D’Alembord gave the smallest gasp. “Oh, God!”

“What is it?”

“Jesus Christ!” The blasphemy was uttered more in anger than in pain. D’Alembord had been hit, and the force of the blow had knocked him backwards, but he had somehow kept his footing even though the bullet had struck his right thigh. Now he staggered with his right hand clamped over the wound. Blood was seeping through his fingers. “It’s all right,” he said to Sharpe, “it doesn’t hurt.” He tried to take a pace forward, and almost fell. “It’s all right.” His face had gone pale with shock.

“Here!” Sharpe put an arm under d’Alembord’s shoulder and half carried him and half walked him up the slope.

D’Alembord was hissing with every step. “I’ll be all right. Leave me!”

“Shut up, Dally!”

Harper saw them as they crossed the ridge’s crest and galloped forward with Sharpe’s horse. “Take him back to the surgeons!” Sharpe called up to the Irishman, then gave d’Alembord a mighty heave that swung him painfully into the empty saddle. “Wrap your sash round the wound!” Sharpe told d’Alembord, then slapped the mare’s rump to speed her out of range of the skirmishers’ fire.

Sharpe turned back to the heated, choking air in the valley. The French were pressing everywhere. More frightening still, a column of enemy troops was marching towards La Haye Sainte, but that was not Sharpe’s business. His business was the enemy immediately in front and, reduced to being a Rifleman again, he knelt and searched for an officer or sergeant. He saw a man with a scabbard not a hundred yards away and fired. When the smoke cleared, the man was gone.

Harry Price backed nervously up the slope. “Where’s Peter?”

“He got one in the leg! It’s not serious.”

“This is bloody serious, sir! I’ve lost ten men, probably more.”

“Pull back. What’s the name of the new light company man?”

“Matthew Jefferson.”

Sharpe cupped his hands. “Captain Jefferson! Pull back!”

Jefferson waved a hand in reply, then ordered Huckfield to sound the whistle that recalled the skirmishers. The redcoats ran back to the crest, dropped again, and fired a last feeble volley at the French Voltigeurs. A shell exploded behind the crest, showering Jefferson with earth. A roundshot crashed past Sharpe, its sound like a sudden overwhelming wind. Musket-balls whip-cracked too close. Sharpe waited till Harry Price’s company was safely past him, then shouted at Price to run.

They ran back together, but Price tumbled, then gasped as the breath was knocked out of him by his fall. Sharpe twisted back to help him, but it was only a pair of ridiculous spurs that had tripped the younger man. “Take the damn things off, Harry!”

“I like them.” Price stumbled on. To their right and left other battalions were reluctantly climbing to their feet, then forming lines of four ranks. They could not fight off skirmishers lying down, nor did they dare risk a charge of the French cavalry that had reached the bottom of the slope, and a four rank line offered more protection against horsemen than a two rank formation. It also meant that every cannon-ball that hit could take as many as four men with it.

But there was nothing to be done, except suffer.

The French skirmishers, thick along the crest of the ridge, raked the battalions with musket-fire. The surviving British cannons hammered canister at the Voltigeurs, but their scattered formation saved the French from heavy casualties. The enemy Voltigeurs now ruled the ridge’s crest, while the British skirmishers, overwhelmed by the French mass, could only form on their battalions. Every few moments, when the enemy skirmishers became too insistent or advanced too far, a battalion would charge forward and drive them back. A single battalion volley also had the effect of clearing the enemy skirmishers off the crest, but they always returned, their losses made up from reinforcements despatched from the valley.

Cavalry could scour the Voltigeurs away, but the Duke had lost his heavy cavalry and was keeping his best remaining horsemen, the Germans and British light cavalry, to cover his retreat if disaster struck. He still had a Dutch cavalry brigade and the Prince of Orange was ordered; to bring it forward. They came, curb chains jingling and sabres drawn. “They’re just to clear the ridge face!” the Duke’s aide ordered. “No damned heroics. Just gallop along the face and sabre the skirmishers!”

But the Dutch horsemen refused to charge. They sat lumpen in their saddles, their doughy faces stubborn and sullen. They stared blankly at the churning strike of shot and shell and no words would persuade them to spur into the quagmire of mud, fire and iron. The Prince, told of their cowardice, pretended not to hear. Instead he just stared at the farm of La Haye Sainte that was now besieged by an overwhelming throng of French infantry. The British cannons on the crest by the elm tree were pouring roundshot into the French ranks, and a battery of howitzers was lobbing shrapnel into the valley, but the French infantry seemed to soak up the punishment as they edged ever closer to the beleaguered farm. La Haye Sainte’s orchard was already captured, and the French had brought cannon down the road to pour shot after shot into the besieged farm buildings.

The Prince knew that the centre of the Duke’s line would be open to disastrous attack if the farm fell. Suddenly he knew he must save the farm. The glory of the idea blossomed in his mind. Fulfilment of the idea would utterly obliterate any shameful memory of the Red Germans, or of the sullen Dutch cavalry. The Prince saw his chance of glory and renown. He would rescue the farm, hold the line’s centre, and win the battle. “Rebecque!”

In the eastern half of the valley, in the dangerous re-entrant from where the Dutch-Belgians had fled at the first approach of the French, the First Battalion of the 27th Regiment of the Line now stood in square and suffered. They were the Inniskillings, and their only shelter was the screen of smoke that the French gunners created before their own cannon, but the enemy artillery had the Inniskillings’ range and, even though fired blind, roundshot after roundshot crashed into the Irish ranks. Their Colonel ordered another issue of rum and the Sergeants doggedly closed the thinning ranks, but there was nothing else anyone could do except stand and die, and that the Irish did.

They might have deployed out of square, but the Emperor made sure his cavalry was always threatening and so the Irish were forced to stay in their vulnerable square like a great fat target for the gunners and the Voltigeurs who infeated the eastern half of the valley as thickly as they swarmed in the west.

Some of those Voltigeurs, fearful that a French victory and pursuit might take them away from the rich plunder of the battlefield, took care to enrich themselves before the British line shattered. The dead and injured of the British heavy cavalry littered the valley floor and, though the pockets of many of the casualties had been hastily searched already, the Voltigeurs had the luxury of time in which they could slit the uniform seams or tear out the greasy — helmet liners where men liked to hide their precious gold coins. Some of the French skirmishers carried pliers which they used to extract fine white teeth that Parisian dentists would buy to make into dentures.

One fortunate Frenchman found a cavalryman’s body that sported a fine pair of brown-topped, silk-tasselled boots. He first took the spurs off the heels, then tugged at the right boot. The body jerked, cried aloud, and a horrid face in which the eyes were nothing but crusts of blood-stared wildly and blindly towards the Frenchman.

“You frightened me!” the Voltigeur chided the wounded man cheerfully.

“For God’s sake, kill me.” Lord John Rossendale, half-crazed with pain, spoke in English.

“You just stay still,” the Voltigeur said in French, then dragged off his lordship’s expensive boots. He noted that the Englishman’s breeches were made of the finest whipcord and though the right thigh had been slashed by a blade the breeches would doubtless mend well, and so the Voltigeur undid the waist buttons and dragged the breeches free. Lord John, his broken thigh grating with each tug, screamed foully.