‘We’re going to clear those scum out of there!’ Frederickson had seen the danger just as soon as Sharpe. He had a company of redcoats offer rapid fire to keep the enemy subdued while Sergeant Harper led a squad with fixed sword-bayonets in a flanking charge. The Frenchmen did not stay to contest the rocks, but retreated nimbly up towards the empty skyline. One of the retreating Frenchmen was hit in the back by a rifle bullet, and Marcos Hernandez, one of Frederickson’s Spanish Riflemen, grinned with pleasure at his own deadly marksmanship.
‘Cease fire!’ Frederickson called. ‘Well done, lads. Now don’t bunch up! You’re not in love with each other, so spread out!’ Sweet William had taken off his eye-patch and removed his false teeth so that he looked like some monstrous being from the grave. He seemed much happier now that the first shots had been fired. Hernandez reloaded, then scored a line on the butt of his rifle to mark another hated Frenchman killed.
The surviving French skirmishers ran over the skyline from where, though the source of the noise stayed hidden, came the sudden sound of massed French drums. The instruments rattled the sky. Sharpe had first heard that malicious sound when he was sixteen and he had heard it on unnumbered battlefields since. He knew what it portended. He was listening to the pas de charge, the heartbeat of an Empire and the sound that drove French infantry to the attack.
‘D’you see guns, Sergeant?’ Frederickson shouted to Harper who was some yards further up the slope.
‘Not a one, sir!’
Then the skyline, as though sown by dragon’s teeth, sprouted men.
‘Christ in his Scottish heaven.’ Major-General Nairn, surrounded by his junior aides, sounded disgusted with the enemy. ‘You’d have thought the woollen-headed bastards would have learned by now.’ He sheathed his sword and glowered dour disapproval at the two enemy columns.
‘Learned, sir?’ the young aide, whose first battle this was, asked nervously.
‘You are about to see the God-damned Frogs damned even further.’ Nairn took a watch from his fob pocket and snapped open the lid. ‘Good God! If they’re going to offer battle, then they might as well do it properly!’
The aide did not understand, but every veteran in the British attack knew what was about to happen and felt relieved because of it. They had climbed in fear of waiting artillery that would have gouged bloody ruin in the three attacking lines. Even more they had feared the conjunction of artillery and cavalry, for the cavalry would have forced the attacking infantry into protective squares that would have made choice targets for the French gunners. Instead they were faced with the oldest French tactic; a counter-attack by columns of massed infantry.
Two such columns were advancing over the skyline. The two columns were immense formations of crammed soldiers, rank after rank of infantrymen assembled into human battering rams that were aimed at the seemingly fragile British lines. These were the same columns that the Emperor Napoleon had led across a continent to smash his enemies’ armies into broken and panicked mobs, but no such column had ever broken an army led by Wellington.
‘Halt!’ All along the British and Portuguese lines the order was shouted. Sergeants dressed the battalions while the skirmishers readied themselves to beat off the French light troops who, advancing in front of the columns, were supposed to unsettle the British line with random musketry.
The French light troops offered no threat to Beresford; instead it was the momentum of the two great columns that was supposed to drive his men into chaos. Yet, like Wellington, Beresford had faced too many columns to be worried now. His first line would deal with their threat, while his second and third lines would merely be spectators. That first line stood to attention, muskets grounded, and gazed up the long sloping sward over which the two giant formations marched. The French columns looked irresistible, their weight alone seeming sufficient to drive them through the thin skeins of waiting men. Above the Frenchmen’s heads waved their flags and eagles. In the centre of the formations the drummer boys kept up the pas de charge, pausing only to let the marching men shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ between each flurry of drumbeats. The veterans among the waiting British and Portuguese battalions, who had seen it all before, seemed unmoved.
The skirmishers fell slowly back before the weight of enemy light troops, but they had done their job which was to keep the French skirmish fire off the waiting line. French officers, swords drawn, marched confidently ahead of the columns. Major-General Nairn gazed at the closest column through a telescope, then slammed the tubes shut. ‘Not many moustaches there!’ The old moustached veterans, the backbone of France, were in their graves, and Nairn had seen how young these counter-attacking Frenchmen were. Perhaps that was why Soult had launched them in column, for raw green troops took courage from the sheer closeness of their comrades in the tightly packed mass of men. It was a formation suited to a conscripted, citizen army, but those citizen conscripts were now closing on the professional killers of Britain and Portugal.
When the columns were eighty paces from Beresford’s forward line, the British and Portuguese officers stirred themselves to give a single laconic order. ‘Present!’
Four thousand heavy muskets came up in a single rippling movement. The leading ranks of the two French columns, seeing their death, checked their pace, but the weight of men behind forced them onwards.
‘Hold your fire!’ Sergeants warned redcoats who dragged back the cocks of their weapons. The French, made nervous by the silent threat, opened fire as they marched. Only the men in the first two ranks could actually fire, the rest were there merely to add weight. Here and there along the red-coated line a man might fall, but the French aim was spoiled by the need to fire while marching.
‘Close up!’ A British Sergeant dragged a dead man back from the line.
‘Hold your fire!’ An officer, slim sword drawn, watched the blue-coated French column come closer. Four thousand muskets were aimed at the heads of the two columns.
A rattle of drums, a pause, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
One heartbeat. The British muskets were steady, the officers’ swords raised, while the men in either army were close enough now to see the expressions on the others’ faces.
‘Fire!’
Like a great cough, or like a gigantic throttling explosion, four thousand muskets flamed smoke and lead, and four thousand brass-bound butts mule-kicked back into men’s shoulders. The smoke spewed to hide the French.
‘Reload!’
Sharpe, still off to the right flank, saw the nearer enemy column quiver as the heavy bullets struck home. Blue coats were speckled by blood. The whole front rank crumpled and fell, and most of the second rank too. Only one officer was left standing, and he was wounded. The succeeding French ranks were baulked by the barrier of their own dead and wounded, but then the sheer mass of the deep column forced the new front rank to clamber over the bodies and continue the advance. ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
‘Fire!’
Now it was the deadly platoon fire that rippled out of the British and Portuguese lines. Hours of training had made these men into clockwork killers. Each platoon of a battalion fired a couple of seconds after the platoon on its left, and so the bullets seemed never-ending as they flicked through the screen of smoke to strike at the French. The fire flayed at the enemy, flensing men off the front and flanks of the column, so that it seemed as if the enemy marched into an invisible mincing machine. The French survivors, inexorably forced to the front ranks, tried to struggle into the storm of musketry, but no man could live against that fire. In the past, in the glorious days when the Emperor’s name struck fear into Europe, the columns had won by overaweing their enemies, but Wellington’s men had long mastered the grim art of bloodying French glory. They did it with musket-fire, the fastest musket-fire in the world. They blackened their faces with the explosions of the priming in their weapons’ pans, they bruised their shoulders with the slamming kicks, and they broke the enemy. Cartridge after cartridge was bitten open, loaded and fired, while in front of the British line the musket wadding burned pale