Sharpe’s Waterloo: The Waterloo Campaign, 15–18 June, 1815

CHAPTER FOUR

Clouds were showing in the west. The vapour, rising over the North Sea, drifted slowly eastwards to heap white and grey thunderheads above the coast. The farmers feared heavy rain that would crush their ripening crops.

No such worries crossed the mind of the Prussian Major who had been sent to Brussels with news of the French advance and details of the Prussian response. The despatch told how the Prussian garrison at Charleroi was falling back, not on Brussels, but north-east to where the main Prussian army was assembling. The Major’s news was vital if the British and Dutch troops were to join the Prussians.

The Major faced a journey of thirty-two miles. It was a sunny and very hot day, and he was tired and monstrously fat. The exertions of the first five miles when he had thought the Dragoons might burst from behind every hedgerow or farmhouse had exhausted both the Major and his horse, so once he felt safe he sensibly slowed to a contemplative and restoring walk. After an hour he came to a small roadside inn that stood on the crest of a shallow hill and, twisting in his saddle, he saw that the inn gave him a good view of the road right to the horizon so that he would see any French pursuit long before it represented any danger. Nothing moved on the road now except for a man driving eight cows from one pasture to another.

The Major eased himself out of the saddle, slid heavily to the ground, and tied his horse to the inn’s signpost. He spoke passably good French and enjoyed discussing food with the pretty young serving girl who came out to the table by the roadside, which the Major had adopted as his vantage point. He decided on roast chicken and vegetables, with apple pie and cheese to follow. He requested a bottle of red wine, but not of the common kind.

The sun shone on the long road to the south. Haymakers scythed steadily in a meadow a half-mile away, while much further off, far beyond the blur of fields and woods, dust whitened the sky. That was the artificial cloud kicked up by an army, but no troops threatened the Major’s peaceful rest and so he saw no reason to make undue haste, especially as the roast chicken proved to be excellent. The chicken’s skin was crisped nicely and its yellow flesh was succulent. When the girl brought the Major his pie, she asked him if Napoleon was coming.

‘Don’t you worry, my dear! Don’t you worry.’

Far to the Major’s north, in Brussels, a detachment of Highland soldiers had been ordered to the Duke of Richmond’s house, where they were shown into the dazzling ballroom hung with the Belgian colours. Before supper was served the Highlanders would offer the guests a display of their dancing.

The Highlander Lieutenant asked that one of the unlit chandeliers be raised from floor level so he could make certain there would be adequate room for his dancers’ crossed swords. The Duchess, intent that every particular of her ball should be arranged to perfection, insisted on a demonstration. ‘You are bringing pipers tonight?’ the Duchess demanded.

‘Indeed, Your Grace.’

Which only gave the Duchess a new detail to worry over: how would the orchestra leader know when to stop his men playing so that the pipers could begin?

Her husband averred that doubtless the orchestra and the pipers would arrange things to their own satisfaction, and further opined that the Duchess should leave the ball’s arrangements to those who were paid to worry about the details, but the Duchess was insistent on voicing her concerns this afternoon. She earnestly asked her husband whether she should request the Prince of Orange not to bring Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe?

‘Who’s Sharpe?’ the Duke asked from behind his copy of The Times.

‘He’s the husband of Johnny Rossendale’s girl. She’s coming, I’m afraid. I tried to stop him bringing her, but he’s clearly besotted.’

‘And this Sharpe is her husband?’

‘I just told you that, Charles. He’s also an aide to Slender Billy.’

The Duke grunted. ‘Sharpe’s clearly a fool if he lets an idiot like Johnny Rossendale cuckold him.’

‘That’s precisely why I think I should talk to the Prince. I’m told this Sharpe is an extremely uncouth man and is more than likely to fillet Johnny.’

‘If he’s uncouth, my dear, then doubtless he won’t wish to attend your ball. And I certainly wouldn’t mention the matter to Orange. That bloody young fool will only bring Sharpe if he thinks it’ll cause trouble. It’s a sleeping dog, my dear, so let it lie.’

But it was not in the Duchess’s nature to let anything remain undisturbed if it was amenable to her interference. ‘Perhaps I should mention it to Arthur?’

The Duke snapped his newspaper down to the table. ‘You will not trouble Wellington about two damned fools and their silly strumpet.’

‘If you say so, Charles.’

‘I do say so.’ The rampart of newspaper was thrown up, inviting silence.

The other English Duke in Brussels, Wellington, would have been grateful had he known that Richmond had spared him the Duchess’s worries, for the Commander-in-Chief of the British and Dutch armies already had more than enough worries of his own. One of those worries, the smallest of them, was the prospect of hunger. Wellington knew from bitter experience that he would be required to make so much conversation at the Duchess’s ball that his supper would inevitably congeal on its plate. He therefore ordered an early dinner of roast mutton to be served in his quarters at three o’clock that afternoon.

Then, noting that clouds were building to the west, he took his afternoon walk about the fashionable quarter of Brussels. He took care to appear blithely unworried as he strolled with his staff, for he knew only too well how the French sympathizers in the city were looking for any sign of allied defeatism that they could turn into an argument to demoralize the Dutch-Belgian troops.

The quality of those troops was at the heart of the Duke’s real worries. On paper his army was ninety thousand strong, but only half of that paper force was reliable.

The core of the Duke’s army was his infantry. He had thirty battalions of redcoats, but only half of those had fought in his Spanish campaigns and the quality of the other half was unknown. He had some excellent infantry battalions of the King’s German Legion, and some enthusiastic troops from Hanover, but together the German and British infantry totalled less than forty thousand men. To make up the numbers he had the Dutch-Belgian army, over thirty thousand infantrymen in all, which he did not trust at all. Most of the Dutch-Belgians had fought for the Emperor and still wore the Emperor’s uniforms. The Duke was assured by the King of the Netherlands that the Belgians would fight, but, Wellington wondered, for whom?

The Duke had cavalry too, but the Duke had no faith in horsemen, whether Dutch or English. His German cavalry was first class, but sadly few in numbers, while the Duke’s English cavalrymen were mere fools on horseback; expensive and touchy, prone to insanity, and utter strangers to discipline. The Dutch-Belgian horsemen, for all the Duke cared, could have packed their bags and ridden home right now.

He had ninety thousand men, of whom half might fight well, and he knew he would likely face a hundred thousand of Napoleon’s veterans. The Emperor’s veterans, fretting against the injustices of Bourbon France, had welcomed Napoleon’s return and flocked to the Eagles. The French army, which the Duke still thought was massing south of the border, was probably the finest instrument that Napoleon had ever commanded. Every man in it had fought before, it was freshly equipped, and it sought vengeance against the countries that had humbled France in 1814. The Duke had cause for worry, yet as he strolled down the rue Royale he was forced to put a brave face on the desperate odds lest his enemies took courage from his despair. The Duke could also cling to one strong hope, namely that his scratch army would not fight Napoleon alone, but alongside Prince Blücher’s Prussians. So long as the British and Prussian armies joined forces, they must win; separately, the Duke feared, they must be destroyed.

Yet twenty-five miles to the south the French were already pushing the Prussian forces eastwards, away from the British. No one in Brussels knew that the French had invaded; instead they prepared for a duchess’s ball while a fat Prussian major paid for his roast chicken, finished his wine, then ambled slowly northwards.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, eight hours after the first shots had been fired south of Charleroi, Sharpe met more cavalrymen; this time a patrol in red-faced dark blue coats who thundered eagerly across a pasture to surround Sharpe and his two horses. They were men from Hanover, exiles who formed the King’s German Legion that had fought so hard and well in Spain. Now the German soldiers stared suspiciously at Sharpe’s strange uniform until one of the troopers saw the Imperial ‘N’ on the horse’s saddle-cloth and the sabres rasped out of their metal scabbards as the horsemen shouted at Sharpe to surrender.

‘Bugger off,’ Sharpe snarled.

‘You’re English?’ the KGL Captain asked in that language. He was mounted on a fine black gelding, glossy coated and fresh. His saddle-cloth bore the British royal cipher, a reminder that England’s King was also Hanover’s monarch.

‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe, of the Prince of Orange’s staff.’

‘You must forgive us, sir.’ The Captain, who introduced himself as Hans Blasendorf, sheathed his sabre. He told Sharpe his patrol was one of the many that daily scouted south to the French border and beyond; this particular troop had been ordered to explore the villages south and east of Mons down as far as the Sambre, but not to encroach on Prussian territory.

‘The French are already in Charleroi,’ Sharpe told the German.

Blasendorf gaped at Sharpe in shocked silence for a moment. ‘For certain?’

‘For certain!’ Tiredness made Sharpe indignant. ‘I’ve just been there! I took this horse off a French Dragoon north of the town.’

The German understood the desperate urgency of Sharpe’s news. He tore a page from his notebook, offered it with a pencil to Sharpe, then volunteered his own patrol to take the despatch to General Dornberg’s headquarters in Mons. Dornberg was the General in charge of these cavalry patrols which watched the French frontier, and finding one of his officers had been a stroke of luck for Sharpe; by pure accident he had come across the very men whose job was to alert the allies of any French advance.

Sharpe borrowed a shako from one of the troopers and used its flat round top as a writing desk. He did not write well because he had learned his letters late in life and, though Lucille had made him into a much better reader, he was still clumsy with a pen or pencil. Nevertheless, as clearly as he could, he wrote down what he had observed – that a large French force of infantry, cavalry and artillery was marching north out of Charleroi on the Brussels road. A prisoner had been taken who reported a possibility that the Emperor was with those forces, but the prisoner had not been certain of that fact. Sharpe knew it was important for Dornberg to know where the Emperor was, for where Napoleon rode, that was the main French attack.

He signed the despatch with his name and rank, then handed it to Blasendorf who promised it would be delivered as swiftly as his horses could cross country.

‘And ask General Dornberg to tell the Prince’s Chief of Staff that I’m watching the Charleroi road,’ Sharpe added.

Blasendorf nodded an acknowledgement as he turned his horse away, then, realizing what Sharpe had said, he looked anxiously back. ‘You’re going back to the road, sir?’

‘I’m going back.’

Sharpe, his message in safe hands, was free to return and watch the French. In truth he did not want to go, for he was tired and saddle-sore, but this day the allies needed accurate news of the enemy so that their response could be certain, fast and lethal. Besides, the appearance of the French had spurred Sharpe’s old excitement. He had thought that living in Normandy would make him ambivalent towards his old enemy, but he had spent too many years fighting the Crapauds suddenly to relinquish the need to see them beaten.

So out of habit as much as out of duty, he turned his captured horse and rode again towards the enemy. While to the north Brussels slept.

Major General Sir William Dornberg received the pencil-written despatch in the town hall at Mons which he had made into his headquarters, and where he had transformed the ancient council chamber into his map room. The panelled room, hung with dusty coats of arms, suited his self-esteem, for Dornberg was a very proud man who was convinced that Europe did not properly appreciate his military genius. He had once fought for the French, but they had not promoted him beyond the rank of colonel, so he had deserted to the British who had rewarded his defection with a knighthood and a generalship, but even so, he still felt slighted. He had been given command of a cavalry brigade, a mere twelve hundred sabres, while men he thought less talented than himself commanded whole divisions. Indeed, the Prince of Orange, a callow boy, commanded a corps!

‘Who was this man?’ he asked Captain Blasendorf.

‘An Englishman, sir. A lieutenant-colonel.’

‘On a French horse, you say?’

‘He says he captured the horse, sir.’

Dornberg frowned at the message, so ill-written in clumsy pencilled capitals that it could have been scrawled by a child. ‘What unit was this Englishman, Sharpe? Is that his name? Sharpe?’

‘If he’s the Sharpe I think he is, sir, then he’s quite a celebrated soldier. I remember in Spain –’

‘Spain! Spain! All I hear about is Spain!’ Dornberg slapped the table with the palm of his hand, then glared with protruding eyes at the unfortunate Blasendorf. ‘To listen to some officers in this army one would think that no other war had ever been fought but in Spain! I asked you, Captain, what unit this Sharpe belonged to.’

‘Hard to say, sir.’ The KGL Captain frowned as he tried to remember Sharpe’s uniform. ‘Green jacket, nondescript hat, and Chasseur overalls. He said he was on the Prince of Orange’s staff. In fact he asked that you tell the Prince’s headquarters that he’s gone back towards Charleroi.’

Dornberg ignored the last sentences, seizing on something far more important. ‘Chasseur overalls? You mean French overalls?’

Blasendorf paused, then nodded. ‘Looked like it, sir.’

‘You’re an idiot! An idiot! What are you?’

Blasendorf paused, then, in the face of Dornberg’s overwhelming scorn, sheepishly admitted he was an idiot.

‘He was French, you idiot!’ Dornberg shouted. ‘They seek to mislead us. Have you learned nothing of war? They want us to think they will advance through Charleroi, while all the time they will come towards us here! They will come to Mons! To Mons! To Mons!’ He slammed a clenched fist onto the map with every reiteration of the name, then dismissively waved Sharpe’s despatch in Captain Blasendorf’s face. ‘You might as well have wiped your arse with this. You’re an idiot! God save me from idiots! Now go back to where you were ordered. Go! Go! Go!’

General Dornberg tore up the despatch. The Emperor had touched the net spread to contain him, but the British half of the trap was unaware of its catch, and so the French marched on.

South-west of Brussels, in the village of Braine-le-Comte, His Royal Highness the Prince William, Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the Netherlands, and Duke, Earl, Lord, Stadtholder, Margrave and Count of more towns and provinces than even he could remember, leaned forward in his chair, fixed his gaze at the mirror which stood on the dressing-table and, with exquisite care, squeezed a blackhead on his chin. It popped most satisfyingly. He squeezed another, this time provoking a small spurt of blood. ‘Damn. Damn, damn, damn.’ The bloody ones always left a livid mark on his sallow skin, and Slender Billy particularly wanted to look his best at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.

‘Eau de citron,’ the girl on his bed said lazily.

‘You’re mumbling, Charlotte.’

‘Eau de citron. It dries the skin and shrivels away the spots.’ She spoke in French. ‘You should use it.’

‘Shit,’ the Prince said as another blackhead burst bloodily. ‘Shit and damn and bugger!’

He had been educated at Eton College so had an excellent command of English. After Eton he had gone to Oxford, then served on Wellington’s staff in Spain. The appointment had been purely political, for Wellington had not wanted him, and the exiled Prince had consequently been kept well away from any fighting, though the experience had nevertheless convinced the young man that he had a fine talent for soldiering. His education had also left him with a love for all things English. Indeed, apart from his Chief of Staff and a handful of aides, all his closest friends were English. He wished the girl on the bed were English, but instead she was Belgian and he hated the Belgians; to the Prince they were a common, ox-like race of peasants. ‘I hate you, Charlotte.’ He spoke to the girl in English. Her name was Paulette, but the Prince called all such girls Charlotte, after the English Princess who had first agreed to marry him, then inexplicably broken off the engagement.

‘What are you saying?’ Paulette spoke no English.

‘You stink like a sow,’ the Prince continued in English. ‘you’ve got thighs like a grenadier, your tits are greasy, and in short you are a typical Belgian and I hate you.’ He smiled fondly at the girl as he spoke, and Paulette, who in truth was very pretty, blew him a kiss before lying back on the pillows. She was a whore fetched from Brussels and paid ten English guineas a day to bed the Prince, and in her opinion she earned every ounce of the precious gold. Paulette thought the Prince disgustingly ugly: he was obnoxiously thin, with a bulbous round head on a ridiculously long neck. His skin was sallow and pitted, his eyes bulged, and his mouth was a slobbering frog-like slit. He was drunk as often as he was sober and in either condition held an inflated opinion of his abilities, both in bed and on the battlefield. He was now twenty-three years old and commander of the First Corps of the Duke of Wellington’s army. Those who liked the Prince called him Slender Billy, while his detractors called him the Young Frog. His father, King William, was known as the Old Frog.

No one of any sense had wanted the Young Frog to be given a command in the Duke’s army, but the Old Frog would not hear of the Netherlands joining the coalition unless his son held high command, and thus the politicians in London had forced the Duke of Wellington to concede. The Old Frog had further insisted that his son command British troops, on which point the Duke had also been forced to yield, though only on condition that reliable British officers were appointed to serve on the Young Frog’s staff.

The Duke provided a list of suitable, sober and solid men, but the Young Frog had simply scrawled out their names and replaced them with friends he had made at Eton and, when some of those friends declined the honour, he found other congenial officers who knew how to leaven war’s rigours with riotous enjoyment. The Prince also demanded a few officers who were experienced in battle and who would exemplify his own ideas of how wars should be fought. ‘Find me the most audacious of men!’ he ordered his Chief of Staff who, a few weeks later, diffidently informed the Prince that the notorious Major Sharpe was on the half-pay list and evidently unemployed. The Young Frog had immediately demanded Sharpe and sweetened the demand with a promotion. He flattered himself that he would discover a twin soul in the famous Rifleman.

Yet somehow, and despite the Prince’s easy nature, no such friendship had developed. The Prince found something subtly annoying about Sharpe’s sardonic face, and he even suspected that the Englishman was deliberately trying to annoy him. He must have asked Sharpe a score of times to dress in Dutch uniform, yet still the Rifleman appeared in his ancient, tattered green coat. That was when Sharpe bothered to show himself at the Prince’s headquarters at all; he evidently preferred to spend his days riding the French frontier which was a job that properly belonged to the pompous General Dornberg, which thought reminded the Prince that Dornberg’s noon report should have arrived. That report had a special importance this day for, if any trouble threatened, the Prince knew he could not afford to go dancing in Brussels. He summoned his Chief of Staff.

The Baron Jean de Constant Rebecque informed His Highness that Dornberg’s report had indeed arrived and contained nothing alarming. No French troops troubled the road to Mons; it seemed that the Belgian countryside slept under its summer heat.

The relieved Prince grunted an acknowledgement, then leaned forward to gaze critically in the mirror. He twisted his head left and right before looking anxiously at Rebecque. ‘Am I losing too much hair?’