A woman wept at the edge of the grave. She was one of the sixty wives who had been allowed to travel with the battalion and, though she was widowed now, she would probably be married again by the month’s end, for a soldier’s woman never lacked for suitors. Another newly widowed wife, Sally Clayton, sat next to Charlie Weller and Sharpe saw the nervousness with which the young man reached for her hand. “Make me a mug of tea, Charlie,” Sharpe said, “and I’ll make you into a sergeant.”
“Sir?” Charlie stared up in astonishment.
“Do it, Charlie!” Sally was quicker to understand that Sharpe was offering them a sergeant’s wage. “And thank you, Mr Sharpe.”
Sharpe smiled and turned away as a shout told him that Harper had returned from Brussels. The Irishman had brought Sharpe’s dog back with him, and now released Nosey who ran to Sharpe and leaped up to nuzzle and fuss his master. The men of the battalion grinned. Sharpe pushed the dog down, waited for Harper to slide out of the saddle, then walked with his friend towards the lip of the valley.
“She’s well,” Harper confirmed. Lucille had wept when she had learned that Sharpe was safe and unhurt, but she had made Harper promise not to reveal her tears. “And the boy’s well, too.”
“Thank you for going for me.”
Harper grunted. He had left for Brussels before dawn and now stared into the battlefield for the first time on this new day. His face showed no reaction to the horror. Like Sharpe he had seen it a hundred times before. They were soldiers; they were paid to endure horror, which is why they understood horror better than other men. They were soldiers and, like the men who dug the nightsoil from the pits of London, or like the women who tended the pestilent dying in the charity wards, they did a distasteful job that more fastidious men and women despised. They were soldiers, which made them the scum of the earth until a tyrant threatened Britain, and then suddenly they were red-coated heroes and jolly good fellows.
“God save Ireland, but we made a right bloody shit-heap of this place,” Harper commented on the valley.
Sharpe said nothing. He was staring beyond the battlefield to where the sunlight glowed on trees unmarked by fire and where the air smelt summer sweet. The cloudless sky promised a day for haymaking, or a day for lovers to stroll through heavy-leafed woods to rest beside the green cool of a streambank. It was a midsummer’s day on the borders of France, and the world was at peace.
HISTORICAL NOTE
It was indeed a near run thing; ,the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” as the Duke of Wellington confessed on the day after the battle, but Napoleon, as the Duke also said, “just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style.”
The Duke himself would probably have been content to let that stand as a full account of the campaign of Waterloo, for he was a man notorious both for the brevity, of his despatches, and for his dislike of authors. He had, he explained later in his life, been too much exposed to authors. One of them, seeking the Duke’s assistance for a projected account of the battle, was sternly advised to leave well alone: `you may depend upon it that you will never make it a satisfactory work’. To another such hopeful scribbler he dismissively remarked that a man might as well seek to write the history of a dance as to write the story of a battle.
Many, though, have defied the Duke’s advice, and I must confess my extreme debt to all those whose temerity has produced the vast library on Waterloo. There are too many books to cite here, but I would be shameless if I did not acknowledge two. Even the Duke might have approved of Jac Weller’s Wellington at Waterloo, the final volume of his impressive trilogy on the Duke’s military career. Whenever I found conflict among my sources, and felt unable to clear the matter from my own research, I relied on Jac Weller’s interpretation and I doubt he let me down.