“Patrick?” Sharpe had been staring up the Nivelles road. “Do you see what I see?”
Harper twisted in his saddle. “Bloody hell, sir, you’re right!” A further brigade of British infantry was arriving, and among the troops was the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. Sharpe and Harper spurred towards their old battalion.
Sharpe stood his horse beside the road and took off his hat as the leading company came abreast. It was his old company, the light, led by Peter d’Alembord. The men’s faces were pale with dust, through which the rivulets of sweat had driven dark trails. Daniel Hagman raised a cheer as Sharpe tossed them a full canteen of water. D’Alembord, his white dancing breeches stained from the wax with which his saddle had been polished, reined in beside the two Riflemen and looked dubiously towards the smear of smoke that marked the battlefield. “How is it?”
“It’s stiff work, Peter,” Sharpe admitted.
“Is Boney here?” It was the same question that nearly every newly arriving officer had asked, as though the presence of the Emperor would dignify the day’s death and dismemberment.
“Not so far as we know.” Sharpe saw that his answer disappointed d’Alembord.
The brigade halted while Sir Colin Halkett, its commander, discovered where his four battalions were wanted. Lieutenant-Colonel Ford and his two Majors, Vine and Micklewhite, walked their horses up the road until they came close to where Sharpe, d’Alembord and Harper chatted. Ford, myopically peering towards the cannon smoke, realized too late that he had come close to Sharpe, whose presence made him feel so uncomfortable and inadequate, but he put a brave face on the chance meeting. “It sounds brisk, Sharpe, does it not?”
“It’s certainly hard work, Ford,” Sharpe said mildly.
No one seemed to be able to find anything else to say. Ford smiled with a general benignity which he thought fitting to a colonel, while Major Vine scowled at the men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers who had slumped on the roadside, and Major Micklewhite pretended to be enthralled by the enamel picture on the lid of his snuffbox. A sudden explosion was loud enough to penetrate the half-deaf ears of Major Vine who twisted round to see that a British gun limber, crammed with ready ammunition, had been struck by a French shell and was now spewing a thick skein of smoke and flames into the sky.
Colonel Ford had jumped at the sudden violence of the explosion, and now he gazed through his thick spectacles at the rest of the battlefield, which appeared as a threatening blur of trampled corn, blood, smoke, and the lumped bodies of the dead. Cannon-balls were ploughing through the slurry of rye and soil, spewing gouts of earth before bouncing into the bloody lines of Highlanders. “Dear God,” Ford said with rather more feeling than he had intended.
“Watch out for their skirmishers,” Sharpe advised drily. “They seem to have more of the bastards than usual.”
“More?” The tone to Ford’s voice betrayed the Colonel’s fear of taking his battalion into the cauldron beyond the crossroads.
“You might like to think about deploying an extra company as skirmishers,” Sharpe, well aware of Ford’s uncertainty, offered the advice as forcefully as he could without sounding patronizing, “but warn the lads to keep an eye open for the cavalry. They’re never very far away.” Sharpe pointed across the highway to where the stream fed a small lake behind Gemioncourt farm. “There’s a fold in the ground over there and it’s swarming with the evil buggers.”
“Quite so, quite so.” Ford took off his spectacles, cleaned them on the tasselled end of his red sash, then hooked the earpieces back into place. He stared through the newly cleaned glass but could see neither a fold in the ground nor any cavalry. He wondered whether Sharpe was deliberately trying to frighten him, and so, to show that he was quite equal to the prospect of fighting, Ford straightened his shoulders and turned his horse away. Vine and Micklewhite, like obedient hounds, followed their Colonel.
“He won’t take a blind bit of notice,” d’Alembord sighed.
“Then you watch out for the cavalry, Peter. They’re in something of a murderous bloody mood. There’s about three thousand of the bastards: Hussars, Lancers, and the Heavies.”