The cavalry straggled in later in the afternoon. Staff officers directed the troopers to their bivouacs behind the infantry. The horses were pegged out in long lines, while their riders used forage scythes to gather fodder and others carried collapsible canvas buckets to the water pumps in Mont-St-Jean. The farriers, who carried a supply of nails and horseshoes in their saddlebags, began inspecting the hooves of the tired beasts.
The gunners placed their cannons just behind the ridge’s summit so that, while most of the guns were hidden from an approaching enemy, the barrels still had a clear shot down the gentle slope. In the centre of the ridge, close to where the elm grew beside the high road, the guns were concealed behind hedges.
The artillery park was placed at the forest’s edge, well back from the guns, and the infantry sourly noted how the gunners were provided with tents, for the artillery alone of all the army had kept their wagons close. No gun could fire long without its supplies, and a battery of six cannon needed a spare wheel wagon, a forage cart, two general supply wagons, eight ammunition wagons, ninety-two horses and seventy mules. Thus the land between the ridge and the forest was soon crammed with a mass of men and horses. Smoke from the bivouac fires smeared the rainy air. The ditches and furrows overflowed with water running off the fields in which the army must sleep.
Some officers walked forward to stare southwards across the wide valley. They watched the last of the British cavalry and guns come home, then the high road was left empty. The farmers, together with their families, labourers, and livestock, had long fled from the three farms in the valley’s bottom. Nothing moved there now except for the rain that sheeted and hissed across the road. The British gunners, standing beside their loaded cannon, waited for targets.
In the early evening the rain paused, though the wind was still damp and cold. Some of the infantry tried to dry out their sopping uniforms by stripping themselves naked and holding the heavy wool coats over the struggling fires.
Then a single cannon fired from the ridge.
Some of the naked men ran to the crest to see that a nine-pounder had slammed a cannon-ball into a troop of French Cuirassiers who had been crossing the valley floor. The gunshot had stopped the advance of the armoured horsemen. One horse was kicking and bleeding in the hay, while its rider lay motionless. A mass of other enemy horsemen was assembling on the far crest about La Belle Alliance. Four enemy guns were being deployed close to the inn. For a few moments the tiny figures of the French gunners could be seen tending to their weapons, then the crews ran aside and the four guns fired towards the lingering smoke of the British nine-pounder’s discharge.
Every gun on the British ridge replied. The massive salvo sounded like a billow -of rolling thunder. Smoke jetted from the crest and roundshot screamed across the valley to thump in muddy splashes among the enemy cavalry. Staff officers galloped along the British crest screaming at the gunners to hold their fire, but the damage had already been done. The French staff officers, gazing from the tavern, saw that they were not faced by a handful of retreating guns, but by the artillery of a whole army. They could even tell, from the smoke, just where that army had placed its guns.
So now the Emperor knew that the British retreat was over, and that the Sepoy General had chosen his battlefield.
At a crossroads among farmland where the hay was nearly all cut and the rye was growing tall and the orchards were heavy with fruit, and where three bastions stood like fortresses proud of a ridge that next day the French must capture, and the British must hold. At a place called Waterloo.
CHAPTER 11
“Not a day for cricket, eh, Sharpe?” Lieutenant-Colonel Ford shouted the jocular greeting, though his expression was hardly welcoming. The Colonel, with Major Vine beside him, crouched in the thin shelter of a straggly hedge, which they had reinforced against the wet and gusting wind with three broken umbrellas.