Bugles at Dawn Page 2

  Behind him, O’Hara could sense the shock among his young soldiers. They had never seen anything like it. Perhaps five hundred men killed in a flash, slaughtered in the blink of an eye, and now piled up like butcher’s meat.

  To his left the Guards did not give the French a chance to recover. Feverishly as the kneeling front rank reloaded, whipping out fresh cartridges, biting off the paper end, spitting out the gunpowder, the second rank standing above them raised their muskets and aimed.

  ‘Fire!’ Maitland yelled. Two hundred and fifty muskets belched flame. Again that fire slammed into the stalled ranks of the Imperial Guard. The enemy, unable to take cover, went down screaming or cursing, the impact throwing them against their unhurt comrades behind, creating a human shock wave that rippled down the whole column.

  French officers frantically waved their silver swords. NCOs struck savagely with their pikes or ramrods. ‘En avant,’ they cried in rage. ‘En avant, salauds!’

  But the Imperial Guard, never beaten in battle before, refused to move. Another volley smacked into them. The column reeled, the survivors swaying to and fro as if drunk.

  Wellington laughed excitedly and raised himself in his stirrups to get a better view.

  ‘M’lud, for pity’s sake!’ his staff cried, ‘be careful!’ They knew the Duke in his civilian clothes was an obvious target for any French sharpshooter.

  But the Duke had thrown all caution to the wind. He knew victory was almost his. If he broke the Imperial Guard, France would be defeated. ‘We’re seeing them off!’ he cried in triumph. ‘Go on, Colborne, go on. See them off with your gallant Fifty-Second ... And you, sir, in command of the Second Guards. They won’t stand. Don’t give them a chance to rally, sir.’

  O’Hara watched as the Colonel raised his sword. Suddenly his heart started to race. He swallowed and told himself it was the excitement, not fear. They were going to attack, at last!

  Colborne flung a glance over his shoulder to check the two flag-bearers and their escorts were in place. They were. ‘Lads,’ he cried above the noise of the musketry and the pitiful cries coming from the French, ‘we’re going to give them a taste of steel. Don’t let the old regiment down, lads.’ He raised his voice to a scream, his face flushed crimson. ‘The Fifty-Second Regiment of Foot will advance!’ He pointed his sword in the direction of the stalled French, who were at last beginning to fumble with their muskets, and take up position. ‘ADVANCE!’

  As one the thousand men of the Fifty-second Regiment of Foot, bayonets lowered into a solid wall of steel, stepped forward, the boy drummer to the right of the line beating the pace on his kettle drum, the flags unfurled and waving in the slight breeze. To their left the Colonel in charge of the Second Guards shouted out his orders and immediately the Guards started forward, their officers to the front of the line, swords crossed over their chests, as was their custom.

  It was a fine sight and O’Hara felt tears of emotion well up. What bold fellows they all were! He was proud to be one of this great company.

  A charge of grape hissed into them. Someone screamed. O’Holloran cursed in Gaelic and clapped his hand to his shoulder to feel his own blood. He staggered and seemed about to fall out. Next moment he recovered and stepped on boldly with the rest.

  ‘Brave fellow, O’Holloran!’ O’Hara called.

  “Tis nothing, yer honour,’ the Irishman replied cheerfully. ‘I’ve had worse scratches from the cat back in the Oud Sod, sir.’

  O’Hara’s smile lasted a second. A group of French cavalry was bearing down upon them. Chasseurs by the look of them, intent on giving support to the hard-hit Imperial Guard. They came leaning low over their mounts, swords already outstretched and in line with the horses’ necks.

  O’Hara gave his orders: ‘Section — halt!’ he cried above the thunder of the guns.

  His section halted as one.

  ‘Front rank — kneel!’

  They did so like veterans.

  Completely in charge of himself despite the danger and excitement, O’Hara waited till the men raised their muskets, then cried, ‘Aim at the horses’ guts! Don’t worry about the riders — and wait till I give the order to fire!’

  Now the French cavalry were almost upon them, the horses going all out as their riders applied the spurs.

  Silently O’Hara, standing to the right of his section, counted off the distance: Sixty ... fifty yards ... forty ... thirty ... IT WAS NOW OR NEVER!

  He brought his sword down sharply and yelled above the thunder of the racing hooves, ‘FIRE!’

  The muskets exploded into action. At that range they couldn’t miss. The Chasseurs simply disintegrated into a welter of blood, their mounts going down everywhere.

  Hastily O’Hara yelled out his orders. The front rank rose to their feet. In quick time they hurried forward to keep up with the rest of the regiment, stepping over the gore regardless.

  Now the Imperial Guard was finally beginning to recover. As Colbourne led his men in four ranks down the slope to the French-men’s left flank, they were forming a front, already raising their muskets to beat off the English attack. At the same time their Chasseurs and sharpshooters on foot were swarming out to the Guards’ front in an attempt to delay the Fifty-second’s progress.

  A couple of French cavalry came riding full tilt at O’Hara’s section. In the front rank O’Holloran raised his musket and fired. The leading rider screamed, his features sliding down his shattered face like molten wax. Next instant he slammed to the ground, dead. The second man jerked at the bit. His horse whinnied piteously and rose up on its haunches, great blobs of foam dripping from its muzzle. There it towered, as its rider brought down his sabre.

  At the very last instant O’Hara jerked aside. The rider was caught off his stroke and O’Hara did not give him a second chance. He thrust his sword upwards viciously. The blade slid neatly into the Frenchman’s unprotected stomach. He screamed shrilly as O’Hara withdrew the blood-red blade with a dreadful sucking sound. The horse bolted, dragging its dying rider, as O’Hara’s men cheered and cried, ‘Them froggies can’t stand the cold steel, sir!’ ... ‘See how — ’

  The rest of their words were drowned by the thunderclap of the first French volley. It hit the right flank of the Fifty-second Foot like a sledgehammer. Men went down screaming and choking in their own blood, with their comrades of the next rank stumbling and cursing over the fallen who writhed and twisted in their death agonies.

  Colonel Colborne, the end of his sword snapped off by a French musket ball, waved the broken weapon angrily. ‘Fire — damn ye!’ he cried urgently, as his line seemed to recoil, as if already preparing to break and run. ‘FIRE!’ Behind him his sergeants lashed at the reluctant infantry with their pikestaffs, forcing them to stand straight and aim.

  An ensign carrying the regimental colours darted forward, followed by his escort. ‘Come on, lads!’ he yelled in a high-pitched youth’s voice, waving the heavy flag. ‘Don’t let the old regiment down — ’

  There was a scorching explosion. When the black smoke cleared, the ensign was no longer shouting. He was dead, stripped completely naked and charred by the explosion, his head rolling away quietly down the littered slope like a ball abandoned by some petulant child.

  But his sacrifice was not in vain. The Fifty-second blasted a tremendous volley into the Imperial Guard — who went down like ninepins. Colonel Colborne did not give them a chance to recover. ‘To the attack, lads!’ he yelled above the din and ran forward, carrying the regiment with him. O’Hara waved his sword, carried away by the unreasoning bloodlust of battle, cursing obscenities he had not realized he knew. But to his left the nearest Guards, under the pudgy Captain Hartmann, had stalled. They were not keeping up with the advancing Fifty-second and even at this moment of crazed excitement, O’Hara knew that this presented danger. If the Imperial Guard rallied and attacked, they might well be able to turn the Fifty-second’s flank and that could lead to disaster.

  ‘Keep moving, sir ... keep
moving, sir!’ he called desperately, his chest heaving with the effort of shouting above that chaotic noise. ‘You must not pull behind, sir!’

  But Captain Hartmann did not move. His horrified gaze was following the progress of that ball of flesh which had once been a human head, as it rolled and bounced down the slope. His face drained of all colour.

  Suddenly O’Hara made up his mind. Running all out, he faced Hartmann. A slight trace of blood was trickling down the man’s left cheek. ‘I’ve been hit,’ he quavered. ‘I am not well.’

  Behind him the young Guardsmen looked at him and then at each other and O’Hara didn’t need a crystal ball to tell what they were thinking. Their officer was a craven coward. He had lost his nerve; he did not want to fight.

  ‘It is the merest scratch, sir,’ O’Hara gasped, seeing the gap between the two regiments growing by the instant. There was no time to lose. ‘I’m sure you will be all right. But you must move, sir — now!’

  Hartmann, his pudgy jowls shaking with fear, did not seem to hear. Once again he moaned weakly, ‘I am hit ... I can go on no longer.’

  O’Hara’s hot Irish temper flared. ‘Shame on you, sir!’ he snorted. ‘You are risking the lives of my whole regiment. I order you to advance at once.’

  Hartmann looked at him dully, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘But I have just told you — ’

  Ensign O’Hara lost all control. He lashed out with his sword like an angry schoolmaster at some schoolboy who had tried his patience too much and too long. The flat of the blade struck the coward’s fat rump with a satisfying whack and he stumbled forward, as O’Hara raised the point parallel to the Guards officer’s stomach and yelled furiously, ‘Advance, damn you ... or by God, I swear I’ll run you through here and now — ADVANCE!’

  The threat worked. Tears of self-pity pouring down his ashen face, Captain Hartmann stumbled forward.

  To the right the Fifty-second broke into a run, cheering wildly. The Guards did the same. And in that instant the Duke himself came galloping up on his chestnut, for all this day he had been present at every crucial skirmish of the battle, losing all his gallopers and many of his staff officers to enemy sharpshooters. It was the fact that he was always prepared to risk his own life that endeared him to the rank and file, although he had the ‘scum’, as he habitually referred to them, flogged mercilessly for the slightest infringement.

  For a long moment while the musket balls whizzed back and forth, he stared down at the handsome young ensign. Then he nodded curtly, but whether that nod signified approval or disapproval O’Hara could not fathom. But there was no mistaking General Maitland’s frosty look as he cantered after the Iron Duke. He had obviously seen the incident with Captain Hartmann and didn’t approve. If Maitland had his way, O’Hara was in for trouble.

  But there was a battle still to be won. Wellington knew that the Imperial Guard had finally to be broken or even at this, the eleventh hour, that old enemy of his, Napoleon, might still rally the French.

  ‘Well done, Colborne,’ he cried, riding towards the triumphant Fifty-second. ‘Damned well done, sir! But go on, go on, sir. Don’t give them a chance to rally. They won’t stand, I tell you ... They won’t stand!’ Almost as if he wanted to urge Colborne forward physically, he spurred Copenhagen, tossing his head with fright, right through the lines of the Fifty-second to within musket shot of the Imperial Guard.

  That was too much for the survivors of the Guards and the Fifty-second, who gave a great cheer. Totally out of the control of their officers and sergeants now, they surged forward, eyes gleaming, teeth bared. Screaming obscenities, they fell upon the French.

  In a flash they were in among the Imperial Guard, wielding bayonets tipped scarlet with enemy blood. They hacked, stabbed, sliced, giving no quarter, smashing the cruel butts of their muskets into the faces of the blue-clad giants, their own bodies shaking with the terrible violence of their rage. Everywhere the Frenchmen went down screaming, to be trampled under the feet of attackers who were so eager for blood they did not even stop to loot the dead and dying.

  But now the French were beginning to surrender. Here and there whole groups of Napoleon’s elite, never before defeated in battle, were throwing away their muskets and raising their hands in surrender, crying urgently, ‘Pardon, m’sieu ... pardon!’ while to their rear, all order lost now, others started to flee the battlefield, throwing away their equipment in their unreasoning panic, even tugging off their boots and tossing them in the nearest ditch in the haste to escape this cruel slaughter.

  Half an hour later, with a sickle moon already casting down its icy light on the terrible carnage, it was virtually all over. Old General Cambronne, tears trickling down into his dyed moustache, surrendered his sword tamely and the last two intact battalions of the Imperial Guard with it.

  Above him on the hilltop which dominated the battlefield, his figure outlined a stark black by the moonlight, a weary Duke of Wellington raised his cocked hat in salute. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said in a tired voice, cracked and hoarse with a day long’s shouting above the roar of the cannon, ‘I may be wrong, but in my opinion we have given Old Boney the death blow. His army is destroyed ... The men are deserting in parties, even his generals are withdrawing from him ... I am now of the opinion he can no longer make any head against us.’ He paused and looked sadly at the piles of dead, scattered as far as the eye could see, and sighed wearily. ‘The men — poor fellows — have done us proud, gentlemen.’ He tugged at the bridle of his tired chestnut. ‘Come, let us go home to Waterloo now. There is no more we can do here.’

  His shoulders bowed beneath the blue cloak, almost as if he had been defeated instead of Napoleon, he started back for the village and his headquarters.

  Ensign O’Hara watched them go as he leaned against the trunk of a leafless oak, suddenly assailed by an overwhelming emptiness as if a tap inside him had been abruptly opened and all the strength drained away. It had been a long, long day.

  He sighed, watching the moon shine on that field of death, the silence broken only by the groans of the wounded who lay in helpless wretchedness beside their dead comrades, and by the clinker-hammers of the civilians who had swarmed on to the field of battle to chisel out the teeth of the dead.

  O’Hara, too weary really to care, knew from his father’s tales that the looters would not concern themselves only with the dead but would slit the throats of the wounded if the poor wretches attempted to stop them. But then, he told himself, it had always been thus over the centuries. To the victor belonged the spoils.

  He yawned. He must find some place to lay his head this night. On the morrow, no doubt, the Duke would order the pursuit to drive Old Boney back into France. His stomach rumbled, but he was too shattered to attempt to find something to eat.

  Jean-Paul O’Hara had fought his first battle. He would fight many more, but would never forget the Battle of Waterloo. For it would change his whole life, send him to exotic places and far climes and make for him strange adventures. But at this moment he was merely unutterably weary, a young man who had killed his first fellow creatures and now looked for somewhere to sleep.

  THREE

  ‘’Twas no foight at all, bedad,’ O’Holloran was saying merrily as light came back to the battlefield that Monday morning. His arm was in a dirty sling and a hunk of looted hard cheese was in his hand. ‘Why our auld goat back in Kilkenny gave a divil more trouble, indeed.’ He took another greedy bite.

  O’Hara rubbed his unshaven chin and yawned; eyeing the battlefield once more, he was shocked by such massive carnage. The dead still lay where they had fallen, the blue coats of the French mingled inextricably with the red of the British, linked together like lovers in one last passionate embrace. Here and there came faint moans. There were so many wounded that the surgeons and their assistants had not been able to collect them all. Even now O’Hara could hear the grating of a surgeon’s saw on some poor fellow’s shattered bone and smell the sharp odour of boiling tar with which
they would cauterize the massive wound left by the amputation. He frowned momentarily and ran his dirty hand thorough his tight black curls.

  Somewhere in the lines of another regiment there came the sweet lift of a bugle sounding some call or other. His mood changed instantly, as it always did when he heard those calls carried on the still dawn air. ‘Bugles in the dawn,’ his father always maintained, often with sentimental tears, ‘the finest sound a man can ever hear, Jean-Paul.’

  And he agreed. But his father had not told him that call to action ended for many like this: mounds of shattered corpses, wounded left to die in their own gore while their marauding comrades stole their pitiful few possessions. He frowned pensively, his good mood destroyed, and even O’Holloran’s new joke about the Frenchman and the pig could not quite restore it.

  ‘Ensign O’Hara?’

  He swung round, startled out of his reverie.

  Colonel Colborne was standing there, his shako replaced by a bloodstained bandage round his head. He looked wan and his hand shook slightly. ‘O’Hara, this officer wishes to speak to you.’ He indicated the staff officer in a peaked cap standing next to him.

  O’Hara recognized the officer as one of those who had accompanied the Duke of Wellington. He clicked to attention.

  ‘O’Hara, that is your name, isn’t it?’ the staff officer said haughtily. ‘Am I correct?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘You were on the left flank of the Fifty-Second Regiment of Foot yesterday, were you not?’

  ‘Yessir.’ What the devil was going on?

  At the staff officer’s side Colonel Colborne frowned severely, as if he did not like whatever was going on one bit.

  ‘I see.’ He looked at Colonel Colborne expectantly.

  ‘I say, Felton-Hervey,’ the Colonel said, ‘what is this? O’Hara is a fine young officer. I knew his dear departed father these twenty years. He served with me in the Peninsula. What — ’