‘G Troop—Colonel Dickson’s, under the command of Captain Mercer—at your service!’
‘Oh yes! I know.’ The Colonel’s eyes travelled past him to a veritable bank of dead cuirassiers and horses, not twenty paces in front of his guns. He gave an awed whistle. ‘Good God!’
‘Yes, we’re having pretty hot work of it here,’ replied Mercer. A shell came whizzing over the crest, and fell in the mud not far from his troop, and lay there, its fuse spitting and hissing. He broke off to admonish his men, some of whom had flung themselves down on the ground. The shell burst at last, without, doing much damage; and the nonchalant Captain turned back to Colonel Audley, resuming, as though only a minor interruption had occurred: ‘—pretty hot work of it here. We wait till those steel-clad gentry come over the rise, and then we give ’em a dose of roundshot with a case over it. Terrible effect it has. I’ve seen a whole front rank come down from the effects of the case.’
‘Do you mean that you stand by your guns throughout?’
‘Take a look at those squares, sir,’ recommended Mercer, jerking his head towards the Brunswickers, who were lying on the ground to the right and left of his rear. ‘You can’t, at the moment, but if you care to wait you’ll see them form squares, huddled together like sheep. If we scuttled for safety among them, they’d break and run. They’re only children—not one above eighteen, I’ll swear. Gives ’em confidence to see us here.’
‘You’re a damned brave man!’ said the Colonel, taking the bridle of the trooper which a driver had led up.
‘Oh, we don’t give a button for the cavalry!’ replied Mercer. ‘The worst is this infernal cannonading. It plays the devil with us. We’ve been pestered by skirmishers, too, which is damned nuisance. Only way I can stop my fellows wasting their charges on them is to parade up and down the bank in front of my guns. That’s nervous work, if you like!’
‘I imagine it might be,’ said the Colonel, with a grin. ‘Don’t get your troop cut up too much, or his lordship won’t be pleased.’
‘The artillery won’t get any of the credit for this day’s work in any case, so what’s the odds?’ Mercer replied. ‘Fraser knows what we’re about. He was here a short time ago, very much upset from burying poor Ramsay.’
The Colonel had one foot in the stirrup, but he paused and said sharply: ‘Is Ramsay dead?’
‘Fraser buried him on the field not half an hour ago. Bolton’s gone too, I believe. Was Norman Ramsay a friend of yours, sir? Pride of our service, you know.’
‘Yes,’ replied Audley curtly, and hoisted himself into the saddle, wincing a little from the pain of his wounded thigh. ‘I must push on before your steel-clad gentry come up again. Good luck to you!’
‘The same to you, sir, and you’d better hurry. Cannonade’s slackening.’
The pause following the third onset of the cavalry was of longer duration than those which had preceded it. Ney had sent for reinforcements, and was reassembling his squadrons. To Milhaud’s and Lefebvre-Desnouttes’ original forty-three squadrons were now added both Kellermann’s divisions and thirteen squadrons of Count Guyot’s dragoons and Grenadiers à Cheval, making a grand total of seventy-seven squadrons. Not a foot of the ground, a third of a mile in width, lying between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, could be seen for the glittering mass of horsemen that covered it. It was an array to strike terror into the bravest heart. They advanced in columns of squadrons: gigantic carabiniers in white with gold breastplates; dragoons wearing tiger-skin helmets under their brass casques, and carrying long guns at their saddlebows; grenadiers in imperial blue, with towering bearskin shakos; steel-fronted cuirassiers; gay chasseurs; and white-plumed lancers, riding under the flutter of their own pennons. They did not advance with the brilliant dash of the British brigades, but at a purposeful trot. As they approached the Allied position the earth seemed to shake under them, and the sound of the horses’ hooves was like dull thunder, swelling in volume. Fifteen thousand of Napoleon’
s proudest horsemen were sent against the Allied infantry squares, to break through the Duke’s hard-held centre. They came over the crest in wave upon wave; riding up in the teeth of the guns until the entire plateau was a turbulent sea of bright, shifting colours, tossing plumes, and gleaming sabres. The fallen men and horses encumbering the ground hampered their advance, and once again the musketry fire from the front faces of the squares caused the squadrons to swerve off to right and left. Lancers, grenadiers, dragoons jostled one another in the press, their formation lost; but the tide swept on up to the second line of squares, and surrounded them. Some of the cavalry pushed right down the slope to the artillery wagons in the rear, and slew the drivers and horses, but though men were dropping all the time in the squares, the gaps were instantly filled, and when a square became disordered, the sharp command: ‘Close up!’ was obeyed before the Calvary could take advantage of the momentary confusion. For three-quarters of an hour the squares were almost swamped by the overwhelming hordes that pressed up to them, fell back again before the fire of the muskets, and rode round and round, striking with swords and sabres at the bayonets, discharging carbines, and making isolated dashes at the corners of the squares.
The French were driven off the plateau, when in hopeless confusion, by the charge of the Allied cavalry, but they retreated only to re-form. The cannonading burst forth again, and the sorely tried infantry, deafened by the roar of artillery, many of them wounded and all of them worn out by the grim struggle to keep their ranks closed, lay down on the torn ground, each man wondering in his heart what would be the end.
When the squadrons came over the crest again, Colonel Audley was nearly caught among them. He was mounted on his last horse, the Earl of Worth’s Rufus, and owed his preservation to the hunter’s pace. He snatched out his sword when he saw the cavalry bearing down upon him, threw off a lance by his right side, and clapping his spurs into Rufus’s flanks, galloped for his life. One of Maitland’s squares opened its files to receive them, and he rode into the middle of it and the files closed behind him.
‘Hallo, Audley!’ drawled a tall Major, who was having sticking-plaster put on a sabre cut. ‘That was a near thing, wasn’t it?’
‘Too damned near for my taste!’ replied Audley, sliding out of the saddle and looping Rufus’s bridge over his arm. He eased his wounded leg, with a grimace. ‘See anything of the Duke, Stuart?’
‘Not quite lately. He went off towards the Brunswickers, I think. Some of those fellows seem to revel in this sort of thing.’
‘The younger ones don’t like it.’
The surgeon, having finished his work on the Major’s arm, bustled away, and the Major, drawing his tunic on again, said, with a grave look: ‘What do you make of it?’
Audley returned the look. ‘Pretty black.’
The Major nodded. He buttoned up his coat, and said: ‘We don’t see much of it here, you know. Nothing but smoke and this damned cavalry. One of the artillery fellows who took cover in our square during the last charge said he thought it was all over with us.’
‘Not it! We shall win through!’
‘Oh, not a doubt! But damme, if ever I saw anything like this cavalry affair! Look at them, riding round and round! Makes you feel giddy to watch them.’ He glanced round the square, and sighed. ‘God, my poor regiment!’ He saw a slight stir taking place in one of the ranks, and hurried off towards the wall of red shouting: ‘Close up, there! Stand fast, my lads! We’ll soon have them over the hill!’
The inside of the square was like a hospital, with wounded men lying all over the ground among the ammunition boxes and the débris of accoutrements. Those of the doctors attached to the regiment who had not gone to the rear were busy with bandages and sticking plaster, but there was very little they could do to ease the sufferings of the worse cases. From time to time, a man fell in the ranks, and crawled between the legs of his comrades into the square. The dead lay among the living, some with limbs twisted in a last agony, and sightless eyes glaring up at the chasing clouds; others as though asleep, their eyelids mercifully closed, and their heads pillowed on their arms.
Almost at Audley’s feet, a boy lay in a sticky pool of his own blood. He looked very young; there was a faint smile on his dead lips, and one hand lay palm upwards on the ground, the fingers curling inwards in an oddly pathetic gesture. Audley was looking down at him when he heard his name feebly called. He turned his head and saw Lord Harry Alastair not far from him, lying on the ground, propped up by knapsacks.
He stepped over the dead boy at his feet, and went to Harry, and dropped on his knee beside him. ‘Harry! Are you badly hurt?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I can be,’ Harry replied, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Only I don’t seem able to move my legs. As a matter of fact, I can’t feel anything below my waist.’