“Sir?”
“There’s an officer on your right. A tall bugger with a red moustache. I want him dead or I’ll blame you for it! Company!” He paused a second. “Fire!”
The smaller volley did more damage, though whether the moustached officer was shot, Sharpe could not tell. He shouted at the men to retire to battalion. The manoeuvre had gained a few moments’ respite, nothing more, but it was better to hit back than simply endure the galling punishment of the enemy skirmishers.
Sharpe lingered at the crest a few more seconds. It was not bravado, but rather curiosity because, five hundred paces to his left, he could just see two red-coated infantry battalions of the King’s German Legion advancing in column. They marched towards La Haye Sainte with their colours flying, presumably to drive away the French infantry who clustered about the farm.
He would have liked to have watched longer, but the enemy was creeping back towards the crest, and so Sharpe turned and walked back to the battalion. “Thank you for the privilege, Colonel!” he shouted to Ford.
Ford said nothing. He was in no mood to appreciate Sharpe’s tact, instead he felt slighted and diminished by the Rifleman’s competence. Ford knew that he should have given the orders, and that he should have taken the battalion forward, but his bowels had turned to water and his mind was a haze of fear and confusion. He had fought briefly in southern France, but he had never seen a horror like this; a battlefield where men were dying by the minute, where his battalion shrank as the files closed over the gaps left by the dead, and where it seemed that every man must die before the field’s appetite for blood was slaked. Ford snatched off his fouled spectacles and scrubbed their lenses on a corner of his saddle-cloth. The white smoke and cannon’s glare melded into a smear of horror before his eyes. He wished it would end, he just wished it would end. He no longer cared if it ended in victory or defeat, he just wanted it to end.
But the Emperor had only just started to fight.
The Duke of Wellington no longer troubled himself about the Prince of Orange. At the battle’s commencement, when some niceties of polite usage persisted, the Duke had taken care to inform the Prince of any orders involving those troops nominally under the Prince’s command, but now in the desperate moments of pure survival the Duke simply ignored the Young Frog.
Which did not mean that the Prince considered himself redundant. On the contrary, he saw his own genius as the allies’ sole hope of victory and was prepared to use the last shreds of his authority to achieve it. Which meant La Haye Sainte must be saved, and to save it the Prince ordered the remnants of the and Infantry Brigade of the King’s German Legion to attack the besieging French.
Colonel Christian Ompteda, the brigade commander, formed his two battalions into close column of companies, ordered them to fix bayonets, and then to advance into the suffocating mix of heated air and bitter smoke that filled the valley. The German objective was the field to the west of La Haye Sainte where the French skirmishers were pressing close and thick on the beleaguered farm.
The Germans reached the crest and were about to march down on the French when the Prince of Orange galloped to intercept them. “In line!” the Prince shouted. “In line! You must overlap them! I insist you advance in line!”
Colonel Ompteda, his battalions halted on the very edge of the valley and under fire from the French guns, protested that there were enemy cavalry patrolling the valley floor. The Prince turned sarcastic eyes towards the smoke. “I see no cavalry.”
“Your Highness, I must insist that – ,
,You cannot insist! You will form line! Damn you!” The Prince was ebullient, feeding off the crash and hammer of the guns. He felt himself born to this heated chaos of battle. He did not give a fig that Ompteda was a man who had spent a lifetime soldiering; the Prince had the passionate certainty of his convictions and not even his experiences with Halkett’s brigade at Quartre Bras nor the massacre of the Red Germans would sway him. “I order you into line! Or do you wish me to appoint another brigade commander?” he shouted into the Colonel’s face.