Sharpe’s battalion threatened the Imperial Guard’s right, while on their left flank the Brunswickers fired another volley, but directly in front of the column was nothing but a broken mass of redcoats. The British cavalry closed on the frightened men, but, before the sabres could be used on the redcoats, the Duke was suddenly among them, and somehow the redcoats were stopped and turned by his confident voice. Staff officers rode among the fugitives, order was shaken out of their chaos, muskets were levelled, and a ragged volley sheeted flames at the column’s head. The Guard, assailed on three sides, halted and shrank away from the musketry.
Sharpe watched the central ranks of the column pushing against the motionless men ahead. “Fire!” Sharpe gave the French right flank another bellyful of bullets. The column was still trying to advance, and the rearmost ranks were swinging obliquely out to form the musket line, and Sharpe sensed that the whole fate of this battle hung on the next few seconds. If the French could be made to move forward over their own dead then they could flood the ridge with their revenge and the fragile British line would shatter. Yet if this column could be driven backwards then the British line would earn a respite in which night or the Prussians might snatch survival from defeat.
“Forward! Forward! Forward!” a French voice shouted huge and desperately in the column’s centre. The drums were still beating their message of victory. `Vive I’Empereur!”
“Forward! Forward for the Emperor!”
“Fix bayonets!” Sharpe shouted in response.
The battalion, already reloading, dropped their half-torn cartridges and clawed their bayonets free. They slotted the blades on to blackened muzzles. The French drums sounded desperately close. Sharpe spurred ahead of the battalion. His horse was nervous and slick with sweat, and his long sword was still stained with the blood he had drawn in the yard at Hougoumont. He saw the
French column push over the bodies of the men his last volley had killed, and he wondered whether he had enough bayonets to break these confident Frenchmen apart, but there was only one way to. discover that answer and Sharpe suddenly felt the old excitement of battle, and the mad joy of it, and he raised his long bloodied blade high and ordered his battalion forward. “Charge!”
The survivors of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers charged with all the fury of bitter men who had taken hell all day and who now faced the pristine, untouched favourites of an Emperor who had been sheltered from death till this moment. They charged with bloodied and powder-stained faces, and they screamed like furies as they carried their long blades forward.
The flank of the column tried to retreat from the charge, but the Frenchmen only pressed against the ranks behind that still tried to advance to the drumbeat. The sound of the drums was menacing, yet even the men sheltered in the very heart of the column knew that something was wrong. Their left flank was dying from the Brunswicker volleys, the Duke had rallied the redcoats in their front, and now Sharpe’s men struck home on the right.
Sharpe slashed back with his heels, the horse leaped forward, and his sword crashed down like an axe. The blade drove a long splinter from a parrying musket, then hacked down again to thump through a bearskin and drive a Frenchman to his knees. The horse screamed and reared as a bayonet stabbed its chest, but then the redcoats swarmed past Sharpe to carry their blades at the enemy. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers had a score to settle, and so they ripped into the Emperor’s immortals with a savagery that only men atoning for a moment’s cowardice could show.
Sharpe’s horse was wounded, but not fatally. It screamed with fear or pain as he crashed a musket aside with his sword then lunged at the Frenchman’s face. The man recoiled from the blade, then went down beneath the bayonets of two snarling redcoats who thrust hard to force their blades through the Frenchman’s heavy blue greatcoat. The enemy were sweating and edging back. The column was so closely packed that the French had no space to use their weapons properly. Sharpe’s men were keening as they killed, crooning a foul music as they lunged and stabbed and gouged and fought across the dead. Sharpe’s horse half stumbled on a corpse and he flailed with the sword to find his balance. The ridge stank of blood and sweat and powder smoke. A vast crash, announced that Harper had fired his volley gun point blank into the ranks of the Guard, and now the Irishman threw himself into the space his bullets had made. He widened the space by stabbing with his sword-bayonet, each vicious thrust accompanied by a Gaelic war-cry.