The skirmishers fell slowly back before the weight of enemy light troops, but they had done their job which was to keep the French skirmish fire off the waiting line. French officers, swords drawn, marched confidently ahead of the columns. Major-General Nairn gazed at the closest column through a telescope, then slammed the tubes shut. “Not many moustaches there!” The old moustached veterans, the backbone of France, were in their graves, and Nairn had seen how young these counter-attacking Frenchmen were. Perhaps that was why Soult had launched them in column, for raw green troops took courage from the sheer closeness of their comrades in the tightly packed mass of men. It was a formation suited to a conscripted, citizen army, but those citizen conscripts were now closing on the professional killers of Britain and Portugal.
When the columns were eighty paces from Beresford’s forward line, the British and Portuguese officers stirred themselves to give a single laconic order. “Present!”
Four thousand heavy muskets came up in a single rippling movement. The leading ranks of the two French columns, seeing their death, checked their pace, but the weight of men behind forced them onwards.
“Hold your fire!” Sergeants warned redcoats who dragged back the cocks of their weapons. The French, made nervous by the silent threat, opened fire as they marched. Only the men in the first two ranks could actually fire, the rest were there merely to add weight. Here and there along the red-coated line a man might fall, but the French aim was spoiled by the need to fire while marching.
“Close up!” A British Sergeant dragged a dead man back from the line.
“Hold your fire!” An officer, slim sword drawn, watched the blue-coated French column come closer. Four thousand muskets were aimed at the heads of the two columns.
A rattle of drums, a pause, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
One heartbeat. The British muskets were steady, the officers’ swords raised, while the men in either army were close enough now to see the expressions on the others’ faces.
“Fire!”
Like a great cough, or like a gigantic throttling explosion, four thousand muskets flamed smoke and lead, and four thousand brass-bound butts mule-kicked back into men’s shoulders. The smoke spewed to hide the French.
“Reload!”
Sharpe, still off to the right flank, saw the nearer enemy column quiver as the heavy bullets struck home. Blue coats were speckled by blood. The whole front rank crumpled and fell, and most of the second rank too. Only one officer was left standing, and he was wounded. The succeeding French ranks were baulked by the barrier of their own dead and wounded, but then the sheer mass of the deep column forced the new front rank to clamber over the bodies and continue the advance. ‘Vive l’Empereur.r
“Fire!”
Now it was the deadly platoon fire that rippled out of the British and Portuguese lines. Hours of training had made these men into clockwork killers. Each platoon of a battalion fired a couple of seconds after the platoon on its left, and so the bullets seemed never ending as they flicked through the screen of smoke to strike at the French. The fire flayed at the enemy, flensing men off the front and flanks of the column, so that it seemed as if the enemy marched into an invisible mincing machine. The French survivors, inexorably forced to the front ranks, tried to struggle into the storm of musketry, but no man could live against that fire. In the past, in the glorious days when the Emperor’s name struck fear into Europe, the columns had won by overaweing their enemies, but Wellington’s men had long mastered the grim art of bloodying French glory. They did it with musket-fire, the fastest musket-fire in the world. They blackened their faces with the explosions of the priming in their weapons’ pans, they bruised their shoulders with the slamming kicks, and they broke the enemy. Cartridge after cartridge was bitten open, loaded and fired, while in front of the British line the musket wadding burned pale in the scorched grass.
The columns could not move. A few brave men tried to advance, but the bullets cut them down. The survivors edged back and the drumroll faltered.
“Cease fire!” a British voice called. “Fix bayonets!”
Four thousand men drew their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them on to hot muzzles.
“Present!” The voices of the officers and sergeants were calm. Most of these men were veterans and they took pride in sounding unmoved by the carnage of battle. “Battalions will advance! Forward!”
All along the front line the battalions marched stolidly into their own fog of smoke. They had fired blind through the choking screen, but a column could hardly be missed even by men obscured by smoke. Now, at last, they broke through the smoke to see what carnage their disciplined fire had done.
Officers’ swords swept downwards. “Charge!”
Now, and only now, did the British and Portuguese soldiers cheer. Till this moment they had kept silent, but now, with blackened faces and bayonets levelled, they cheered and broke into a quick march.
The French broke. They ran. They left two blood-soaked heaps of dead, dying and wounded men behind and raced back towards safety. A drummer boy wept because a bullet was in his guts. He would die before noon, and his drum would be chopped up for firewood.
“Halt!” The British did not press their charge home. There was no need, for the columns had fled in panic.
“Dress ranks! Unfix bayonets! Skirmishers forward! Reload!”
Major-General Nairn looked down at his watch and noted that it had taken precisely three minutes and twenty seconds to break the French attack. In the past, he reflected, when more moustaches had filled the enemy ranks, it would have taken about six minutes longer. He put the watch away. “Advance the brigade.”
“Battalion will advance!”
“Silence in the ranks!”
“Forward!”
The seemingly tenuous lines started forward again. In two gory places the men stepped clumsily over the piles of enemy dead. The men, long practised in the art, dragged their enemies’ bodies with them for a few paces; giving themselves just enough time to loot the pockets and pouches of the dead or wounded. They took food, coins, talismans and drink. One redcoat kicked the wounded drummer boy’s instrument downhill. The drum’s snares twanged as it bounced and rolled down the long hill.
“Looks like it’s going to be an easy Easter!” Frederickson said happily.
But then the skyline was reached, and the plateau of the ridge’s summit was revealed, and nothing looked easy any more.
CHAPTER 3
The battle, as if by mutual consent, stopped to draw breath.
Beresford used the lull to divide his attack. His left hand division would now slant away to threaten the land between the ridge and the city, while the right division, in which Nairn’s Brigade marched, would advance northwards along the ridge’s summit. Horse artillery was being dragged up the slope to thicken Beresford’s attack. The morning passed. Many of the waiting men fell asleep with their heads pillowed on their packs and their faces shaded by mildewed shakoes. Some ate, and a few just stared emptily at the sky. Some men gazed along the ridge towards the fearful French defences. Every few minutes a random French cannonball bounded through the somnolent lines, provoking an irritated scramble from its bouncing path. Sometimes a howitzer shell banged a sharp explosion on the turf, but the fire was sporadic and allowed most of the waiting men to ignore the enemy. Sharpe watched one fusilier patiently hammer the soft lead of a musketball into a perfect cube, then prick its faces with a touch-hole spike to make a dice. No one would gamble with the man who, disgusted, hurled the lead cube away.
In the early afternoon the battalions which had broken the twin French columns were moved to the rear of Beresford’s new formations. Nairn’s brigade now formed the right flank of the first line. He had his two English battalions forward, and his Highlanders in reserve. The horse gunners stacked their ready ammunition alongside the advanced positions, while the skirmishers deployed as a protective screen even further forward.