The Prince did not look at the Germans nor at the exultant French. Instead he stared imperiously towards the east. “It isn’t my fault if men won’t fight properly!”
None of the staff answered. Not even Winckler was minded to soften the disaster with flattery.
“We gave the garrison a breathing space, did we not?” The Prince gestured at La Haye Sainte that was once more ringed with smoke, but again no one answered and the Prince, who believed he deserved loyalty from his military family, turned furiously on his staff. “The Germans should have formed square! It wasn’t my fault!” He looked from man to man, demanding agreement, but only Simon Doggett was brave enough to meet the Prince’s petulant and bulging eyes.
“You’re nothing but a silk stocking full of shit,” Doggett said very clearly, and utterly astonished himself by so repeating Patrick Harper’s scornful verdict on the Prince.
There was an appalled silence. The Prince gaped. Rebecque, not quite sure whether he had heard correctly, opened his mouth to protest, but could not find adequate words.
Doggett knew he had just seconds to keep the initiative. He tugged at his horse’s reins. “You’re a bloody murderer!” he said to the Prince, then slashed back his spurs and galloped away. In a few seconds the smoke hid him.
The Prince stared after him. Rebecque hastened to assure His Highness that Doggett’s wits had clearly been loosened by the stress of battle. The Prince nodded acceptance of the facile explanation, then turned furiously on his staff again. “I’m surrounded by incompetents! That bloody man should have formed square! Is it my fault if a damned German doesn’t know his job?” The Prince’s indignation and anger spilled out in furious passion. “Is it my fault that the French are winning? Is it?”
And in that, at least, the Prince spoke true. The French, at last, were winning the battle.
CHAPTER 19
French victory became a virtual certainty when La Haye Sainte fell. The farm’s German defenders ran out of rifle ammunition and the French attackers tore down the barricaded doors and flooded into the farm buildings. For a time they were held off”by bayonets and swords as the defenders fought furiously in the corridors and stables. The Germans made barricades of their own and the French dead, then rammed their sword-bayonets over the piled bodies, and for a time it seemed as if their steel and fury might yet hold the farm, but then the French musket volleys tore into the Riflemen and the French musket wadding set fire to the stable straw, and the defenders, choking and decimated, were forced out.
Those Riflemen who escaped from La Haye Sainte ran up the ridge’s slope as the victorious French swarmed into the farm buildings. The Riflemen of the 95th had long been driven from the adjacent sandpit, so now the centre bastion of the Duke’s line was gone. The French brought cannon into the farm’s kitchen garden and, at perilously short range, opened fire on the ridge. Voltigeurs, given a new territory to exploit, spread up the forward slope to open a killing fire on the troops nearest to the elm tree.
An immediate counter-attack could have recaptured the farm while the French hold on its buildings was still new and tenuous, but the Duke had no reserves left. Every man who could fight in the Duke’s army was now committed to defend the ridge, while the rest of his troops had either fled, were wounded, or were dead. What was left of the Duke’s army was a thin line of men stretched along a blood-soaked ridge. The line was two ranks deep, no more, and in places the ridge seemed empty where the battalions had been forced to shrink into four ranks as a precaution against the cavalry that still lurked in the smoke that drifted at the slope’s foot.
The French were winning.
The Duke, hardly a man given to despair, muttered a prayer for the coming of either the Prussians or the night. But both, this day, came painfully slowly.
The first French attacks on the British ridge had failed, but now their gunners and their skirmishers were grinding down the British defence. Men died in ones and twos, but constantly. The already truncated battalions shrank as the surviving Sergeants ordered the files to close the gaps. Men who had started the day four files apart became neighbours, and still the gun-fire shredded the ranks and still the Voltigeurs fired from the smoke and still the Sergeants chanted the litany of a battalion’s death, “Close up! Close up!”