Sharpe supposed the greeting expressed forgiveness for his usurpation of command the previous day. Sharpe had brusquely ordered the battalion to run while Ford had still been deliberating what to do, but it seemed the Colonel had no desire to make an issue of the afiair. Vine, huddled in the roots of the hedge, scowled with dark unfriendly eyes at the Rifleman.
“I was taking some food to my old company. You don’t mind, Ford?” Sharpe still had the cold beef and bread that Rebecque had given him that morning. He did not need Ford’s permission to visit the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteer’s bivouac, but it seemed polite to ask, especially on a day during which Rebecque had lectured him about the need for tact. Sharpe had sent Lieutenant Doggett on to the village of Waterloo where the Generals had their quarters, but Sharpe had no wish to join the Prince yet. He preferred the company of his old battalion.
Sharpe and Harper found the men of their old light company squatted about some miserable fires made from damp straw and green twigs collected from the hedge. Major d’Alembord was collecting letters from those few men who could write and who wanted to leaVe a message for their families should anything happen to them the next day.
It had begun to rain again. The men were cold and miserable, though the veterans of the war in Spain pretended that this was a paradise compared to the ordeals they had suffered in their earlier campaigns. The new men, not wanting to appear less tough than the veterans, kept silent.
The veterans of the company made space for Sharpe and Harper near a fire and Sharpe noted how these experienced soldiers were assembled around one blaze and the newcomers about the other feebler campfires. It was as if the old soldiers drew together as an elite against which the newcomers would have to measure themselves, yet even the veterans were betraying a nervousness this rainy night. Sharpe confirmed to them that the Prussians had been beaten, but he promised that Marshal Blcher’s army was withdrawing on roads parallel to the British retreat and that the Marshal had promised to march at first light to Wellington’s aid,
“Where are the Prussians exactly, sir?” Colour Sergeant Major Huckfield wanted to know.
“Over there.” Sharpe pointed to the left flank. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were on the right side of the British position, almost midway between the elm tree and the track which led down to Hougoumont.
“How far away are they, sir?” Huckfield, an intelligent and earnest man, persisted.
Sharpe shrugged. “Not far.” In truth he did not know where the Prussians were bivouacked, nor was he even certain that Marshal Blucher would march to help this bedraggled army in the morning, but Sharpe knew he must give these men some shred of hope. The newcomers to the battalion were edging closer to the veterans’ fire to listen to the Rifleman. “All that matters,” he said loudly, “is that the Prussians will be here and fighting in the morning.”
“If this rain doesn’t stop we’ll need the bloody navy here, not the bloody Prussians.” Private Clayton looked up at the darkening clouds. The rain was steady and hard, drumming on the black shako tops of the shivering men and running down the old furrows to puddle at the field’s bottom where a troop of officers’ horses were unhappily picketed.
“This rain will bugger up their harvest.” Charlie Weller, who was allowed to bivouac with the veterans because they liked him, plucked a head of soaking wet rye and shook his head sadly. “It’ll all be black and rotten in a week’s time.”
“But it’ll be well dunged next year, though. Corn always grows better on dead flesh.” Hagman, the oldest man in the company, grinned. “We saw that in Spain, ain’t that right, Mr Sharpe? We saw oats growing taller than a horse where a battle had been fought. The roots was sucking up all that blood and belly, they was.”
“They don’t always bury them, though, do they? You remember that place in Spain? Where all the skulls were?” Clayton frowned as he tried to remember the battlefield over which the battalion had marched some weeks after a fight.