LITMIR.BIZ

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has missed the mark. I only hope that he hasn’t lost us the battle.’

      Steel and Slaughter were still staring at the motionless cavalry when another horseman appeared riding along the left of the line in a fashion so foolhardy that it proclaimed his utter inexperience on a battlefield.

      Slaughter suppressed his laughter. ‘Aye aye, sir. Looks like we’ve got company. Silly bugger’ll get hisself killed, riding along a line like that. If the Frenchies don’t have a pop at ’im then like as not one of our own lads will. That type of officer there’s what you’d call a liability, sir. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

      ‘You’d do best to keep your thoughts to yourself, Jacob. But you’re quite right. The young idiot’s only going to draw their fire.’

      In response, it seemed, a French gun on the hill above Schaerken opened up with a round of ball and, missing the tempting target of the horseman, sent its projectile into the ranks of a company of musketeers, killing several of them.

      Slaughter sighed. ‘What’d I tell you?’

      The man pulled up his horse directly in front of Steel, who saw that he was a young lieutenant from Farquharson’s number three company, Sir James’s wife’s well-provided nephew, who rather than advance at the head of a company as a battalion officer had been taken on by the colonel as his personal aide, with a view to joining the General Staff. Steel had not encountered him before, but he had heard that the young man had already run up a prodigious mess bill in attempting to win over the affections of his brother officers. It was not Steel’s way, and he wondered whether the lad was really cut out for soldiering.

      The lieutenant reined in, patted his horse and stared down with a supercilious air. You’d be better suited to the Royal Household, thought Steel. This battlefield is no place for a boy like you.

      The lieutenant touched his hat in salute and spoke in a clipped, courtly accent. ‘Sir. Lieutenant Mowbray, with a message from Colonel Farquharson. Captain Steel, the battalion is about to advance. Your company will form the van. We are ordered to take the hill.’

      Steel nodded. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. I shall advance the company, and please be so good as to return my compliments to the Colonel.’

      Apparently satisfied, the lieutenant turned, and as he rode back to the colonel Steel looked at Slaughter, barely managing to contain his laughter until the young man was out of earshot.

      ‘Well, that’s us told. Jacob, hold your tongue. Silly young sprat. He’d better get that head of his a sight lower if he wants to keep it attached to his body. Come on.’

      Again the men changed formation and then, in a steady line, three ranks deep and two hundred men wide, the entire battalion began to advance up the hill towards the French. To their left another six battalions followed suit, while to the rear two identical lines of three ranks’ depth came on at fifty-pace intervals. Argyle rode in the centre of the huge brigade column, shouting encouragement above the wind and rain.

      Out in front of his half-company of Grenadiers, crossing the shallow stream of the Diepenbeek, Steel turned to Williams. ‘This’ll give them a surprise, eh, Tom?’

      ‘We’ll send them back to Paris, sir.’

      Steel laughed and nodded, although, while he could almost see the incredulous French faces, in his heart he knew that this would be no easy victory, and he waited for the first shot to strike.

      As much as Steel presumed that their assault might take the French by surprise, even he would have been astonished had he known the full extent of the trap about to be sprung on Marshal Vendôme. For while the French before them were taken aback that their hard-pressed enemy should counterattack, it was their comrades to the right who had the greater surprise. As Argyle’s brigade pressed forward, to their left from the very top of the Boser Couter down the hillside streamed battalion after battalion of grey-coated infantry with black-cuirassed cavalry protecting their flanks. They were the Danes and the Dutch. The Scandinavian cavalrymen of Claude-Frédéric Tserclaes, Count Tilly, and sixteen Dutch battalions under the command of a Swede, Count Oxenstein. Under Marlborough’s direction and the command of the young Prince of Orange fighting in his first battle, they had skirted the southwest side of the Boser Couter, hidden from French sight, and now the moment of reckoning had arrived. It was eight o’clock, and as they descended the slope, slippery from the recent rain, struggling to keep their lines dressed, Orange’s men found to their intense pleasure that they were looking directly into the flank and rear of the entire French army.

      But Steel was oblivious to their coming triumph. His thoughts were fixed only on the sight that lay before him: a long line of enemy infantry, with levelled muskets. The French opened fire on Farquharson’s battalion at seventy paces. One of the balls struck Lieutenant James Mowbray in the right side of his jaw and passed out through his left cheekbone, shattering it and taking away half his face. As he fell from his horse his last mortal thoughts were not of the agony he might be in, for he was too shocked to feel the pain, but how much it might cost him to have his tailor make up a new coat. The same volley felled some forty men of the battalion. Not all were dead and some were only lightly wounded, but it was enough to make the company officers yell to dress the ranks and for the sergeants to push with their halberds at the reluctant redcoats, urging them on into the storm of lead. Steel, at the head of the Grenadiers, felt a musket ball touch his calf and saw that it had torn away part of the leather of his boot and grazed the skin. He swore out loud, not from having been hit, but because his immediate concern was where on earth in Flanders he was going to find another pair of boots as comfortable as these that had carried him down the Rhine to Blenheim and through the mud of Ramillies. Bugger the formal firefight, he thought. In for a penny, in for a pound. Another firefight might decimate the French but there were sure to be more behind, he reasoned. The only real way to take this hill was going to be to fight for it hand to hand. He looked to his rear and yelled: ‘Charge! Grenadiers, with me.’

      Then they were running in. Steel sensed the momentum close behind him. There were thirty paces still to cover and the French were loading too fast. Twenty, ten more, and then they were on them just as they loosed off their volley. Steel’s target was smaller than him, swarthy and moustachioed, with black hair and a gold sleeper ring in his ear. He fell on him with all his force, and as the blade of Steel’s sword drove deep into the man’s chest his finger tightened on the trigger of his musket and it exploded beside Steel’s left ear, firing its ball high in the air and almost deafening him. Along the line it was a similar experience, most of the Grenadiers having managed to close just in time. A few unfortunates, though, were too slow and met the muzzles of the French guns at point-blank range, to be torn to pieces by the impact of the bullet, their dead flesh scorched by the flash. Steel drew his blade from the dying man and ran into the second rank. Parrying a bayonet, he cut at the man before him, and, feeling his sword find bone, moved on. The third-rank man, seeing him, turned and fled past a bewildered officer who quickly followed his example.

      Now they were through the line, and apart from isolated groups of men locked in combat with Farquharson’s redcoats the French unit had disintegrated. Steel saw a score of them surrendering under the merciful eye of one of the other company commanders. He looked about him to gauge his losses, but had hardly begun to make a count when he was aware of another body of men directly to their front. As Steel had feared, behind the first line lay a second, and as he watched they prepared to fire a volley at the recovering British. Steel braced himself.

      ‘Sar’nt. Prepare the company to take fire from fifty paces front. Grenadiers, reform. Mister Williams, to me.’

      As the company attempted to reassemble itself as best it could, Steel realized that across in the enemy lines all was not as it should be. He watched, intrigued, as several of the French officers stopped in the very motion of issuing their commands for musketry drill and began to look across the field to their right. He followed their gaze, and it was at that moment that he caught sight of the Danish and Dutch infantry and horse advancing down the great hill and heading directly for the French right flank. The French had seen them too, and suddenly the men who a few seconds before had been ready to take the field were thrown into confusion. Officers and sergeants shouted

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