The Earl of Uxbridge, quite ready for the moment, had arranged for his servant to bring a tray of silver stirrup cups filled with sherry. As the first gun fired the Earl waved the servant forward and watched as the small cups were handed about to his staff.

The Earl waited for the second gun to fire, then, as though these hors.e.m.e.n were about to ride to hounds, he gravely raised his stirrup cup. "Today's fox, gentlemen. Allow me to give you today's fox."

The hors.e.m.e.n drank. Lord John Rossendale had to curb the temptation to gulp the sherry down.

The third gun fired. The fox had broken cover, was running, and the blooding could begin.

Every gun on the French ridge opened fire.

The salvo showed as a volcanic eruption of smoke that blurred the far crest with yellow-grey smoke. In the heart of the smoke were the stabbing flames.

Two heartbeats later the sound slammed across the valley; a thunderclap to tell Europe that the Emperor was at war.

The majority of the guns had been loaded with sh.e.l.l. The cold barrels dropped the missiles fractionally short and most plunged harmlessly into mud that either extinguished the burning fuse or soaked up the force of the explosion. A few, very few, ricocheted on the ridge's forward slope to land a second time among the battalions sheltering beyond the crest. The explosions punched ragged blots of dark smoke and livid flame into the damp air.

The first men were dying, but not many, for a sh.e.l.l had to explode in the very heart of a company if it was to kill. Some sh.e.l.ls were defused by quick-witted men who either pinched out the fire or knocked the smouldering fuse clean from the powder charge with a swift blow of a musket b.u.t.t. The smoke from the French guns rolled down into the valley, then began to be fed as the guns which had reloaded the quickest fired again. The firing became ragged, but constant; jet after jet of smoke and flame pumped from the French-held ridge. The shots screamed higher as the gun barrels warmed. Some sh.e.l.ls skimmed across the ridge top to explode far back at the forest's edge while the best aimed shots bounced just below the British crest to plunge down among the men hidden behind. The sh.e.l.ls made differing sounds, depending on their distance from the ear. Some hummed like childrens' tops, some whirred like a bird's wingbeat, while others rumbled like thunder. The sounds were already causing a trickle of Belgian troops to retreat towards the forest; one wounded man was an excuse for ten others to help him to safety.

One sh.e.l.l exploded close to the Earl of Uxbridge's staff who, still bunched together after their toast to the day's fox, split asunder like sheep attacked by a wolf. A small silver cup fell into the mud, but otherwise there was no damage other than to the young men's dignity. They curbed their excited horses and watched as each new shot roiled and twitched the bank of smoke which thickened in front of the Emperor's gun line.

On the British right, where the French guns were close to Hougoumont, the gunners were firing canister to scour the British skirmishers from the woods which lay south of the chateau. Some of the musket-b.a.l.l.s hummed up onto the ridge where they pattered on the wet ground like hail.

A British nine-pounder fired a return shot, and earned a furious reprimand from a mounted staff officer. "Hold your d.a.m.ned fire! Hold your fire!" The Duke was saving his guns the wear and tear of incessant firing that could blow out touchholes and even split barrels. He would need his guns when the enemy infantry or cavalry advanced.

A sh.e.l.l plunged down to smash an howitzer's wheel before bouncing up to explode harmlessly behind the ridge. The gunners quickly brought up a spare wheel and repaired the gun. The French began to mix more solid roundshot with the sh.e.l.ls and one of the iron b.a.l.l.s took the head off a staff officer, leaving his b.l.o.o.d.y body momentarily upright in its saddle before the terrified horse bolted and the headless body toppled to be dragged along by the left stirrup. The corpse was finally shaken loose and a group of redcoats scuttled forward to rifle the dead man's pockets.

A sh.e.l.l landed on the ridge top, bounced, then exploded twenty yards to Sharpe's left. A piece of red-hot casing, trailing smoke, smacked harmlessly against his thigh. "Go back," Sharpe told Harper.

"I'm all right here, so I am."

"You made your wife a promise! So b.u.g.g.e.r off!"

"Save your breath!" Harper stayed. The cannonade was heavy, but it was not overly dangerous. The French gunners were doubly hampered; first they were being blinded by their own smoke, and secondly their enemy was crouching behind the protection of the low ridge, and so most of their sh.e.l.ls were exploding harmlessly if they exploded at all. Too many fuses were being extinguished by mud, yet the artillery was making a deal of noise, enough to terrify the Belgian troops who crouched under the sounds of hissing sh.e.l.ls and banging explosions and thundering guns.

Sharpe moved to his right, going to a vantage point from where he could see the empty countryside on the army's right flank. The move took Harper and himself away from the worst of the cannonade and to where another British staff officer was evidently posted on the same duty as Sharpe; to watch for a French outflanking march. The man, who was in the blue coat and fur Kolbak of the Hussars, nodded civilly to Sharpe, then consulted a notebook. "I made it ten of midday, did you?"

"Ten of midday?" Sharpe asked.

"When Bonaparte opened fire. It's good to be accurate about these things."

"Is it?"

"The Peer likes to be specific. I'm one of his family by the way." By which the pleasant-faced young man meant he was one of the Duke's aides. "My name is Witherspoon."

"Sharpe. And this is my friend Mr Harper from Ireland."

Captain Witherspoon nodded genially at Harper, then c.o.c.ked an eye at the clouds. "I suspect it might well clear up. I detected a quite definite rise in the mercury this morning. I'm honoured to make your acquaintance, Sharpe! You're with the Young Frog, are you not?"

"Yes, I am."

"Is he good for anything at all?"

Sharpe smiled at Captain Witherspoon's disingenuous tone. "Not that I know of."

The cavalryman laughed. "I was at Eton with him. He wasn't any good there either, though he had a mighty fine opinion of himself. I remember him as being eternally dirty! But he liked the girls, and had a prolific fondness for wine."

"What's the time now?" Sharpe asked in apparently rude disregard of Witherspoon's gossip.

Witherspoon hauled his watch from his fob and clicked open the lid. "Four minutes after midday, save a few seconds."

"You'd best write down that the French are advancing, then."

"They're doing what? Oh, my soul! So they are! Thank you, my dear fellow! Good Lord, they advance, indeed they do!" He dashed a note into his book.

French skirmishers were swarming towards Hougoumont. They came in a loose ma.s.s of men; running, firing, running again. They were mostly among the trees, which gave cover from the foot of their ridge right up to the walls of the chateau, but some had overlapped onto the open flank where newly cut hay lay in sopping rows among the stubble. The skirmishers of the red-coated Cold-stream Guards were falling back fast, evidently ordered not to make a fight of it among the trees. With the redcoats were some Dutch and German troops, the Germans armed with long-barrelled hunting rifles. Sharpe saw at least two of the blue-coated Dutch-Belgian troops running towards the enemy, presumably seeking shelter.

The Guards skirmishers scrambled back into-the farm buildings or into the walled garden and orchard that lay alongside the chateau. The French skirmishers had advanced to the very edge of the wood and were hidden from Sharpe by the loom of the chateau's buildings. "I'm going down there," he told Harper, pointing to the field where a handful of the French skirmishers sheltered behind the rows of wet hay.

"I'll come with you," Harper said obstinately.

"Take care!" Captain Witherspoon called after the two Riflemen.

Sharpe cantered his horse down the farm track, past a haystack that stood outside the chateau's rear gates, and then into the open field to the west. The few French skirmishers who had been sheltering behind the cut hay had gone back to the wood, evidently scoured from the field by muskets fired from loopholes hacked in Hougoumont's barns. Sharpe was only a hundred yards from the fight, but he was as safe from it as if he had been on the moon. The French had only one object, and that was to capture the buildings from where they could rake the British-held ridge behind with close-range cannon-fire. They had taken the woods, and now the ma.s.s of blue-coated infantry readied themselves for the final rush at the sprawling farm. Some of the French used axes to chop big holes in the hedge that bordered the wood. More French battalions filed into the trees until the woods were filled with enemy infantry waiting for the bugle, which would throw the attack forward.

The bugle sounded; the French cheered, and the great ma.s.s rushed at the gaps in the hedge.

The defenders opened fire.

The Guards were behind ditches and hedges, safe behind walls, or firing from the windows in the chateau's upper floors. A blast of musketry crashed down on the French attack, and every musket fired was immediately replaced by another loaded weapon that fired and in turn was replaced at the loophole or firing step. The crackle of the muskets was incessant, drowning the cannon-fire from the ridge beyond. Smoke filled the s.p.a.ce south of the chateau's walls; smoke that was twitched and torn by new musket blasts that glowed red and sudden inside the acrid cloud. Somehow enough Frenchmen survived the musket volleys to reach the-chateau's walls where they clawed to drag the British muskets clean out of the loopholes. Instead the muskets fired, hurling attackers back into the faces of the men who advanced behind.

There seemed more hope of capturing the kitchen garden that was protected by a wall only a few inches taller than a man. Some of the French held their muskets over their heads to fire blindly down across the wall's coping. Others fired through the British loopholes, while the bravest tried to climb the wall and some even straddled it to stab down with their long bayonets.

Yet the Guards knew how to defend. For every French musket fired into a loophole a dozen British shots replied, while those brave Frenchmen who gained the wall's top were either shot back or else pulled over to be bayoneted among the broken pea plants or in the trampled rose beds. Outside the garden the foot of the wall became treacherous with the bodies of the dead and dying French. Inside the garden files of men queued to take their turn at the loopholes, so that the musket-fire never slackened and the heavy lead b.a.l.l.s smashed into the ma.s.s of Frenchmen who still ran forward from the trees to be baulked by the wall. Bugles and shouts urged them on.

The chateau's orchard, beyond the garden, had no walls, but only a thick blackthorn hedge. The Guards fired through and over the hedge, but the French brought up pioneers' axes and defended each axeman with a group of muskets, and it seemed that the Emperor's men would have to win here by sheer weight of numbers. The axes crashed at the thick thorn trunks, ripping and shredding and tugging the obstacle away. A redcoat lunged his bayonet at an axeman, lunged too far, and was dragged screaming over the thorns to be ripped by a dozen bayonets.

Then a sh.e.l.l exploded above the French.

Sharpe looked up. High in the sky was a tangle of arcing smoke trails, evidence that the howitzers on the ridge were firing Britain's secret weapon: the spherical case sh.e.l.l invented by Major-General Shrapnel. The sh.e.l.l was a five-and-a-half-inch sphere packed with musket-b.a.l.l.s and a powder explosive that, if its fuse was cut to a precise length, would explode lethally in the air above its target. The difficulty lay in cutting the fuses which were affected by humidity as well as by the exact length of the sh.e.l.l's flight, yet these fuses had been cut by a genius for the salvoes were murderously precise. Common sh.e.l.l burst into a few big fragments, but spherical case showered a killing rain of thin casing and musket-b.a.l.l.s, and now caseshot after caseshot was crashing apart above the French infantry and the musket-b.a.l.l.s and jagged iron fragments were slashing down to cut swathes of b.l.o.o.d.y flesh in the French attackers.

"That is pretty work! Ton my soul, but that's very well done!" Captain Witherspoon had followed Sharpe and Harper to their vantage point and now applauded the skill of the gunners who were dropping the spherical case exactly in the right place; none falling short on the Guards, but all arcing onto the French attackers.

The musket-fire still hammered from the chateau's walls. The French were faltering now, a.s.sailed from above and from their front. Some edged backwards, seeking the shelter of the trees, but the howitzers seemed to antic.i.p.ate the move and the shrapnel blasts moved away from the chateau to flense the oaks in the wood of their leaves and branches. Each sh.e.l.l cracked apart with a sharper bang than common sh.e.l.l. In Spain Sharpe had noticed how the spherical case caused more wounds then deaths, but the sight of wounded men streaming back through the trees would shake the confidence of the French troops advancing in support of the first attack.

British skirmishers ran from the chateau's northern flank into the field where Sharpe and Harper watched. The skirmishers ran south and added their fire from the corner of the farm buildings. The French were retreating fast now, going deep into the woods to escape the explosions and musketry.

"Opening honours to the Duke, wouldn't you say?" Witherspoon was scribbling his comments in his notebook.

"It'll be a very long day," Sharpe warned.