And in the early afternoon, and before the hurrying British reinforcements could reach the crossroads, the Prince’s wish was granted. An enemy cannon banged its signal.

And the French, at last, were advancing to battle.

“Was that a gun? I swear that was a gun. Would you say that was a gun, Vine?” Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Ford, commanding officer of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, twisted in his saddle and stared anxiously at his senior Major who, because he was deaf, had heard nothing. Major Vine, thus unable to confirm or deny the sound which had so alarmed his Colonel, merely offered a bad-tempered scowl as a reply, so Colonel Ford looked past him to seek the opinion of the Captain of his light company. “Was that a gun, d’Alembord? Would you say that was a gun?”

D’Alembord, his head aching with hangover, still wore his white dancing breeches and buckled shoes from the night before. He did not want to speak to anyone, let alone Ford, but he made an effort and confirmed that the Colonel had indeed heard a cannon’s report, but very far away and with its sound much muted by the humid air.

“We’re going to be late!” Ford worried.

Just at this moment d’Alembord did not care how late they would be. He just wanted to lie down somewhere very dark and very cool and very silent. He wished the Colonel would go away, but he knew Ford would keep pestering until he received some reassurance. “The brigade marched on time, sir,” he told the worried Ford, “and no one can expect more of us.”

“There’s another gun! D’you hear it, Vine? There! And another! ’Pon my soul, d’Alembord, but it’s begun, it’s begun indeed!“ Ford’s eyes, behind their small thick spectacles, betrayed excited alarm. Ford was a decent man, and a kind one, but he had a worrying nervousness that aggravated d’Alembord’s patience. The Colonel fretted about the opinions of senior officers, the diligence of his junior officers, and the loyalty of his non-commissioned officers. He worried about the spare ammunition, about the ability of the men to hear orders in battle, and about the morality of the wives who followed the marching column like a gypsy rabble. He agonized about losing his spectacles, for Ford was as short-sighted as a mole, and he worried about losing his battalion’s colours, and about losing his hair. He was ever anxious about the weather and, when he could think of nothing else to be anxious about, he became worried that he must have forgotten something important that should have been causing him worry.

The ever-anxious Ford had been appointed to replace Major Richard Sharpe as commanding officer of the battalion, which of itself was cause for the Colonel to worry, for Joseph Ford was keenly aware that the Rifleman had been a most competent and experienced soldier. Nor did it help Ford that many of his junior officers and a good third of his rankers had seen far more fighting then he had himself. Ford had been appointed to the battalion in the dying weeks of the last war, and he had only experienced a few skirmishes, yet now he must lead the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers against the Emperor’s field army, a realization that naturally occasioned Ford constant trepidation. “But at least“, he comforted his officers, ”it’s a veteran battalion.“

“It is that, Colonel, it is that.” Major Vine, a small, strutting, dark-eyed, bad-tempered stoat of a man, always agreed with the Colonel when he managed to hear what the Colonel had actually said.

Ford, distrusting such easy agreement, would seek support for his views from the more experienced officers of the battalion, but those officers, such as Peter d’Alembord, doubted whether the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers could truthfully be called a veteran battalion. A third of its men were new recruits who had seen no fighting, almost another third had seen as little as the Colonel, while only the rest, like d’Alembord, had actually faced a French army in open battle. Still, that experienced third was the battalion’s backbone; the men whose voices would stiffen the ranks and give the Colonel the victory he needed in his opening engagement. And that was all d’Alembord prayed for at this moment, that Ford would learn success fast and thus calm his worried fears.

D’Alembord also prayed for a swift and overwhelming victory for himself. He wanted to return to England where a bride and a house and a secure civilian future waited for him. His bride was called Anne Nickerson, the daughter of an Essex landowner whose reluctant consent to an army marriage had turned to wholehearted approval when Peter d’Alembord had put up his captaincy for sale.

Then, just as d’Alembord was about to sell his commission and retire to one of his prospective father-in-law’s farms, Napoleon had returned to France. Colonel Ford, worried that he was losing his veteran Captain of skirmishers, had begged d’Alembord to stay for the impending campaign and implicit in the Colonel’s plea was a promise that d’Alembord would receive the next vacant majority in the battalion. That enticement was sufficient. The captaincy would sell for fifteen hundred pounds which was a good enough fortune for any young man contemplating marriage, but a majority would fetch two thousand six hundred pounds, and so d’Alembord, with some misgivings, but reassured by the prospects of a fine marriage portion, had agreed to Ford’s request.

Now, ahead of d’Alembord, the gun-fire rumbled like dull thunder to remind him that the two thousand six hundred pounds must be earned the hard way. D’Alembord, contemplating how much happiness he now stood to lose, shivered with a premonition, then told himself that he had always feared the worst before every battle.

Joseph Ford, frightened because he was about to fight his first real battle, worried that either he or his men might not do their duty and, as ever when worry overwhelmed him, he snatched off his spectacles and polished their lenses on his sash. He believed that such a commonplace action expressed a careless insouciance, whereas it really betrayed his fretting nervousness.

Yet, this day as they marched towards the gun-fire, the men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were oblivious of their Colonel’s fears. They trudged on, breathing the dust of the dry summer road that had been shuffled up by the boots ahead, and they wondered if there would be an issue of rum before the fighting began, or whether they would be too late for the fighting and would instead be billeted in some soft Belgian village where the girls would flirt and the food would be plentiful.

“It’s sounding bad,” Private Charlie Weller spoke of the distant gun-fire, which did not really sound so very awful yet, but Weller was feeling a flicker of nervousness and wanted the relief of conversation.

“We’ve heard worse that that, Charlie,” Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in the light company, said, but he spoke tiredly, dutifully, unthinkingly. Hagman was a kind man, who recognized Charlie Weller’s apprehension, but the day was too hot, the sun too fierce, and the dust too parching for kindness to have much of a chance.

Major Vine curbed his horse to watch the ten companies march past. He snapped at the men to pick up their feet and straighten their shoulders. They took no notice. They did not like Vine, recognizing that the Major despised them as a lumpen, dull ugly mass, but the men themselves knew better; they were Wellington’s infaritry, the finest of the best, and they were marching east and south to where a pall of gun-smoke was forming like a dark cloud over a far crossroads and to where the guns cleared their throats to beckon men to battle.

The French attack began with a cannonade which punched billows of grey-black smoke into the hazing dancing air above the village of Frasnes. The Prince of Orange, unable to resist the lure of danger, galloped from the crossroads to be with those troops closest to the enemy, and the Prince’s staff, their luncheon brutally interrupted by the French gun-fire, hurried after him.