The clouds thickened in the west, climbing ever higher and darker.

Twelve miles to the north of Quatre Bras, in the orchard of a farm called Hougoumont which, in turn, was close to the small village of Waterloo, some men were busy thinning the apple crop. They plucked the unripe fruit and tossed it into baskets, thus ensuring that the remaining apples would grow big and juicy. The discarded fruit would be fed to the pigs that lived in the yard of the chateau of Hougoumont.

It was a hot day, and as the men worked they could hear the percussive thumping of the guns to the south. From the top of their ladders they could see the growing cloud of dirty smoke that climbed over the battlefield. They chuckled at the sight, relieved that it was not they who were being shot at, nor their homes being invaded by soldiers, and not their land being ridden ragged by cavalry.

The chateau windows were open and white curtains stirred in the small breeze that offered a slight measure of relief from the stifling heat. A plump woman came to one of the upstairs windows where she rested her arms on the sill and stared at the strange conical smoke canopy that grew in the far southern sky. On the main highway that ran through the valley east of the chateau she could see a stream of soldiers marching south. The men,wore red, and even at this distance she could see they were hurrying. “Better them than us, eh, ma’am?” one of the apple pickers shouted.

“Better them than us,” the woman agreed, then crossed herself.

“We’ll get rain tomorrow,” one of the men remarked, but the others took no notice. They were too busy picking apples. Tomorrow, if it did not rain, they were supposed to finish the haymaking down in the valley’s bottom, and there was a flock of sheep to be sheared as well, while the day after tomorrow, thank the good Lord, they would have a day off because it was Sunday.

More British troops arrived at Quatre Bras, but they had to be sent to the flanks which were under increasing pressure from the French. Sharpe, after scraping home in front of the French cavalry, had been sent through the wood to find Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. The Prince, a dour tough man, had been holding his position, but his ammunition was running low and his men were being killed by the ever-present skirmishers. Newly arrived British infantry were sent to support him, while yet more redcoats were sent to help the Rifles on the left flank who were also under heavy attack from a brigade of French infantry.

“Why don’t they attack our centre with infantry?” Doggett asked Sharpe, who had rejoined Harper behind the crossroads.

“Because they’re being led by a cavalryman.” An Hussar prisoner had revealed that it was Marshal Ney who led the French troops at Quatre Bras. Ney was called ‘the bravest of the brave’, a red-haired cavalryman who would have ridden through the pits of hell without a murmur, but who had yet to launch an infantry attack against the battered defenders at the crossroads.

“You have to understand something about cavalrymen, Mr Doggett,” Harper explained. “They look very fine, so they do, and they usually take all the credit for any victory, but the only brains they’ve got are the ones they keep in their horses’ heads.”

Doggett blushed. “I wanted to be a cavalryman, but my father insisted I joined the Guards.”

“Don’t worry,” Harper said cheerfully, “the Guards aren’t our brightest lads either. God save Ireland, but just look at those poor boys.”

The poor boys were the Highlanders beyond the crossroads who could only stand and be slaughtered by the French guns. They were in square, which made them a tempting target for the French artillerymen, and they dared not relinquish the formation for fear of the French cavalry that watched them like hawks. The Scotsmen could only stand while the roundshot slammed into the files, and each shot that struck home killed two or three men, sometimes more. Once Harper saw a roundshot strike the flanking face of a square and ten men went down in a single bloody smear. The British artillery at the crossroads was being saved for any French infantry attack, though once in a while a gun would try to hit a French cannon. Such counter-battery fire was almost always wasted, but as the infantry’s suffering dragged on the Duke ordered more of it simply to help the morale of the redcoats.

“Why don’t we do something?” Doggett asked plaintively.

“What’s to do?” Harper asked. “The bloody Belgians won’t fight, so we haven’t got any cavalry. It’s called being an infantryman, Mr Doggett. Your job is to stand there and get slaughtered.”

“Patrick?” Sharpe had been staring up the Nivelles road. “Do you see what I see?”

Harper twisted in his saddle. “Bloody hell, sir, you’re right!” A further brigade of British infantry was arriving, and among the troops was the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. Sharpe and Harper spurred towards their old battalion.

Sharpe stood his horse beside the road and took off his hat as the leading company came abreast. It was his old company, the light, led by Peter d’Alembord. The men’s faces were pale with dust, through which the rivulets of sweat had driven dark trails. Daniel Hagman raised a cheer as Sharpe tossed them a full canteen of water. D’Alembord, his white dancing breeches stained from the wax with which his saddle had been polished, reined in beside the two Riflemen and looked dubiously towards the smear of smoke that marked the battlefield. “How is it?”

“It’s stiff work, Peter,” Sharpe admitted.

“Is Boney here?” It was the same question that nearly every newly arriving officer had asked, as though the presence of the Emperor would dignify the day’s death and dismemberment.

“Not so far as we know.” Sharpe saw that his answer disappointed d’Alembord.

The brigade halted while Sir Colin Halkett, its commander, discovered where his four battalions were wanted. Lieutenant-Colonel Ford and his two Majors, Vine and Micklewhite, walked their horses up the road until they came close to where Sharpe, d’Alembord and Harper chatted. Ford, myopically peering towards the cannon smoke, realized too late that he had come close to Sharpe, whose presence made him feel so uncomfortable and inadequate, but he put a brave face on the chance meeting. “It sounds brisk, Sharpe, does it not?”

“It’s certainly hard work, Ford,” Sharpe said mildly.

No one seemed to be able to find anything else to say. Ford smiled with a general benignity which he thought fitting to a colonel, while Major Vine scowled at the men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers who had slumped on the roadside, and Major Micklewhite pretended to be enthralled by the enamel picture on the lid of his snuffbox. A sudden explosion was loud enough to penetrate the half-deaf ears of Major Vine who twisted round to see that a British gun limber, crammed with ready ammunition, had been struck by a French shell and was now spewing a thick skein of smoke and flames into the sky.

Colonel Ford had jumped at the sudden violence of the explosion, and now he gazed through his thick spectacles at the rest of the battlefield, which appeared as a threatening blur of trampled corn, blood, smoke, and the lumped bodies of the dead. Cannon-balls were ploughing through the slurry of rye and soil, spewing gouts of earth before bouncing into the bloody lines of Highlanders. “Dear God,” Ford said with rather more feeling than he had intended.

“Watch out for their skirmishers,” Sharpe advised drily. “They seem to have more of the bastards than usual.”

“More?” The tone to Ford’s voice betrayed the Colonel’s fear of taking his battalion into the cauldron beyond the crossroads.

“You might like to think about deploying an extra company as skirmishers,” Sharpe, well aware of Ford’s uncertainty, offered the advice as forcefully as he could without sounding patronizing, “but warn the lads to keep an eye open for the cavalry. They’re never very far away.” Sharpe pointed across the highway to where the stream fed a small lake behind Gemioncourt farm. “There’s a fold in the ground over there and it’s swarming with the evil buggers.”