Temeraire said, low, “I did not know battles could be so large; where are we to go? Some of those men are far away; we cannot help all of them.”

“We can but play our own part as best we can,” Laurence answered him. “It is not for any one man or dragon to win the day; that is the business of the generals. We must look sharp to our orders and our signals, and achieve what they ask of us.”

Temeraire made an uneasy rumble. “But what if we should not have very good generals?”

The question was unpleasantly apt; at once the involuntary comparison sprang to mind between that lean and glittering-eyed man on the heights, so full of certainty and command, and the old men in their pavilions with their councils and arguments and endlessly changing orders. Below to the back of the field he could see Hohenlohe on his horse, his white-powdered wig in place, with his knot of aides-de-camp and men running back and forth around him; Tauentzein, Holtzendorf, and Blücher were moving among their separate troops; the Duke of Brunswick was not yet upon the field, his army still hurrying back from their aborted retreat. None of them distant strangers to sixty; and they faced on the French side the Marshals who had fought and clawed their way through the Revolutionary wars and the man who held their reins, any one of whom could have given them twenty years.

“Good or bad, our duty remains the same and that of any man,” Laurence said, thrusting aside with an effort such unworthy thoughts. “Discipline on the field may win the day even if the strategy be flawed, and its absence will ensure defeat.”

“I do see,” Temeraire said, resuming his flight: up ahead, the French light-weight dragons were rising again to harry the unfolding ranks of the Prussian battalions, and Eroica and his formation had turned to meet them. “With so many men, all must obey, or there would be no order at all; they cannot even see themselves as we can, and know how they stand in the whole.” He paused and added anxiously and low, “Laurence, if—only if—we were to lose this war, and the French were to try again to come into England, surely we would be able to stop them?”

“Better not to lose,” Laurence said grimly, and then they were back into the thick of it, the tableau of the battlefield dissolving into the hundred private struggles of their own corner of the war.

By the early afternoon they could feel the tide shifting in their direction for the first time. Brunswick’s army was pouring back in double-quick time, long before Bonaparte could have expected them, and Hohenlohe had sent out all his battalions: twenty of them already now deployed in parade-ground form upon the open field and preparing to make an assault against the leading corps of French infantry, who were hunkered down in a small village near the center of the battle.

Still the French heavy-weights had not engaged, and the larger Prussian dragons were growing exasperated. As Temeraire said, “It does not feel right to me, only batting around these little fellows; where are the big dragons from their side? This is not much of a fair fight.” By the sound of Eroica’s loud and grumbling response, he wholly agreed, and his swipes at the little French dragons were beginning to be desultory.

At last one Prussian courier, a high-flying Mauerfuchs, risked a quick overflight of the French camp while the rest of them engaged the light-weights at close quarters. He winged back almost at once in a flurry to say the larger French dragons were no longer bringing in men, and now were all lying about on the ground, eating and some even napping. “Oh!” Temeraire said, outraged, “they must all be great cowards, sleeping when there is a battle going on; what do they mean by it?”

“We can be grateful for it; they must have worn themselves all out lugging about those guns,” Granby said.

“Yet at this rate they will be well-rested enough when they come in,” Laurence said; their own side had been flying hours with only the briefest pauses for water. “Perhaps we ought take turns ourselves; Temeraire, will you not land a while?”

“I am not at all tired,” Temeraire protested, “and look, those dragons are trying some mischief over there,” he added, and dashed away without waiting for an answer, so they all had to cling to his harness to keep from being flung off their feet as he collided mid-air with a startled and squalling pair of French light-weights, who had only been circling around looking over the battlefield, and who promptly fled his attack.

Before Laurence could renew his suggestion, loud cheering rang out below and their attention was distracted: in the teeth of the continuing terrible artillery-fire, Queen Louise herself had come out and was galloping along the Prussian line, escorted only by a handful of dragoons, the Prussian banner streaming out brilliantly behind their little party. She wore a colonel’s uniform coat over her clothing and the stiff-sided plumed hat also, with her hair caught up snugly beneath it. The soldiers yelled her name wildly: she was perhaps the heart of the Prussian War Party and had long urged a resistance to Napoleon and his predations of Europe. Her bravery could not fail to put heart into the men; the King also was on the field, his banner showing farther on the Prussian left, and all throughout the ranks the senior officers had exposed themselves with their men to the fire.

She had no sooner cleared the field than the order was given; in another sort of encouragement, bottles were going down across the front ranks, men pouring the liquor straight into their mouths. The drums beat out the signal, and the infantry charged straight out from their lines with bayonets leveled, men screaming with raw voices, and stormed into the narrow lanes of the village.

The death-toll was hideous: from behind every garden wall and window the French sharp-shooters arose and put forth a ceaseless fire, and near enough every bullet found a mark; while down the straight-aways of the main tracks of the village the artillery pounded away, canister-shot breaking apart into deadly shrapnel as it flew from the mouths of the guns. But the Prussians came onward with irresistible force, and one after another the guns were silenced as they poured into the farmhouses, the barns, the gardens, the pigsties, and hacked down the French soldiers at their places.

The village was lost, and the French battalions were pouring out its back, retreating in good order but retreating nonetheless, for nearly the first time that day. The Prussians roared and kept coming onwards: behind the village they drew back together into line again under the shouts of their sergeants and threw the terrible volley-fire upon the retreating French again.

“That is a great success, Laurence, is it not?” Temeraire said jubilantly. “And now surely we will push them back still further?”

“Yes,” Laurence said, full of inexpressible relief, leaning over to shake hands with Badenhaur in congratulation, “now we will see some proper work done.”

But they had no further opportunity to watch the ground-battle unfold; Badenhaur’s hand abruptly tightened on Laurence’s with surprise, and the young Prussian officer pointed him around: from the summit of the Landgrafenberg the massed forces of the French aerial corps were rising, the heavy-weights coming to the battle at last.

The Prussian dragons gave almost as one a loud roar of delight, and full of renewed energy began to shout out taunting remarks on the subject of the French dragons’ late entry to the field as they waited for the others to move into formation and close. The French light-weights, who had so valiantly held the field all day, made now one heroic final effort and kept up a sort of screen before the oncoming dragons, darting back and forth around the Prussians’ heads to obscure their view, wings flapping distractingly in their faces. The bigger dragons impatiently snorted and lashed out here and there, but without much attention, rather craning their heads to see. Only at the last moments did the light-weights pull away, and Laurence saw the French were not coming in formation at all.