They reined in close to Witherspoon’s disembowelled corpse. A glossy crow noisily protested their arrival, then went back to its feeding. “There goes my colonel’s pay,” Sharpe said after staring in silence at the shifting smoke above the valley.

Harper was frowning at the corpse, wondering if it was that of the pleasant young Captain who had been so friendly at the beginning of the battle.

“Worth it, though, just to tell that poxy little Dutch bastard one home truth,” Sharpe continued. He was staring at Hougoumont. The roof of the chateau was burning fiercely, spewing sparks high and thick into the smoky sky. The western end of the house had already been reduced to bare walls and blackened beams, though, judging from the amount of musket smoke which ringed the chateau, the conflagration had not diminished the defenders’ resistance. The French attacks still broke to nothing on the chateau’s walls and musketry.

“So what do you want to do?” Sharpe asked Harper.

“We can go, you mean?” Harper sounded vaguely surprised.

“There’s nothing to keep us here, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Harper agreed, though neither man moved. To the left of the chateau the valley was still oddly unscarred by the battle. The only French attack on the main British line had come in the east, not here in the west, and the only scars in the patchy field of wheat and rye were black marks where some shells had fallen short and scorched the damp and rain-beaten crops. French infantry was thick about Hougoumont, and a mass of men were closing on La Haye Sainte, yet between those bastions the valley lay empty beneath the screaming passage of the French bombardment.

“So where the hell are the bloody Prussians?” Harper asked irritably.

“God knows. Gone to a different war, perhaps?”

Harper turned to stare at the British infantry who lay patient and unmoving beneath the flail of the French guns. “So where will you go?” he asked Sharpe. i

“Fetch Lucille and go back to England, I suppose.” Lucille would have to wait to go home and, Sharpe thought, the wait could prove a very long one for if this battle was lost the Austrians and Russians might make peace with Napoleon and it could take years to forge another alliance against France. Even if today’s battle was won it could still take months for the allies to destroy what remained of the Emperor’s armies.

“You could wait in Ireland?” Harper suggested.

“Aye, I’d like that.” Sharpe took a piece of hard cheese from his saddlebag and tossed a lump of it to Harper.

A shell bounced off the ridge nearby and whirled its fuse crazily in the air to leave a mad spiral of smoke. The shell landed, spun in a mud bowl for a second, then simply died. Harper watched it warily, waiting for the explosion that did not come, then he looked back to the French-held ridge. “It seems a shame to leave right now.” Harper had come to Belgium because the British army and its war against an Emperor had been his whole adult life and he could not relinquish either the institution or its purpose. He might be a civilian, but he thought of himself as a soldier still, and he cared desperately that this day saw victory.

“You want to stay here, then?” Sharpe asked, as though he himself did not much care either way.

Harper did not answer. He was still staring across the valley, staring through the scrims of smoke, and as he stared his eyes grew wide as gun muzzles. “God save Ireland!” His voice was full of astonishment. “Christ in his cups, but will you just look at that?”

Sharpe looked and, like Harper, his eyes widened in amazement.

All the damned cavalry in all the damned world seemed to be spilling down the far side of the gentle valley. Regiment after regiment of French horse was threading the spaces between the enemy’s artillery batteries to form up in the undisturbed fields of rye and wheat. The sun was breaking through the shredding clouds to glint on the breastplates and the high-crested helmets of the Cuirassiers. Behind the Cuirassiers were Lancers, and behind them were even more horsemen. Every cavalry uniform in the Empire was there: Dragoons, Carabiniers, Hussars, Chasseurs, all forming their long lines of attack behind the Lancers and Cuirassiers.

Sharpe trained his telescope on the far ridge. He could see no infantry. There had to be infantry. He searched the smoke clouds, but still found none. A charge by horse alone? And where were the French gunners? The cavalry, after all, would force the British infantry to form squares which made wonderful targets for gunners and infantrymen, but the cavalry could not hope to destroy the squares by itself. Or did the French believe this battle already won? Had the Emperor reckoned that no troops, so battered by gun-fire, would stand against his prized cavalry? “There’s no infantry!” Sharpe said to Harper, then turned to shout a warning of cavalry to the nearest British battalion, but their officers had already seen the threat and all along the British line the battalions were climbing to theirTeet and forming squares.

While on the far side of the valley the Cuirassiers drew their swords. The sun rippled down the long line of steel. Behind them the red and white flags of the Lancers pricked the smoke scrims. Harper was entranced by the sight. It was like something from a saga, a legend of old battles come to flesh and steel. Half a battlefield was filled with the glory of cavalry; with plumes and crests and leopard skins and flags and blades.

Brigade officers were galloping among the newly formed British squares, ordering some battalions further back so that the unwieldy formations were staggered like a draught board. Now the flank of one square could not fire on the face of another, and wide spaces were left between the battalions so that the enemy horse could flow freely between the squares. Batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery placed their cannon in the wide spaces and loaded with roundshot. They would have preferred to have double-shotted their cannon, but the lighter guns of the horse artillery would not survive the extra strain. The gunners’ horse teams were taken far behind the squares to where British and Dutch light cavalry waited to tackle any French horsemen who survived the passage through the wicked maze of men, muskets and cannon-fire.

The French gun-fire was undiminished and, because the British were now standing in square, the shells and roundshot which streaked across the ridge’s rim were finding targets. Sharpe watched a cannon-ball strike savagely down one side of a square of Highlanders. At least ten men fell, perhaps more. Another ball struck the face of the square, driving a bloody hole that was instantly filled as the files shuffled together.

“The buggers are coming!” Harper warned.

The Cuirassiers walked their heavy horses forward. Behind them were the Red Lancers in their square czapka headgear and the Horse Grenadiers in their tall black bearskins. Further back were the Carabiniers in their dazzling white uniforms, and squadrons of green Dragoons and troops of plumed Hussars. The horsemen covered the far slope, obliterating the dull wet crops with a gorgeous tapestry of shifting colours, nodding plumes, sun-brightened helmets and gold-fringed flags. It was a sight Sharpe had never seen before, not in all his years of soldiering. Even the mounted hordes in India had not matched the splendour of this sight. This was the massed cavalry of an empire assembled on one battlefield. Sharpe tried to count them, but there were just too many men and horses flowing through the filmy drifts of gun smoke. The sun glittered from thousands of drawn swords, raised lances, polished armour, and curved sabres.

The cavalry advanced at a walk. This was how cavalry should attack; not in some madcap rush to glory, but with a steady slow approach that was gradually quickened until, at the last moment, the heavy horses with their steel-clad riders should crash home as one unit. If a horse was shot in its last few galloping strides, then man and horse could slide as dead meat to crumple a square’s face. Sharpe had seen it happen; he had ridden behind the Germans at Garcia Hernandez and watched as a dead horse and dying rider smashed in blood and terror through the face of a French square. All the French were dead at that moment as the following horsemen streamed through the gap to gut the square from its inside outwards.