Free Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil by Bernard Cornwell Page B

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 in the scorched grass.
    The columns could not move. A few brave men tried to advance, but the bullets cut them down. The survivors edged back and the drumroll faltered.
    ‘Cease fire!’ a British voice called. ‘Fix bayonets!’
    Four thousand men drew their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them on to hot muzzles.
    ‘Present!’ The voices of the officers and sergeants were calm. Most of these men were veterans and they took pride in sounding unmoved by the carnage of battle. ‘Battalions will advance! Forward!’
    All along the front line the battalions