The two armies faced one another across the shallow valley, the French massed in columns on either side of the Brussels road, the British and their allies crowning the ridge of Mont St. Jean, their front presenting a short mile of bivouac fires behind a few advanced field batteries crowning the edge of the plateau.
Half-way down the slope, on the right of the enemy’s position, lay a huddle of white and grey buildings, the farm and château Hougomont, with a small orchard, a few barns and low stone walls reaching out to the edge of a sparse copse. It was occupied by the English. Here and there the watching French skirmishers caught sight of a flash of scarlet as the Guards garrison moved about the yard, loopholing, digging, barricading.
“A hard nut to crack,” said Jean, but he knew that he and Gabriel would not be asked to crack it, for their place in the line of battle was farther to the right, opposite the higher bastion of the English line, the smaller, more open farm of La Haye Sainte.
The Forty-fifth had moved into position late the previous evening, passing the Imperial staff outside the farmhouse of La Belle Alliance. The Emperor himself had been standing by a fire talking to Marshal Soult and Gérard, their own corps commander.
When the tired men greeted the Emperor he had acknowledged their cheer with a perfunctory lift of the hand and one of his pale smiles. Round about him the grenadiers of the Old Guard were cooking their evening meal; Gabriel noticed that all traces of Ligny mud had been removed from their long white gaiters. They looked as trim and elegant as on the day he had seen them reviewed in the courtyard of Schönbrunn, after the Wagram campaign.
There was an air of confidence about the camp, and divisions moved into position without fuss or flurry. No one would have supposed that Marshal Berthier was absent, his time-honoured place as Chief of Staff being filled by Soult. There were guns everywhere, and between the batteries were ranged masses of cavalry, more than Gabriel had ever seen on a single battlefield.
As they bivouacked beside the road Gabriel wished that Dominique had been present to play them a tune. Before they rolled themselves in their greatcoats beside the fire, Jean and he discussed old times and old comrades. The sergeant summed up his last file.
“They were good boys, all of them—even old Nicky, until he went crazy!”
Neither of them mentioned Nicholette, but after they had thrown fresh wood onto the fire and Gabriel had rolled on his back and looked up at the few stars, he wondered whether the girl had rejoined the army after the Emperor’s return. He would have asked Jean his opinion on the matter, but the old sergeant had already begun to snore. Jean was never more than a moment in getting to sleep.
The battle opened with a murderous artillery duel. From where they were standing to arms, near the main road, the light infantrymen saw something of the havoc created by the French guns among the red-coated artillerymen on the ridge. After a spell the more advanced batteries withdrew behind the skyline, but for more than an hour the French continued to pepper the ridge, screening the entire battle line with battery smoke that hung like a fog on the light air.
About eleven o’clock the division received orders to march and moved off down the main road towards La Haye Sainte. On their right three other divisions of Gérard’s corps advanced along parallel lines of march, whilst on the road itself a few squadrons of cuirassiers clattered forward in support.
Then the British artillery opened fire and balls began to plough into the column. As it approached the farm the crackle of musketry was heard and a line of flashes picked out the loopholes. A few men dropped, but the column marched on up the slope, driving in the British skirmishers and striking out for the crest, which appeared to be empty of anything but guns. One battalion inclined to the left to surround the farm, where firing soon rose to a climax. The other, with Jean and Gabriel in the van, skirted a sandpit manned by British riflemen, won the crest and advanced with fixed bayonets against a double line of troops lining the hedgerow. The enemy did not wait for the collision. Badly shaken by the long cannonade, of which they had borne the brunt, an entire division of Dutch-Belgian infantry broke and fled, sweeping back into the second line and making no attempt to rally until they were out of range.
The French infantry threw themselves at the hedges, and Jean, turning to Gabriel as the latter jumped down onto open ground, shouted for joy. His elation was premature.
Advancing in column, the Forty-fifth had lost much of its momentum in the act of crossing the hedge. Its officers rushed along the edge of the ditch, shouting orders to deploy into line, but the movement had hardly commenced when the breathless men heard the thunder of hooves on their immediate right. A mass of cavalry bore down on them, squadrons of the royals and dragoon guards, an avalanche of grey and black horses, their riders leaning right and left as they lashed out with their sabres, scattering the disordered ranks in heaps and hurling the survivors back into the hedge. There was no time to form square.
Hundreds of men went down under the fearful impact; others, seeing what was happening from the French side of the bank, turned and fled downhill, the dragoons streaming through a gap lower down and cutting obliquely into their line of flight.
Jean and Gabriel rallied a dozen men and fought back with the bayonet, their feet in the ditch, but once the gap had been found the dragoons galloped away to find less resolute victims on the slopes of the incline. Jean took advantage of the respite to shepherd his half-company back over the hedge; then he bullied them into forming some sort of square to fight a way back to their starting-point. Furious at the repulse, he began to curse the officers.
“God in heaven,” he shouted above the roar of artillery, which had opened fire on the fleeing column, “fancy trying to deploy us in the face of the enemy. We might as well sit down and blow our own brains out! Is this what they learned in the Peninsula?”
British cavalry, life guards and dragoons, was still pouring down into the valley, overturning the few cuirassiers who tried to oppose them on the fringe of La Haye Sainte. Jean’s square, shaken now into a defensive formation, attracted more and more fugitives. A sergeant of the 105th joined them, his face bleeding profusely from a sabre cut.
“They’ve taken our eagle,” he growled, dashing the blood from his eyes. “Who in hell would have expected cavalry at that point?”
“Wait a minute and then watch our own people present the bill,” replied Jean; and indeed, within seconds, the rallying infantrymen began cheering. From their side of the declivity they had a good view of the opposite slopes. There they saw the British cavalry, carried away by its own impetuosity, storm up the valley towards Gérard’s guns and wheel to sabre the gunners as they fled towards the reserves. At that moment a long streak of green and silver lunged from the solid ranks of the French cavalry reserves as whole squadrons of cuirassiers and lancers plunged down the slope into the disordered masses of redcoats.
The execution was fearful. Caught in the flank, their horses blown by a long gallop over soft ground, the dragoons did their utmost to turn and race for their own lines, but hardly one of them escaped the long, straight swords of the heavy cavalry or the points of Jacquinot’s green lancers. Within five minutes the valley was dotted with scarlet, while riderless greys reared and cavorted in the mêlée. Only a few well-mounted survivors galloped past the retreating infantry and rode for the plateau; the jubilant French infantry gave them a scattered volley as they passed.
“So much for that,” said Jean, as they reformed behind the cavalry screen.
Over at Hougomont a terrific battle was in progress. Orchard and wood were veiled in drifting smoke, and a confused roar spread right along the valley from the sector where Reille’s infantry battered impotently on the château gate, falling in heaps before the well-directed fire of the British Guards.
Before La Haye Sainte there was a short lull, men of the light infantry companies occupying the time by rifling the bodies of the dragoons. Jean pocketed a silver watch but gave its owner, a trooper dying from a lance thrust in the back, a few swallows of brandy. The man thanked him with his eyes. He did not appear to grudge the loss of his watch.
The din from the direction of Hougomont had increased; the artillery exchanges were deafening when Ney, attended by a group of staff officers, rode up to the regrouped battalion.
The marshal had just led an unsuccessful attack on the château gate, and his face was smudged with powder. He pointed towards La Haye Sainte with his sword.
“We’re going to take that!” he shouted. Then, clapping his spurs into his horse, he cantered towards the head of the column and took his place in the front rank.
The division was set in motion, up the slope once more, this time heading directly for the farmhouse.
A storm of round shot and grape struck the column; Gabriel saw Ney’s horse stagger and fall, throwing its rider from the saddle. Donzelot having helped the marshal to his feet, he continued to advance on foot, breaking into a run and turning to urge the leading files forward.
“Good old Michel,” cried Jean as he too hurried towards the head of the column, Gabriel following.
They stormed into the courtyard, to be met by a feeble spatter of musketry. Inside the farm a British major and his German garrison crouched behind the barricades. They knew that there was no hope of holding the position against this fresh assault. Their cartridge pouches were almost empty.
All the farm buildings, however, including the great barn, had been manned by light troops, and for a brief space there was a fierce struggle for possession of the sheds and byres, the French closing in at the point of the bayonet and fighting their way through fires started by their own field artillery. The door of the great barn resisted all attacks until some of the voltigeurs clambered onto the roof, tore loose sections of the tiles and fired into the interior, shooting down the garrison to a man.
Inside the main building the British major in command, seeing that further resistance was useless, cleared the back door for a retreat into the garden and across the fields to the plateau. He and a few others succeeded in getting clear, but the French soon smashed in the front door, carrying the fight into the narrow passage that ran the length of the farmhouse.
Jean and Gabriel were among the first over the threshold, lunging at the Germans packed in the narrow space. The struggle could not last long, for the French, with full pouches, fired volleys into the struggling mass jammed in the passage. Gabriel shot a sergeant at point-blank range and Jean took another man through the throat. The din was hellish, the passage reeked of powder-smoke. In the uncertain light Gabriel saw a young officer, his shoulder shattered by a musket ball, reel into a room branching off the corridor. He was quickly followed by two of his men. A crowd of skirmishers, shouting “No quarter,” followed at their heels, and when Gabriel forced his way into the room the two men were being bayoneted. One of them, a boy of about eighteen, screamed for mercy, but the other, a veteran, continued to lunge at his assailants’ feet until he died. There was no sign of the German officer and Gabriel guessed that he had crawled under the broad four-poster bed that occupied the centre of the room. It was clear that Gabriel was the only man to have witnessed him enter. The Frenchman took a single step towards the canopy, then stopped; a vivid memory seared him, revealing another bed, in another violated dwelling on the banks of the Danube.
For a second he stood quite still, staring down once more at the first man he had killed more than six years ago and suffering the same revulsion. There was the same patch of sunlight on the floor, the same dust motes hovering in the beam, the same dark pool of blood spreading round the body of the young bayonetted German. Nausea gripped him and he leaned heavily against the smooth surface of the massive bedpost.
One of the voltigeurs, casually wiping his bayonet on the patchwork quilt, glanced at Gabriel. “You wounded?”
Gabriel shook his head, and the man looked round the room.
“Any more in here?”
In his fancy Gabriel heard the German officer’s heart beating, felt the man’s sweat beading on his forehead, choked with the effort of controlling laboured breath. He made an immense effort to push himself away from the bedpost.
“Come on, there’s more outside!”
They went out into the passage and Gabriel closed the door. In a strange way it seemed an act of atonement for murder done long ago.
Jean joined them in the yard, where the column was re-forming. The old sergeant was sweating and the muscles of his face twitched. Gabriel saw that Jean’s tunic was coated with white dust and blood; it crossed his mind that the sergeant had become more savage since the last campaign. He had never formerly been a man to kill in cold blood. During the years that they had fought side by side Gabriel had seen him spare a dozen men whom most veterans would have despatched without a second thought, but today Jean was as vicious as any of them. This was a different war, more relentless and unforgiving even than Leipzig. Gabriel remembered something that Jean had said when they were crouching in the pine forests of Russia, watching the convoy of prisoners being driven along the road: “After Austerlitz I saw French staff officers dive into a freezing lake to bring a couple of wounded Russians ashore.” That act of mercy now seemed remote and absurd, like a chivalrous exchange at the barriers in the Middle Ages. Men were dying on all sides of them, piled on the manure heaps in the yard, crawling painfully away from the blazing byres, crying out for help and getting none. The elation of yesterday had gone. Today it seemed incredible to Gabriel that he had contributed to this slaughter, that some of the men at their feet had fallen before his musket and his bayonet. He glanced at the bayonet tip and saw that it was as red as any man’s in the yard.
A shower of grapeshot whipped the only instinct that mattered into awareness again, the instinct of self-preservation, of keeping alive as long as possible. As they dived for cover officers began shouting and pointing towards the plateau. Now that La Haye Sainte was in French hands the British gunners on the ridge had opened fire once more and the shots were flailing down on the shattered buildings, splintering tiles, pitting the cob walls of the farm and sending out spurts of choking dust. The battalion poured from the yard, fanned out in the field between farm and plateau, and advanced in skirmishing order, kneeling, firing and loading, closing in on the emplacements, where little red figures crouched and ran, sponged, sighted and died.
For the second time the French infantry gained the flat crest, leaping over still figures of men who had marched into bivouac with them the previous evening. Gabriel ran behind Jean. In this tempest of sound he found comfort in fixing his eyes on the sergeant’s bouncing cartridge-box, dreading to lose sight of the one sure reality in a succession of terrifying nightmares. He felt like a small child pursuing his mother’s apron across a crowded fairground peopled by screaming lunatics. But, just as they reached the guns, Jean’s cartridge-box ceased to bounce; it seemed to hover for a moment before falling sideways and rolling over and over into the shallow emplacement beside a stationary field-piece.
Gabriel went over to the gun and fell on his knees, turning the sergeant onto his back and staring down at the lean, contorted face. The lips twisted in agony and the moustache about which they had made so many jokes jerked comically, as though determined to maintain the joke to the last moment. The battle rolled past them as they crouched in the trench; over the lip of the little crater Gabriel could see a red, compact square of British infantry, stationed well back, a hundred paces from the crest of the plateau. He immediately understood why they could never win this battle.
He stripped off Jean’s equipment and tunic, appalled by the pallor of the sergeant’s face, but the wound was not mortal—a musket-ball graze along the right side of the neck, a near-miss leaving a thick red weal but hardly drawing blood.
He began to laugh, semi-hysterically, with sheer relief, but Jean continued to writhe and pointed down at his left leg. Then Gabriel saw that a second ball had passed through the lower part of the thigh, a clean wound the size of a thrush’s egg, blue at the edges and pumping blood steadily.
Gabriel took out his knife and cut away the upper half of the breeches. Picking up his musket, he slashed at its leather sling, twisting it into a tourniquet with the knot facing inwards a hand’s breadth above the wound. There was only a ramrod to complete the appliance and he turned Jean onto his side, slipping the ramrod under the sling and twisting until the steady pumping subsided as the tourniquet bit into the flesh. He tucked the end of the ramrod into Jean’s boot and then set to work on his shirt, tearing off strips of the coarse material and bandaging swiftly. That done, he remembered something else and, after groping in the pocket of Jean’s greatcoat, found the brandy flask and held it to the sergeant’s mouth. Jean swallowed twice, jerked back his head and coughed, speaking for the first time since they had left the farmyard.
“You’re left behind, Gabriel.”
The younger man glanced round and saw that the fighting had ceased on the plateau. The red square was still in position, and over on the left he caught a glimpse of a similar formation, three-parts shrouded in smoke. Looking behind, he saw the remains of the French assault column pouring down the incline towards La Haye Sainte, with a brigade of the King’s German Legion in hot pursuit. From the edge of the emplacement Gabriel could see the greater part of the battlefield. Facing right, on the lower slopes of the incline, the upper storey of Hougomont was visible, its garden and farm buildings wreathed in smoke, an unholy din still rising from beneath the pall. Hougomont continued to hold out against Reille’s frantic assaults. On the opposite side of the valley were masses of French troops, mustering for a fresh attack, while to the left, higher up the incline, La Haye Sainte could be seen burning furiously. In the field behind the farm squadrons of cuirassiers were cutting down the men of the German Legion that had just put their own column to flight. The entire valley was dotted with casualties, red and blue about equally divided, with here and there the green of a French lancer or the silver grey of a hussar. Riderless horses were everywhere, wandering aimlessly among the dead or standing patiently beside their former riders. Over the whole valley hung an immense cloud of smoke, drifting lazily towards the north-west. Apart from the minor scrimmage behind La Haye Sainte there was no sign of a battle. All the fighting about Hougomont remained invisible, reaching the plateau only in the form of a confused roar. The sound reminded Gabriel of the crash of breakers on the Devon coast.
Jean said: “See if you can find my pipe.”
Gabriel found his pipe, filled and lit it and stuck it between Jean’s teeth. The sergeant puffed contentedly. The pain did not seem nearly so intense now that the tourniquet was beginning to numb the lower half of his leg.
“How’s it going?” he asked. From his position on the floor of the emplacement he could see nothing but sky.
Gabriel told him, gauging numbers, making guesses at probable movements.
“We’d better stay here awhile,” Jean said presently. “If the English gunners come back they won’t harm us; I never heard of the English mauling wounded. Maybe you’d better play wounded as well.”
Gabriel glanced at the field-piece just above his head and saw that it had been spiked.
Jean said: “They’re good troops, these Englishmen, but they deserve better allies. If Marshal Grouchy turns up before nightfall we’ll roll them up like a row of skittles.”
An eight-pounder screamed over their heads to pitch within a few paces of the square, causing an officer’s horse to rear violently. The ball ricochetted off to the rear.
A moment later a battery opened fire on the far side of the valley, then another, then a third, until the air immediately above them shuddered with the passage of the projectiles, bomb-shells and small-calibre balls mostly, as Gabriel could tell by the pitch of their whine.
They crouched in the trench, heads pressed down to the soil.
“That had to happen,” grumbled Jean. “Lie here and be murdered by our own artillery! How’s their range?”
Gabriel took a series of cautious peeps at the square. It was still in formation, but every now and again, as a ball tore a gap in the closely dressed ranks, the sides of the square billowed like a regiment of poppies in a soft breeze. The French range was excellent and improving all the time.
After about half an hour there was a lull. Jean twisted onto his side and peered across the plateau.
“They’re waiting for our cavalry, poor devils,” he said, “otherwise they wouldn’t keep square.”
Gabriel crawled across the pit and looked over the outer edge. Jean’s guess was correct; masses of French horsemen were moving down the opposite slope and heading for the plateau. The guns were silent whilst the squadrons moved from the French crest, but they opened up again immediately the mass of horsemen had dipped below the muzzles of the guns. Within five minutes more than two hundred guns were in action. Shot tore into the British ranks, while from time to time a ball fell short and struck the soft bank of the voltigeurs’ emplacement, sending a shower of earth and stones into the pit.
“I picked a lively place to get a ball in my leg,” grunted Jean, who, although curled in a grotesque position, went on puffing at his pipe.
Presently the cannonade ceased altogether and another sound replaced the thunder of the guns, a wild rippling cheer heard above the beat of five thousand hooves. The duet grew louder and louder until Gabriel could see Jean’s mouth opening and closing without being able to hear a syllable that the sergeant uttered.
Suddenly the first horsemen gained the plateau, and went racing past the abandoned gun. The next moment Jean and Gabriel cowered under the wheels while an avalanche of cavalry swept over them. Milhaud’s steel-clad cuirassiers, Lefebvre-Desnouette’s chasseurs, Piré’s and Jacquinot’s lancers, mounted grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, a sea of blue, red, yellow and green uniforms, shouting and screaming, at the enemy and one another, as they crouched over their horses’ necks, heading directly for the squares, pouring across the level ground like the vomit of a volcano, overturning everything in their way until they recoiled from the wall of bayonets jutting from the square or piled up under volleys discharged at point-blank range by men who seldom missed at a hundred paces.
For more than an hour the struggle continued, a contest of weight and speed against stolidity, of impotent sword and ill-aimed pistol against steady crackle of musketry, wave on wave of the finest cavalry in the world hurling itself upon the most dogged infantry in the world.
There was no danger now from French artillery, nor dared the reserve batteries of the British open fire. The small force of British cavalry did not ride out to try conclusions with the twelve thousand horsemen cavorting round the squares. Gabriel stood up in the emplacement, leaning against the gun, while Jean, lying on his side with his face towards the squares, forgot the pain of his wound in the grandeur of the spectacle. Rifts in the all-enveloping smoke showed them fleeting facets of the struggle, a redcoat dragged from his place by the sidelong thrust of a lance, an officer of the chasseurs towed round and round the square by his stirrup iron, the maddened horse overturning others in its frenzy, a wall of dead men and horses piling up at the corners of the square where the volleys were fired into close concentrations, wounded cavalrymen trying to crawl clear of the mêlée, and once a glimpse of Ney himself, astride a huge grey horse, endeavouring to rally the shattered squadrons on the edge of the plateau.
More than once during the struggle Gabriel contemplated lifting Jean on his shoulders and starting off down the decline in the direction of La Haye Sainte, but each time he was about to propose the move fresh squadrons of cavalry poured up the slope, barring the way of retreat. It would have been a matter of extreme difficulty to make his way back to the lines alone. Carrying a wounded man, the attempt would have been quite impossible. So they stayed where they were, in comparative safety, and watched the French cavalry batter itself to pieces against the squares.
Jean raged helplessly. “Why don’t they send infantry? In God’s name why don’t they send up the Guard?”
Gabriel suspected the reason, but said nothing. From his position against the gun he could see what Jean, lying prone, could not see, a line of advancing puffs of smoke moving towards the French right from the direction of the woods that covered the Wavre road. Jean had said Grouchy must come that way, but the smoke puffs could mean only one thing—the advance of another enemy division, Prussians or more British, forcing the French right back on its centre and pushing towards the main road to the south.
The last of the cavalry drew off, hustled from the plateau by thin squadrons of British dragoons, whose ranks had been decimated by the morning encounter in the valley. The squares shook themselves and cleared away the wounded. Blue-uniformed artillerymen ran towards the abandoned pieces on the crest, where some of the guns quickly opened up on the retreating French.
A British sergeant jumped into the emplacement, but after scanning the spiked touch-hole of the gun jumped out again without so much as a glance in their direction. Gabriel ate a few mouthfuls of bread and tried to coax Jean to eat. The sergeant shook his head sadly.
“It’s all over with us, unless Grouchy moves in,” he said. He settled lower in the pit, wincing, and Gabriel asked if his wound was giving pain.
“I’ve had worse,” he replied. “There’s nothing to a clean bullet wound. This one matches the hole they made in me in Spain. I’m unlucky against the British; the Austrians never left a bullet in me.”
There was activity now behind them. The squares were breaking up, deploying into line. Gabriel wondered if the moment had come for a general advance and glanced across at the distant villages on the French right. The puffs of smoke were still no nearer, but they seemed infinitely more numerous. The whole area between the two patches of woodland was shrouded in smoke. Over at Hougomont the air had cleared a little, while the fighting round the château seemed to have died down. The din was transferred to the opposite side of the valley.
All at once Gabriel stared at the French centre. Two teeming columns of infantrymen were moving down the hill into the valley. The setting sun rippled along the line of shouldered arms, but there was no wide sparkle as there had been when their cavalry flooded the slope. Two solid wedges of bearskins were in motion. The Old and Middle Guard were advancing to carry the plateau, moving obliquely across the valley, heading straight for the enemy’s centre, half-way between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte.