“Now, Maitland! Now’s your time!” The Duke had stationed himself behind the survivors of the British Foot Guards who faced the larger of the two French columns. The Duke, who had learned his trade as a battalion officer, could not resist giving the orders himself. “Stand up, Guards!”
To the French Guardsmen it seemed as though the line of redcoats rose out of the mud like the reviving dead. They suddenly stood to make a barrier across the path of the larger French column which, instinctively, checked. One moment the ridge had appeared empty, now, suddenly,” an enemy had risen from the ravaged earth.
“Forward!” the French officers shouted, while at the back of the Imperial Guard’s column the battalions began to spread outwards to form the musket line which would overpower the handful of men who dared to oppose them.
“Make ready!” It had been many years since the Duke had handled a single battalion in battle, but he had lost none of his skills and had judged the moment to perfection. The British muskets were suddenly raised, making it seem to the approaching Frenchmen as if all the waiting redcoats had made a quarter turn to the right. The Duke looked grim, waited a second, then shouted. “Fire!”
The British muskets flamed. They could not miss at fifty paces and the leading ranks of the French column were cut down in blood and screams. The dead were numbered in scores, making a barrier of blood and meat to block the following ranks.
More muskets crashed flame and smoke to fill the ridge with the sound of infantry volleys. On either flank of Maitland’s Guards other British battalions were closing on the deploying French. The 52nd, a hard and bloody-minded battalion that had learned its trade in Spain, was wheeling out of line and advancing to take the wounded column in its flank. They raked the French Guards with a lethal and practised volley fire. Fifteen thousand Frenchmen` might have crossed the valley, but only the handful of men at the head of each column could use their muskets, and that handful was faced by the rippling volleys of the red-coated battalions. Column had met line again, and the line was swamping the heads of the columns with fire. The rear flanks of the column tried but could not deploy into line; instead they shrank back from the relentless musketry.
The Imperial Guard could not go forward, nor could it form its own musket line, it could only stand stock still while its face and flanks were mauled by the redcoats’ fire. The French officers shouted at the ranks to advance, but the living were obstructed by the dead and under a lashing fire that made each new front rank into a barricade of corpses. The Emperor’s dream had begun to die.
The British Guards facing the column’s head reloaded. “Make ready! Fire!” The Guards of either nation were close enough to see each others’ faces clearly, close enough to see the pitiful agony in a wounded man’s eyes, to see the bitter anger of an officer’s broken pride, to see a man spit tobacco juice or vomit blood, to see resolve turn swiftly to fear. The undefeated, immortal, Imperial Guard was beginning to falter, beginning.to edge backwards, though still the drummer boys tried to beat them on with their desperate sticks.
“Make ready!” The voice of a British Guards officer rose cool and mocking. “Fire!”
The splintering, ripping sound of a battalion volley filled the sky as the musket-balls thudded home through the twitching smoke. The British Guards had stopped the French advance, while the œ2nd had closed on the column’s flank and was now turning it bloody with their pitiless and murderous fire. Hours of practice had gone into this column’s death; tedious hours of loading and ramming and priming and firing until the redcoats could perform the motions of firing a musket in their rum-sodden sleep. Now they grimaced with powder-blackened faces as their brass-bound musket butts crashed back into their bruised shoulders. They were the scum of the earth and they were turning the Emperor’s pampered darlings into bloody offal.
“Now’s your time!” The Duke’s voice pierced the noise. “Fix bayonets!”