A single horseman rode to the solitary elm tree. The horseman wore a blue civilian coat over white buckskin breeches and tall black boots. About his neck was a white cravat, while on his cocked hat were four cockades, one each for England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. A blue cloak was rolled on the pommel of his saddle. His staff closed in behind as His Grace the Duke of Wellington stared through a spyglass at the tavern called La Belle Alliance. The military commissioners of Austria, Spain, Russia and Prussia attended the Duke, and like him trained their telescopes at the far ridge. Some civilians had also ridden from Brussels to observe the fighting and they too crowded in behind the Duke.

The Duke snapped his glass shut and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. “Baggage to the rear,” he said to no one in particular, but two of his aides turned their horses away to carry the order down the line.

The battalions shrugged off their packs which were piled onto the carts that had brought up the extra ammunition. The men were ordered to keep nothing but their weapons, cartridges and canteens. The carts struggled through fetlock-deep mud to carry the baggage back to the forest’s edge where it joined the carriages of the military commissioners and the artillery wagons and the portable forges and the farriers’ carts,“ and where the supernumeraries of battle — the shoeing smiths, the wheelwrights, the commissary officers, the clerks, the drivers, the harness makers and the soldiers’ wives — would wait for the day’s decision.

On the northern slope of the ridge the Duke’s infantry waited in columns of companies. The leading battalions were far enough advanced for the men of the forward companies to see over the crest to where a faint and watery glimmer of sunlight shone on the enemy ground. That southern ridge was empty, all but for a few horsemen.

Then, suddenly and gloriously, an army began to show.

The veterans in the Duke’s army had seen an enemy prepare for battle, but never like this. Before, in Spain, the enemy would come as a threat, as a smear of dark uniforms advancing across sunlit ground, but here the Emperor paraded his army as though this day was a holiday and the British redcoats were spectators of his gorgeous display. The French did not advance to battle; instead they spread themselves in an arrogant panoply of overwhelming power.

Infantry, cavalry and gunners appeared. They marched or rode as though they were on the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were not in their combat uniforms, but dressed for the forecourt of a palace. Their coats glistened with gold and silver lace. There were plumes of scarlet, silver, yellow, red, green and white. There were helmets of brass and of steel; helmets trimmed with leopard’s fur or rimmed with sable. There were Cuirassiers, Lancers, Dragoons, Carabiniers, and Hussars. Gunners with dark blue pelisses edged with silver fur ordered their weapons slewed to face the enemy. Trumpeters challenged the valley, their instruments trailing banners of embroidered gold. The-red and white Polish swallow-tailed flags of the Lancers made a thicket of colour, while guidons, standards, banners, pennants and gilded Eagles studded the watery sky.

And still they came; regiment after regiment, troop after troop, battery after battery; the might of a resurrected Empire displayed in a massive show of incipient violence. Grecian helmets trailed plumes of horsehair, officers wore sashes thick with gold thread, and the elite of the infantry’s elite wore black bearskins. Those were the men of the Imperial Guard, Napoleon’s beloved antiens, each man with a powdered pigtail, gold ear-rings, and the moustache of a veteran. In front of the Emperor’s Guard hisjeunes flies, his guns, stood wheel to wheel.

Sharpe, watching from the ridge above Hougoumont, stared in utter disbelief. After half an hour the enemy was still filing onto the ridge, the new battalions concealing the first, and those new battalions in turn being hidden by yet more troops who poured from the high road to wheel left or right. The bands were playing while officers with gold and lace-trimmed saddle-cloths galloped bravely in front of the display. It was a sight not seen on a battlefield for a hundred years; a formal display of a glorious threat, overwhelming and dazzling and filling the southern landscape with guns and sabres and lances and swords and muskets.

The British gunners gazed at their targets and knew there was not enough ammunition in all Europe to kill such a horde. The infantry watched the thousands of enemy cavalry who would try and break them as they had broken a brigade at Quatre Bras. The Dutch-Belgian troops just watched the whole vast array and knew that no army in all the world could beat such glory into gore.

“God save Ireland.” Even Harper, who had seen most of what war had to offer, was overwhelmed by the sight.

“God quicken the bloody Prussians,” Sharpe said. The sound of the French bands came clear across the valley; a cacophony of tunes among which, at intervals, the raucous defiance of the Marseillaise sounded distinct. “They’re trying to make the Belgians run away,” Sharpe guessed, and he twisted in his saddle to stare at the nearest Belgian regiment and saw the fear on their young faces. This was not their fight. They thought of themselves as French, and wished the Emperor was back as their lord, but fate had brought them to this sea of mud to be dazzled by a master of war.

From one end of the far ridge to the other, across two miles of farmland, the French army paraded. The Emperor’s guns seemed wheel to wheel; Sharpe tried to number the enemy’s artillery and lost count at over two hundred barrels. He did not even attempt to number the enemy’s men, for they filled the ridge and hid each other and still they marched from the high road to fill the far fields. The might of France had come to a damp valley, there to obliterate its oldest enemy.

The enemy’s drums and bands faded as a cheer billowed from the line’s centre. A small man on a grey horse had appeared. He wore the undress uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard’s chasseurs a cheval; a green coat faced with red over a white waistcoat and white breeches. The man wore a grey overcoat loose on his shoulders like a cloak. His bicorne hat had ho cockades. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of France, galloped along the face of his army and was greeted by the cheers of men who knew they were on the brink of victory.

The Duke of Wellington had long turned scornfully away from the display. “Tell the men to lie down.”

The British and Dutch obeyed. Men lying flat in the long grass of the ridge’s plateau could not see the overwhelming enemy, nor were they visible to the enemy’s gunners.

The Duke rode along the right of his line. He did not gallop like his opponent, but trotted sedately. No one cheered the Duke. His gunners, posted on the ridge’s crest, watched the Emperor. One gunner captain, his weapon loaded, squinted along its crude sights then called out to the Duke that in a moment the Emperor would gallop directly into the gun’s line. “Permission to fire, Your Grace?”

“It is not the business of army commanders to fire on each other. Save your ammunition.” The Duke rode on, not even deigning to look towards his opponent.

The Duke and his entourage passed near Sharpe, then angled towards the troops who guarded the open flank beyond Hougou-mont. The closest battalion was Dutch-Belgian and the troops, seeing the knot of horsemen come down from the ridge, opened fire. The musket bullets fluttered near the Duke, but did not hit any of his party. The Duke swerved away as the Dutch officers shouted at their men to cease their fire. The Duke, grim-faced, rode back towards the elm tree that would be his command post.

A shower of rain briefly obscured the valley as the French redeployed themselves for battle. The great display was evidently over for most of the enemy troops now retreated from the ridge’s crest. The French gunners could be seen charging their barrels with powder and shot.