The huge Lieutenant with the axe saw the Coldstreamer Colonel and shouted at his men to make way. He drove a path through them, the axe glittering above the press of men, then Sharpe saw the axe crash down. The Colonel had stepped safely back, now he lunged. The Lieutenant brushed the sword thrust aside with his free hand as though the blade was no more dangerous than a riding crop. He grunted as he began a backswing with the axe calculated to split the Colonel up from the groin to the breastbone, then gasped as a pain exploded behind his knee. Sharpe had rammed his sword forward to hamstring the Frenchman’s leg, now he kicked at the crippling wound to topple the huge man sideways. The Lieutenant’s scarred face snarled as he tried to swing the huge axe round at his new attacker, but Sharpe was slicing the sword forward again, this time to split the grimacing face into a bloody and broken mask. The Colonel’s sword lunged, taking the Lieutenant in the ribs. Still the Frenchman would not give up. The axe rang on the ground as he dragged the blade forward, then two Guardsmen pushed past the Colonel to stab their bayonets hard down. The huge body jerked for a few seconds, then was still.

The last French intruders were being hunted down. A sergeant was bayoneted on the dungheap, while a corporal, backed against the barn wall and screaming for quarter, received two bayonets in his belly instead.

The yard was foul with blood, crushed apples and corpses. Only the French drummer boy, a wee nipper-hardly out of his cradle, had been spared from the massacre. A huge Guardsman stood by the boy, protecting him.

“I don’t know who you are, but thank you.”

Sharpe turned to see it was the Coldstream Colonel who had spoken. “Sharpe,” he introduced himself. “The Young Frog’s staff.”

“MacDonnell.” The Colonel was wiping the blood off a very expensive sword blade with an embroidered linen handkerchief. “Will you forgive me?” He ran back towards the house from where the sound of musketry was louder than ever.

Sharpe wiped the mess off his own sword, then looked at Harper whose face was speckled with blood. “I thought you’d promised to stay out of the fighting?”

“I forgot.” Harper grinned, threw down the French musket and retrieved his own weapons. „I’ll say one thing. The Guards may be pretty-boy soldiers, but the buggers can fight when they have to.“

“So can the French.”

“Their tails are up, that’s for sure.” Harper breathed a belated sigh of relief. “And how the hell did the Guards close that gate?”

“God only knows.”

“He must be on our side today.” Harper crossed himself. “God knows, but that was desperate.”

The second French attack on the chateau, so close to success in the courtyard, now rolled with an equal menace around the orchard. The howitzers opened fire from the ridge again, but this time the French attack was on a wider front, and a horde of men broke through the orchard’s hedges and harried the defenders back towards the walled garden. Some of the Guardsmen, too slow to climb the brick wall, were bayoneted at its foot, but then the relentless musketry erupted from the loopholes and from the wall’s coping and the French attack stalled again about the garden’s margin.

More men of the Goldstream Guards advanced down from the ridge. They attacked in column, their muskets armed with bayonets, and they drove up through the orchard’s northern hedge to scour the French away from the garden wall. The woods to the south were still thick with French infantry, but the Guards lined the broken and torn hedge and opened a killing volley fire that blew great holes in the French lines. No troops fired faster than the British, and now, for the first time that day, the French suffered under the flaying volleys of platoon fire. The Guards reloaded with grim speed, propping their ramrods against the hedge before levelling the heavy muskets and blasting at the smoke-obscured enemy. Each platoon fired a second after its neighbour so that the hedge rolled with flames and the woods echoed with volley after volley.

Gradually the French broke away; more and more men fleeing from the remorseless musketry. “Cease fire!” a Guards officer shouted in the orchard. The space in front of the woods was thick with the dead and wounded. The French had been hurling men against stone and flames, and suffering for it, but the Guards could see yet more men being formed in the far woods, presumably for yet another assault.

In the walled garden the only civilian left in Hougoumont was almost in tears. He was the chateau’s gardener and he had been running from bed to bed, trying to save his precious plants from the boots of the Guardsmen. Despite his efforts the garden was a shambles. Espaliered pears had been ripped from the wall and rosebuds had been trampled. The gardener made a pathetically small pile of plants he had somehow rescued, then flinched as he watched a French corpse being dragged by its heels through the remains of an asparagus bed.

The second French assault had failed. Colonel MacDonnell, his face still smeared with blood, found Sharpe in the courtyard when the last musket shot had faded to silence. “You could be useful to me,” he spoke diffidently, not wanting to encroach on another man’s authority.

“I’ll do whatever I can.”

“More ammunition? Can you find a wagon of the stuff and have it sent down?”

“With pleasure.” Sharpe was glad to have a proper job to do.

MacDpnneli looked around the courtyard and grimaced at the remnants of the massacre. “I think we can hold here, so long as we’ve got powder. Oh good! She’s alive.” He had spotted the cat carrying the last of her kittens across the slaughteryard. The captured French drummer boy, his face stained with tears, held one hand over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the bodies which were being searched for plunder by the victorious Guardsmen. The boy’s instrument was lying smashed beside the chapel door, though he still had his drumsticks stuffed into his belt. “Cheer up, lad!” MacDonnell spoke to the boy in colloquial and genial French. “We gave up eating captured drummer boys last year.”

The boy burst into tears again. A big Coldstreamer sergeant with a Welsh accent barked at his men to start clearing the enemy bodies away. “Pile the buggers by the wall there. Look lively now!”

Sharpe and Harper retrieved their horses which had miraculously survived the fighting in the courtyard unhurt. The gate was swung open and the Riflemen rode to find the cartridges that would hold the chateau firm.

While on the far ridge the Emperor was turning his eyes away from Hougoumont. He was looking towards the British left, to the enticing and empty gentle slope east of the high road. He assumed that the Sepoy General would already have sent his reserves to help the beleaguered garrison at Hougoumont, so now the master of war would launch a thunderbolt on the British left. Marshal d’Erlon’s corps, unblooded so far in the brief campaign, could now have the honour of winning it. And when the corps had smashed through the British line, the Emperor would unleash his cavalry, fresh and eager, to harry the fleeing enemy into offal.

It was half-past one. The day was becoming warmer, even hot, so that the thick woollen uniforms were at last drying out. The clouds were thinning and errant patches of sun illuminated the smoke which drifted across the valley from the French guns, but in the eastern fields, where the Prussians were supposed to be arriving, the intermittent sunlight shone on nothing. Gneisenau had done his work well, and the British were alone.