Trumpet calls sounded far to Sharpe’s left, were repeated ever closer, and the first line of Beresford’s attack started forward. The second line was held for a moment before it too was ordered into motion. Almost at once the careful alignments of the thin lines wavered because of the ground’s unevenness. Sergeants began bellowing orders for the men to watch their dressing. The officers’ horses, as if sensing what waited for them, became skittish.
“Are you here to take command?” Frederickson asked Sharpe as the skirmishers started forward.
“Are you the senior Captain?”
Frederickson cast a dour look at the Captains of the three redcoat Light Companies. “By a very long way.”
The sour tone told Sharpe that Frederickson was resenting the lack of promotion. Rank was clearly more important to a man who planned to stay in the army, and Frederickson well knew how slow promotion could be in peacetime when there were no cannons and muskets to create convenient vacancies. And Frederickson, more than any man Sharpe knew, deserved promotion. Sharpe made a mental note to ask Nairn if he could help, then smiled. “I won’t interfere with you, William. I’ll just watch, so fight your own battle.”
“The last one,” Frederickson said almost in wonder. “I suppose that’s what it will be. Our last battle. Let us make it a good one, sir. Let’s send some souls to hell.”
“Amen.”
The three advancing lines seemed very fragile as they climbed upwards. The sweep of the lines was interrupted by the battalions’ colours; splashes of bright cloth guarded by the long, shining-bladed halberds. Following the three lines were the battalion bands, all playing different tunes so that the belly-jarring thump of their big drums clashed. The music was jaunty, rhythmic and simple; the music for death.
Frederickson’s Riflemen were mingled with the redcoats of the other three Light companies. Those redcoats carried the quick-firing but short-ranged muskets, while the Green-jackets had the more accurate, longer-ranged rifle that was slow to reload. The mixture of weapons could be lethal; the rifles killed with precision and were protected by the muskets. The men were scattered now, making a screen to repel the attack of any French skirmishers.
Yet so far no enemy had threatened the cumbersome advance. Even the ridge’s centre batteries had ceased their speculative firing. Sharpe could see nothing but the empty skyline and a wisp of high cloud. The thin turf on the slope was dryer than the bottom-ground. A hare raced across the advance’s front, then slewed and scampered downhill. A hawk hovered for a few seconds above Taplow’s colours, then slid disdainfully westwards. From beyond the crest came the sound of a French band playing a quick march; the only evidence that a real enemy waited for Beresford’s thin lines.
The slope steepened and Sharpe’s breath shortened. The enemy’s invisibility seemed ominous. Marshal Soult had been given three hours to observe the preparations for this attack; three hours in which he could prepare a devil’s reception for the three lines that struggled up the ridge. Somewhere ahead of the attack, beyond the empty skyline, the enemy waited with charged barrels and drawn blades. The old game was about to be played once more; the Goddamns against the Crapauds. The game of Crecy and Agincourt, Ramillies and Blenheim. The air was very clear; so clear that when Sharpe turned he could see a woman driving two cows to pasture a half mile beyond the western river. The sight of the woman made Sharpe think of Jane. He knew that he could have accompanied Jane home without any shame, and that even now he could be sitting in England, but instead he was on a French hillside and on the brink of battle’s horror.
He turned back to the east just in time to see a redcoat among Frederickson’s flank skirmishers bend double, clutch his belly, and start gasping for breath. At first Sharpe thought the man was winded, then he saw the puff of dirty white smoke higher on the slope. The redcoat toppled backwards, blood drenching his grey breeches. More French skirmishers fired from positions that had been concealed in a tumble of rocks. The enemy would soon be on the flank of the advance unless they were shifted.
“We’re going to clear those scum out of there!” Frederickson had seen the danger just as soon as Sharpe. He had a company of redcoats offer rapid fire to keep the enemy subdued while Sergeant Harper led a squad with fixed sword-bayonets in a flanking charge. The Frenchmen did not stay to contest the rocks, but retreated nimbly up towards the empty skyline. One of the retreating Frenchmen was hit in the back by a rifle bullet, and Marcos Hernandez, one of Frederickson’s Spanish Riflemen, grinned with pleasure at his own deadly marksmanship.
“Cease fire!” Frederickson called. “Well done, lads. Now don’t bunch up! You’re not in love with each other, so spread out!” Sweet William had taken ofF his eye-patch and removed his false teeth so that he looked like some monstrous being from the grave. He seemed much happier now that the first shots had been fired. Hernandez reloaded, then scored a line on the butt of his rifle to mark another hated Frenchman killed.
The surviving French skirmishers ran over the skyline from where, though the source of the noise stayed hidden, came the sudden sound of massed French drums. The instruments rattled the sky. Sharpe had first heard that malicious sound when he was sixteen and he had heard it on unnumbered battlefields since. He knew what it portended. He was listening to the pas de charge, the heartbeat of an Empire and the sound that drove French infantry to the attack.
“D’you see guns, Sergeant?” Frederickson shouted to Harper who was some yards further up the slope.
“Not a one, sir!”
Then the skyline, as though sown by dragon’s teeth, sprouted men.
“Christ in his Scottish heaven.” Major-General Nairn, surrounded by his junior aides, sounded disgusted with the enemy. “You’d have thought the woollen-headed bastards would have learned by now.” He sheathed his sword and glowered dour disapproval at the two enemy columns.
“Learned, sir?” the young aide, whose first battle this was, asked nervously.
“You are about to see the God-damned Frogs damned even further.” Nairn took a watch from his fob pocket and snapped open the lid. “Good God! If they’re going to offer battle, then they might as well do it properly!”
The aide did not understand, but every veteran in the British attack knew what was about to happen and felt relieved because of it. They had climbed in fear of waiting artillery that would have gouged bloody ruin in the three attacking lines. Even more they had feared the conjunction of artillery and cavalry, for the cavalry would have forced the attacking infantry into protective squares that would have made choice targets for the French gunners. Instead they were faced with the oldest French tactic; a counterattack by columns of massed infantry.
Two such columns were advancing over the skyline. The two columns were immense formations of crammed soldiers, rank after rank of infantrymen assembled into human battering rams that were aimed at the seemingly fragile British lines. These were the same columns that the Emperor Napoleon had led across a continent to smash his enemies’ armies into broken and panicked mobs, but no such column had ever broken an army led by Wellington.
“Halt!” All along the British and Portuguese lines the order was shouted. Sergeants dressed the battalions while the skirmishers readied themselves to beat off the French light troops who, advancing in front of the columns, were supposed to unsettle the British line with random musketry.
The French light troops offered no threat to Beresford; instead it was the momentum of the two great columns that was supposed to drive his men into chaos. Yet, like Wellington, Beresford had faced too many columns to be worried now. His first line would deal with their threat, while his second and third lines would merely be spectators. That first line stood to attention, muskets grounded, and gazed up the long sloping sward over which the two giant formations marched. The French columns looked irresistible, their weight alone seeming sufficient to drive them through the thin skeins of waiting men. Above the Frenchmen’s heads waved their flags and eagles. In the centre of the formations the drummer boys kept up the pas de charge, pausing only to let the marching men shout ‘Vive l’Empereur’ between each flurry of drumbeats. The veterans among the waiting British and Portuguese battalions, who had seen it all before, seemed unmoved.