“Look! Look!” Harper was standing in his stirrups, pointing and cheering at the smaller wood to the right. “God bless the bastards! Well done, lads!” For in that far wood, which protected the road that ran towards the Prussian army, were Riflemen. Greenjackets. The best of the Goddamn best. The British reinforcements had started to arrive.

But behind Sharpe and Harper the victorious French marched on, and between them and the crossroads there was nothing.

The Prince of Orange, blithely disregarding that nearly half of his troops had fled the field, greeted the Duke of Wellington with good news. “We’re holding the woods!” he announced in a tone that implied victory was thereby guaranteed.

The Duke, returning from Ligny where the Prussians waited for Napoleon’s attack, cast a cold eye on the fugitives who streamed northwards towards Brussels, then turned a grave face on the excited Prince. “The woods?” The Duke’s polite request for a more precise report was icy.

“Over there.” The Prince pointed vaguely towards the right flank. “Isn’t that so, Rebecque?”

Rebecque deferred to Sharpe, who had actually visited the right flank. “Prince Bernhard’s brigade retreated into the woods, sir. They’re holding the tree line.”

The Duke nodded curt acknowledgement, then urged his horse a few paces forward so he could survey the ruin he had inherited from the Prince of Orange. The Belgian troops had been driven from all the forward farms and, even more disastrously, had failed to garrison Gemioncourt. French cavalry, artillery and infantry had already advanced as far as the stream and it couid only be a matter of moments before they thrust a strong attack at the vital crossroads. The only good news was that Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s men held the woods on the right, thus denying the French the shelter of the trees as they attacked the crossroads, but that slim advantage would count for nothing unless the Duke could construct another defensive line to protect the highway.

The materials for that line were at last arriving. The Riflemen that Harper had seen were the vanguard of Sir Thomas Picton’s Fifth Division. The rest of that division was now marching through the crossroads and past the remnants of the dispirited Belgians.

“I promised Blücher we’d march to his aid,” the Duke greeted Sir Thomas Picton, “but only if we weren’t attacked here.” A French gun fired a ranging shot from Gemioncourt and the ball skipped off the road, past the Duke and crashed into a wall of the farm at the crossroads. “It seems the Prussians will have to fight without us today,” the Duke said drily, then gestured towards the fields which lay to the left of Quatre Bras. “Your men to line the road there, Sir Thomas, with your right flank in front of the crossroads.”

Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton, a burly and bad-tempered man who had fought gallantly through Spain, glared at the Duke. „I’ll not take orders from that bloody little Dutch boy.“

“You will take orders from me, Picton, and not from His Royal Highness. I quite agree. May I trouble you now to obey those orders?”

Picton, dressed in a top hat and a civilian coat that looked like a farmer’s cast-off, obeyed. His infantry marched through the disorganized Dutch battalions and took their station just south of the Nivelles road. Closest to the crossroads was the 92nd, a Highland battalion in kilts, cath-dath hose and black plumed bonnets. Next to them were more Highlanders, the 42nd or Black Watch, who wore a dark plaid and red hackles, and whose officers flaunted vultures’ feathers in their caps and carried lethal broadswords. Next to them were the 44th, the East Essex, placid country men in coats of yellow-faced scarlet. All three battalions were veterans, immune to French drums and French cheers, and content to smoke their short clay pipes as they waited to see what the day would bring from the long fields of rye.

The French batteries had been moved forward from Frasnes to the slopes above Gemioncourt. Their gunners now made the last adjustments to their cannons’ elevating screws, while the infantry, which had taken the battlefield’s centre with scarce a scratch to themselves, rested in the rye. The French seemed to have no sense of urgency, perhaps believing the battle for Quatre Bras already won. Seven miles to the east another and larger battle had begun, evidenced by the sudden and overwhelming sound of cannon salvos that rolled and punched across the intervening countryside. The Emperor had launched his attack on the Prussians.

The first batteries of British artillery reached Quatre Bras and were ordered to unlimber at the crossroads. Almost immediately the gunners came under strong musket-fire from French skirmishers who had crept forward in the long rye. The enemy Voltigeurs were especially thick in the wedge of field between the highway and the woods where Saxe-Weimar’s men kept up their stubborn resistance. The Highlanders sent their light companies forward to beat back the French.

Sharpe was a skirmisher himself and he watched the light companies’ battle with a professional eye. The job of the skirmisher was simple enough. A battle line was a mass of close-packed men who could fire a deadly weight of metal in disciplined volleys, but to upset those men and thin their ranks, the skirmishers were sent ahead like a swarm of wasps to sting and unsettle them. The best way to defeat the skirmishers was with other skirmishers, the two swarms meeting in a private battle between the lines. It was a battle that the British were accustomed to winning against the French, but today the French seemed to have deployed far more skirmishers than usual. The Highlanders made a spirited attack, but were held up at the field’s margin by the sheer weight of French musket-fire that smoked and flickered out of the rye.

“There’s thousands of the buggers!” Harper had never seen a French skirmish line so overwhelming in numbers.

“I thought you were staying out of trouble?” Sharpe had to raise his voice over the sound of the French fire.

“I am.”

Then get back!“

Even more French skirmishers were pushing forward so that all along the line of Picton’s division the redcoats were falling and the Sergeants had begun their litany of battle. “Close up! Close up!” The light companies were helpless against such a horde of enemy skirmishers. Twice the Duke sent whole battalions forward in line to sweep the French Voltigeurs away, but as soon as the British battalion resumed its station the enemy skirmishers crept back and their musket smoke blossomed again from the rye’s margin. The cartridge wadding from the French guns had begun small fires in the dry crops. The flames crackled palely in the strong sunlight, adding yet more smoke to the thickening cloud of powder smoke.

Cavalry reached the crossroads. They came down the Nivelles road in a cheerful jingle of curb chains. The horsemen were Dutch-Belgians and Brunswickers. The black-coated Brunswick-ers were commanded by their own Duke who led a charge into the wedge of field that lay to the west of the highway. The French skirmishers fled the Duke of Brunswick’s sabres like mice fleeing a scourge of cats, but then the death’s head horsemen came across a French infantry brigade that was concealed in the tall crops beyond the stream. The brigade had formed squares and blasted the German horsemen with volleys of musket-fire so that the cavalry milled about in confusion, men and horses dropping, until, bleeding and baulked, they were forced to retire. Some galloped for safety into the wood, others retreated through the rye to the crossroads. The Duke of Brunswick was dead.

The Prince of Orange had been inspired by the success of the Brunswickers. He galloped past Sharpe. “Come on, Sharpe! Come on! That’s the way to clear them off!”