He pointed at the tavern sign and yelled out to anyone that might be in earshot: ‘There we are, boys. Didn’t I tell you if we took this field I’d buy you the best in the house? Well, there’s the bloody house. Remember it. Follow me to the French and after we’ve won I’ll wager the Duke himself will stand you to anything that’s on the menu there.’
There was a cheer, but only from the veterans. The new, green troops, he noticed, although they continued to advance doggedly, said nothing.
Another cannonball crashed into their ranks and left a sea of groaning dead and wounded men. From somewhere within the confused tangle of dead, wounded and unscathed bodies a single voice began to sing. Private Coles was doing what he always did, fending off the bullets with an invocation to the Almighty. It was a song, although Steel himself would have been the first to say that it was hardly what you might have called a melody:
‘Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me
Bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget not all his benefits,
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction;
Who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies …’
Clearly the man intended to continue, but as they walked on over the dead and wounded, trying in vain not to walk on living flesh, Steel heard another voice rise above the holy words. Slaughter growled out an order: ‘Coles. I’ll give you tender bloody mercies. There’s no mercies here. Nor no benefits or kindness either. Now shut that noise.’
‘But, Sarge, it’s the 103rd Psalm. It’s the Lord’s word.’
‘I don’t care if it’s the first bloody Psalm or if your sainted bloody mother wrote the whole of the bloody book. Shut your wailing now or you’ll be on sergeant’s orders for the rest of the month. That is if you live through this bloody battle, which, given your closeness to the Almighty, I very much doubt. He must be keen to see you, Coles, you talk to him so much. But I’ve got no appointment with him, so shut your bleeding trap or I’ll do it for you. Last thing I want on this battlefield is a bloody bible-basher. Upsets the men.’
But the God-fearing Coles was not finished: ‘But they seem to like it, Sarge.’
‘Coles. What is it you don’t understand? Are you a fool as well as deaf? I don’t care what the men like and what they don’t like. Fact is, I don’t like it! So shut your trap.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
For all the fire pouring in on them from the hill, Slaughter’s clever outburst had broken the spell of death that had hung over the advancing company, and a few of the men were grinning now.
Then Steel heard another voice, one of the recruits: ‘Bloody hell, Sarge. I mean, look, sir.’
Steel looked up to his front and peered into the clearing smoke. What met his gaze almost brought him to a standstill. It was everything he could do to carry on. For directly in front of them, at a distance of perhaps eighty yards, was an endless, unbroken line of grey-coated French infantry. As Steel looked on they levelled their muskets until he was staring down the barrel into the blackness of oblivion.
He called back: ‘Steady, boys. Keep going now. Not long –’ But the last syllable of his words was clipped away by the crash as the fire from four hundred muskets spat four hundred three-quarter-ounce balls that ripped holes in James Farquharson’s red-coated regiment of foot. Steel looked quickly over to the left to where the colonel had been riding with the colours and drummers at his side. Miraculously Sir James appeared to be unhurt. One of the drummer boys was down and dead, and Steel saw the brass spike-tipped top of one of the flagstaffs falter, indicating that an ensign had been hit, but then the colour was raised up again. Several gaps had appeared among his own company. But this was no time to think of losses.
‘Close up. Close your ranks. Keep going. With me.’
The order was repeated along the line as sergeants and corporals ran along the files.
A faint cry arose above the cacophony of drums, cries of pain, flying shot and yelling men: ‘Halt.’
Major Frampton had halted the entire battalion sixty paces from the enemy – the exact prescribed distance for a volley. Steel noticed that the two sides were separated by a small stream which ran down from the top of the big hill they called the Boser Couter and along the entire Allied front line. He saw too that the French were already reloading. He barked out the command and slipped quickly between the ranks to a new position.
He found Slaughter. ‘We’ll give them a firefight here, Jacob. By platoons. We can do better than that ragged excuse for a volley, eh? And by God we’ll give them a shock.’
By prior orders from the brigade, Steel’s Grenadiers were not to be held as was the usual practice in reserve during such a firefight, but would loose off their own volleys, adding to the firepower of the battalion.
‘Firing by platoon, sir?’
‘Fire by platoon, Sar’nt. Three firings each of six platoons. And the only means they have of countering such a fire is to come at us, as they will, with the bayonet. And frankly, Sar’nt, I don’t think they’ve the stomach for it today. So what will they do? Stand and fire at us? They can get off three shots a minute at the most. And I warrant they’ll not manage two. And then we’ll have at them.’
Slaughter nodded, knowing the grim truth in Steel’s words: Farquharson’s, like the other regiments in the British army, was composed of nine companies each of a field strength of around fifty men, and each of those companies was subdivided into two, including the Grenadiers. In a firefight such as this they would be ‘told off’ as one and two. The trick was that within each of those two platoons another six units or small platoons had also been nominated, and it was these which provided the continuous fire which the French had come to fear so much. Using this system, Farquharson’s and the other British foot would be able to fire six small volleys every minute. And, Steel asked himself, what troops in all the world could stand under a volley every ten seconds?
He barked the command: ‘Advance to half distance. Make ready.’
Down the line the men cocked their muskets and the front rank knelt on their right knees, placing the butt on the ground with their thumbs on the cock and their finger on the trigger. Behind them the second and third ranks closed forward.
‘Sar’nt, I think that we might dress the lines. Keep the barrels down. You know the drill. The new lads might think they’re on a partridge shoot.’ He turned back to the line: ‘Present.’
Along the length of the company and all the way down the long line of the regiment, all three ranks raised their weapons: Tower Armoury weapons, the finest that modern technology could produce, forty-six inches long, brass mounted and firing a .76 calibre ball.
Slaughter smiled and wandered off to line his pike along the levelled musket barrels until they were all pointing roughly towards the enemy’s stomachs. An inaccurate musket might easily miss the killing zone of a head. But a shot that went into the torso, packed as it was with vital organs, even if it didn’t kill a man, would certainly render him hors de combat for the rest of the action.
Steel sensed that someone was behind him, and turning found the odious adjutant,