“Let’s get out of here!” Harper saw his target plucked backwards, and now he hauled Sharpe to his feet and both men sprinted away towards the crest. Sharpe had just staged an assassination in full view of an army, but no one shouted at him and no one gaped in astonishment because no one, it seemed, had noticed a thing. A French roundshot screamed low overhead. A Voltigeur’s-bullet clipped Sharpe’s sword scabbard and thudded into the ground.
Sharpe began laughing. Harper joined him. Together they reeled over the crest, still laughing. “Right in the bloody belly!” Sharpe said with undisguised glee.
“With your bloody marksmanship, you probably killed the Duke.”
“It was a good shot, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke as fervently as any young Rifleman first mastering the complex weapon. “I felt it go home!”
Major Warren Dunnett saw the two Riflemen grinning like apes and assumed they shared his pleasure at a task well done. “A successful venture, I think?” Dunnett said modestly, but he was clearly eager for praise.
Sharpe gave it gladly. “Very. Allow me to congratulate you, Dunnett.” The efficient Greenjacket foray had taken the French cannon at La Haye Sainte out of the battle. Their gunners were dead, cut down by the best marksmen in either army.
Sharpe led Harper to the rear of a British battery from where he could see Rebecque and a group of other Dutch officers helping the Prince away. The Prince had slumped sideways, and was only being held in his saddle by the support of his Chief of Staff. “Harry!” Sharpe shouted at Lieutenant Webster, the Prince’s only remaining British aide. “What happened, Harry?”
Webster spurred across to Sharpe. “It’s bad news, sir. The Prince was hit in the left shoulder. It isn’t too serious, but he can’t stay on the field. One of those damned skirmishers hit him, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, shit,” Sharpe spoke with obvious remorse.
“It is indeed bad news, sir.” Webster offered sympathetic agreement. “But his Highness will live. They’re taking him to the surgeons, then back to Brussels.”
Harper was trying not to laugh. Sharpe scowled. “A pity.” His voice was fervent. “A damned bloody pity!”
“It’s decent of you to be so upset, sir, especially after the way he’s treated you,” Webster said awkwardly.
“But you’ll present my regards, Lieutenant?”
“Of course I will, sir.” Webster touched his hat, then turned to ride after the wounded Prince.
Harper grinned and mocked Sharpe with imitation. “It was a good shot. I felt it go home.”
“The bugger’s gone, hasn’t he?” Sharpe said defensively.
“Aye,” Harper admitted, then looked ruefully along the British line. “And it won’t be long before we’re all gone either. I’ve never seen the like, nor have I.”
Sharpe heard the Irishman’s despair of victory and was tempted to offer agreement, except that a small part of Sharpe refused to give up hope even though he knew victory would need a miracle now. The British army was reduced to a ragged line of shrunken, bleeding battalions who crouched in the mud near to the ridge’s crest that was crowned with smoke and riven by the explosions of mud thrown up by the continuing cannonade. Behind the battalions the rear of the ridge was empty but for the dead and the dying and the broken guns. At the edge of the forest the ammunition wagons burned to ash. There were no reserves left.
The two Riflemen trudged through the smoke towards the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers while the French cannon, all but for the two that had been emplaced in La Haye Sainte’s garden, fired on. The valley was shrouded by the cloud of smoke which flickered with the unearthly light of the guns.
By La Belle Alliance a tentative drum tap sounded. There was a pause as the drummer rammed the leather rings down the white ropes to tighten his drumskin, then the sticks sounded a jaunty and confident flurry. There was another pause, a shouted order, and a whole corps of drummers began to beat the pas de charge.
To tell the French that the Imperial Guard was about to fight.
The Emperor left La Belle Alliance, deigning to ride his white horse down the high road almost as far as La Haye Sainte. He stopped a few yards short of the captured farmhouse and watched his beloved Guard march past. To Napoleon’s immortals would go the last honour of this day. The undefeated Guard would cross the pit of hell and break the final remnants of a beaten army.