Behind Lord John the first beam of sunlight struck like a golden lance across the world’s rim. It was dawn in Belgium. Clouds still heaped in the west, but over the crossroads at Quatre Bras, and above a stream just north of Fleurus, the sky was clear as glass. Larks tumbled in song above the roads where three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men, in the armies of Prussia, Britain and France, converged on death.
“God save Ireland.” Harper reined in at Quatre Bras. In front of him, and smeared across the southern sky, was the smoke of thousands of camp-fires. The smoke betrayed an army encamped. The French troops were hidden by the folds of ground and by the woods and high crops, but the smoke was evidence enough that thousands of men had closed on Frasnes in the night to support the battalion of French skirmishers who had been baulked the previous evening.
Closer to Sharpe and Harper, around the crossroads of Quatre Bras, more men had gathered; all of them Dutch-Belgians of the Prince of Orange’s Corps. There was a smattering of musket-fire from far beyond the stream, evidence that the rival picquet lines of skirmishers were bidding each other a lethal good morning. The Baron Rebecque, waiting with a group of the Prince’s aides at the crossroads, seemed relieved to see Sharpe. “We’re concentrating the corps here, instead of at Nivelles.”
“Quite right, too!” Sharpe said fervently.
Rebecque unfolded a sketch map he had made. “The French are in Frasnes, and we’re holding all the farms beyond the stream. Except this one by the ford. We’ll only garrison that if we’re forced back to it.”
“I’d garrison it now,” Sharpe recommended,
“Not enough men.” Rebecque folded his map. “So far only eight thousand infantry have arrived, with sixteen guns and no cavalry.”
Sharpe cast a professional eye at the smoke of the French cooking fires. “They’ve got twenty thousand, Rebecque.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t tell me that.” Rebecque, accepting Sharpe’s experienced estimate without question, smiled grimly.
“So if I can make a suggestion?”
My dear Sharpe, anything.”
“Tell our skirmishers to hold their fire. We don’t want to provoke the Crapauds into nastiness, do we?” There was no sense in inviting battle from a much stronger enemy; it was better to delay any fighting in the hope of more allied troops arriving to even the numbers who faced each other south of Frasnes.
The sky above Quatre Bras was dirtied by the camp-fires, but to the east the rising sun betrayed a much vaster quantity of rising woodsmoke. That larger smear in the sky showed where the Prussian army faced the main force of the French and where the day’s real battle would be fought. The French would be trying to defeat the Prussians before the British and Dutch could come to their aid, while the Prussians, to be certain of victory, needed Wellington’s troops to march from Quatre Bras and assault the Emperor’s left flank. But that rescue mission had been stopped dead by the presence of the twenty thousand Frenchmen encamped in Frasnes who had been sent by the Emperor to make sure that the allied armies did not combine. All that the French needed to do was take the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Sharpe reckoned it could not take the enemy longer than an hour to overrun the fragile line of Dutch-Belgian troops, and in one further hour they could have fortified the crossroads to make them impassable to the British.
The French were thus one hour from victory; just one hour from separating the allied armies, yet as the sun climbed higher and as the smoke of the dying fires thinned, the French made no move to advance on the crossroads. They did not even follow the retreating Dutch skirmishers, but seemed content to let the morning’s skirmish die to nothing. Sharpe looked to the north and west, searching for the tell-tale drifts of dust that would speak of reinforcements hurrying towards the threatened crossroads. No dust showed above the roads yet, evidence that the French had plenty of time to make their attack.
The Prince of Orange arrived three hours after dawn, excited at the prospect of action. “Morning, Sharpe! A bright one, isn’t it! Rebecque, all well?”