed them with musketry and the Greenjackets were forced back, leaving three men dead in the mud.
D’Alembord’s men were similarly suffering. “We’re going to have to let them take the slope!” he said to Sharpe, instinctively seeking the Rifleman’s approval.
“You haven’t much choice, Peter.” Sharpe was on one knee, his rifle at his shoulder. He fired at a French sergeant, but the muzzle smoke prevented him from seeing whether the bullet hit. He began to reload. A hundred yards to his right a line of Frenchmen was already near the ridge’s crest. Peter d’Alembord’s two companies were temporarily holding the skirmishers in their front, but they would soon be outflanked, and even as Sharpe rammed his next bullet home he saw a rush of blue-uniformed men force back a section of Harry Price’s company. Bullets were hissing and thrumming near Sharpe, presumably attracted by the sight of the two officers so close together.