The French gunners opened fire again, this time using short-barrelled howitzers that fired shells in a high arc over the heads of their own columns, and which exploded in small dirty gouts of flame and smoke.

The first French skirmishers were appearing at the edge of the trampled area. The Dutch skirmishers had yielded the field, retreating to their battalions, so now the scattering of enemy Voltigeurs could kneel unmolested at the rye’s edge and fire at the waiting defenders. Men began to fall. Others screamed. Some died. The main enemy attack was still nothing but a sound of blended menace; a crashing noise in the rye, a thump of drums and a deep-throated cheer.

Rebecque galloped back towards the Dutch battery, shouting at its Colonel to open fire on the concealed columns, but the Colonel was staring at one of his officers who had been killed by a skirmisher’s bullet. The officer lay on the chalky road where his blood showed remarkably bright against the white dust. Other gunners were falling. A bullet clanged monstrously loud on a brass barrel and ricocheted up into the sky.

“Fire!” Rebecque shouted angrily at the gunners.

The artillery Colonel jerked round, stared at Rebecque for an instant, then bellowed his own orders, but instead of ordering a killing volley into the tall rye, he commanded his men to retreat. The drivers whipped the horse teams onto the road while the gun crews manhandled the weapons back to hook them on to their limbers. The huge ammunition wagons set off for the crossroads, their massive iron-rimmed wheels digging great gouges into the road’s surface. The gun teams began to follow, but two teams collided, their limber wheels locked, and there was a sudden tangle of cursing drivers, stalled cannon and frightened horses.

Sharpe had spurred forward. “Where are you going?” he shouted in French across the chaos.

“Back!” the gunner Colonel shouted over the noise of an exploding howitzer shell.

“Stop at the farm! Stop at Gemioncourt!” Sharpe knew the panic could not be controlled here, where the French columns filled the air with menace, but perhaps the sturdy walls of Gemioncourt would give these gunners some necessary reassurance.

“Back! Back the gun away!” The Colonel slashed with his riding crop as he tried to disentangle the trapped limbers. Another volley of French howitzer-fire miraculously missed the melee of gunners and horses which, stung by the shells’ threat, magically disentangled itself. The fleeing Dutch guns crashed up onto the road, their chains and buckets swinging. Those gunners who had no riding place on the guns or limbers were running down the verges in an undisciplined retreat.

“Stop at the farm!” Sharpe bellowed after the gunner Colonel.

An howitzer shell screamed down to smash the wheel of the last gun limber. For a second the shell lay with a smoking fuse amidst the wreckage of the wheel, then it crashed apart in a deafening explosion. One horse died instantly, its guts flung red and wet across the road. Another screaming beast collapsed on broken hind legs. The rest of the team, panicking, tried to gallop free and only slewed the broken limber round. A gunner fell off his seat on the ammunition box and was crushed by the limber’s scraping violence. He clawed at the broken wheel that first dragged him across, then pinned him to the road. The other gunners ignored him; instead they slashed at the traces with swords or knives, eventually freeing the four live horses which galloped wild-eyed towards Gemioncourt. The dying horse was mercifully shot by an officer who then took off after his men, abandoning the gun.

The man under the limber was also abandoned. He was left screaming in a terrible wailing sob that made the nearest infantry look nervously round. Harper rode up to the man and saw the broken wheel spokes impaled in his belly and groin. He took the rifle off his shoulder, aimed it, and shot once.

The French skirmishers cheered their victory over the panicked gun teams, then turned their muskets on the nearest Belgian battalions. The Prince of Orange was shouting at his men to stand fast, to wait, but the attrition of the skirmishers was fraying their nerves. They began to edge backwards.

“They’ll not stand!” Harper warned Sharpe.

“The buggers bloody well will.” Sharpe spurred towards the nearest Belgians, but before he could even get close to the battalion a French column burst out of the rye and the Belgians, without even firing a volley, turned and ran. One moment they were a formed battalion and the next they were a mob. Sharpe reined in. Two howitzer shells exploded a few paces from his horse, both blasts beginning small fires among the rye. The French were cheering. The Prince was hitting at the running men with the flat of his sabre, but they feared an emperor far more than they feared a prince and so they kept on running. The other battalions were infected by the panic and also fled. The French skirmishers turned their force on the Prince’s staff.

Rebecque, his eyes red and swollen from hay fever, reined his horse alongside Sharpe. “This isn’t a very impressive beginning, is it?”

“Get out of here, sir!” Sharpe could hear the hiss and whiplash of musket bullets all around them.

“Can you find out what’s happening to Saxe-Weimar?” Rebecque asked.

Sharpe nodded. “I will, sir! But you go! Now!” The first French skirmishers were running forward but, instead of tackling the staff officers who still lingered close to the Dutch position, they laid their hands on the abandoned gun, the first trophy of their attack.

A trumpet sounded behind the column and a Dutch aide shouted a warning of enemy cavalry. The Prince turned his horse and galloped north towards Gemioncourt and Quatre Bras. Rebecque galloped after the Prince, while Sharpe and Harper rode west. All along the centre of the position the Dutch had collapsed, leaving a great inviting hole into which the French could swarm, yet from the far right flank there still came the sound of reassuring volleys, proof that Saxe-Weimar’s men were defending staunchly.

Prince Bernhard’s battalions, which had held the crossroads the night before, now protected it again. They were retreating from the French attack, but they were not running. Instead they were marching backwards and pausing every few steps to fire steady and effective volleys at their French attackers. Those Frenchmen, Sharpe noticed, had deployed from column into a line that overlapped and outnumbered Saxe-Weimar’s brigade, yet the Nassauers were fighting well. Better still, instead of retreating back to the crossroads, they were going to the cover of the dark wood which ran like a bastion down the left flank of the French route to Quatre Bras. If the Prince could hold the wood, and the centre was somehow saved, there was still a chance.

It was a very slight chance, a mere wisp of straw snatched against an overwhelming disaster, for Sharpe could not see how any general, let alone a pimpled prince, could reform the broken troops of the centre and stop the French from sweeping forward to take the crossroads. And once the crossroads were taken, then no British troops could reach the Prussians and thus the armies would be irrevocably split and the Emperor would have won his campaign.

“We’re going back!” Sharpe shouted at Harper.

They turned their horses away from Saxe-Weimar’s men who were now edging the treeline with deadly musketry. Sharpe and Harper trotted northwards, staying a few hundred yards ahead of the advancing French. To their left was the long forbidding wood with its tangle of trees and stubborn defenders. In the centre was Gemioncourt farm which should have been a fortress to hold up the French, but was now empty because the Belgian guns and infantry had fled straight past the farm, thus yielding its strong walls and loopholed barns to the enemy. Far ahead of Sharpe was the crossroads itself where the dark mass of fugitives was milling in confusion, while to the right, and acting somewhat as another bastion, was a smaller wood and a handful of cottages.