The British picquets shivered. The French army was camped by the southern ridge, yet the enemy’s fires had long been extinguished and the only lights in the enemy’s line were two dim yellow smears which marked the candle-lit windows of the tavern. Even those lights were dulled and sometimes hidden by the sheer volume of rain. It seemed to the picquets that the rain would never stop. It was a deluge fit for a world’s ending; a rain that hammered and swept before the wind to drench the fields and slop through the plough furrows and drown the ditches and crush the crops and flood the farm tracks. It was a madness of wind and water, beating through the darkness to bring misery to a field which, because it lay between two ridges, was marked for yet more misery in the morning.
CHAPTER 13
It stopped raining during the night.
At four in the morning the dawn revealed a valley mist which was stirred by a gusting damp wind. The mist was swiftly thickened by the smoke of the new morning fires. Shivering men picked themselves out of the mud like corpses coming to shuddering life. The long day had begun. It was a northern midsummer’s day and the sun would not set for another seventeen hours.
Men on both sides of the shallow valley untied the rags which had been fastened round their musket locks, and took the corks out of the guns’ muzzles. The sentries scraped out the grey damp slush which had been the priming in their pans and tried to empty the main charge with a fresh pinch of priming. All they achieved was a flash in the pan, evidence that the powder in the barrel was damp. They could either drill the bullet out, or else keep squibb-ing the gun with fresh priming till enough of the powder inside the touchhole dried to catch the fire. One by one the squibbed muskets banged, their sound echoing forlornly across the shallow valley.
The staff and general officers in Waterloo rose long before the dawn. Their grooms saddled horses, then, like men riding to their business, the officers took the southern road through the dark and dripping forest.
Sharpe and Harper were among the first to leave. The Prince was not even out of his bed when Sharpe wearily hauled himself into his saddle and shoved his rifle into its bucket holster. He was wearing his green Rifleman’s jacket beneath Lucille’s cloak and riding the mare which had recovered from her long day’s reconnaissance about Charleroi. His clothes were clammy and his thighs sore from the long days in the saddle. The wind whipped droplets of water from the roofs and trees as he and Harper turned south into the village street. “You’ll keep your promise today?” Sharpe asked Harper.
“You’re as bad as Isabella! God save Ireland, but if I wanted someone else to be my conscience I’d have found a wife out here to nag me.”
Sharpe grinned. “I’m the one who’ll have to give her the news of your death, so are you going to keep your promise?”
“I’m not planning on being a dead man just yet, so I’ll keep my promise.” Harper was nevertheless dressed and equipped for a fight. He wore his Rifleman’s jacket and had his seven-barrelled gun on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. Both men had left their packs at the Prince’s billet, and neither man had shaved. They rode to battle looking like brigands.
As they neared Mont-St-Jean they heard a sound like the sucking of a great sea on a shelving beach. It was the sound of thousands of men talking, the sound of damp twigs burning, the noise of squibbed muskets popping, and the sound of the wind rustling in the stiff damp stalks of rye. It was also a strangely ominous sound. The air smelt of wet grass and dank smoke, but at least the clouds of the previous day had thinned enough so that the sun was visible as a pale pewter glow beyond a cloudy vapour that was being thickened by the smoke of the camp-fires.
There was one ritual for Sharpe to perform. Before riding on to the ridge’s crest he found a cavalry armourer close to the forest’s edge and handed down his big sword. “Make it into a razor,” he ordered.