Brothers in Arms. Iain Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, Major Frampton, looking down at him from horseback as he made his way along the flank, ordering the lines.

      Frampton nodded at Steel. ‘Steel. Good day. Your men look keen. Keep them to the fore, Steel. They are Grenadiers, you know.’

      He smiled, not meaning the compliment, and rode off to the other flank. Steel wondered whether he would survive. Unpopular mounted officers, and few were more unpopular than Charles Frampton, made a tempting target if you had a crack shot in the battalion. He brushed fantasy aside and turned back to the job in hand.

      Frampton’s voice rang out to the battalion: ‘First firing. Take care … Fire!’

      But the French had now reloaded and as the guns fired from the British line, so they did from the enemy ranks. It seemed to Steel that the air had become a storm of musket balls, and he saw men fall all along the red-coated line. But then looking across he saw through the smoke to his left that the French too had taken losses. The regimental drummers beat a short preparative tattoo which had the men at the ready.

      Again Frampton’s voice sang out: ‘Second firing … fire.’ The second platoon fired and more of the grey-coated infantry fell. But the slower French had not yet reloaded and were unable to return fire.

      The drums beat up again. And again the command came: ‘Third firing.’ It was the turn of the Grenadiers this time. They cocked their weapons.

      ‘Fire!’ A deafening report was followed by billowing white smoke, and Steel knew that by now the French would be suffering badly. And all this in only thirty seconds. The theory was that it should be possible for 2,000 men to fire 10,000 rounds in a single minute. Looking down the line and all along the brigade, Steel wondered whether today might not prove the theorists right.

      He shouted the command: ‘Grenadiers. Reload. Make ready.’

      As he did so the first firing, already reloaded, loosed off another volley. And so it went on. Not one volley but a continuous ripple which ran up and down the Allied line. The French, now themselves reloaded, managed to fire again, and again men fell among the Grenadiers. But the storm of lead pouring out of the British ranks was just too continuous. Too relentless. Too deadly.

      For fully five minutes they kept it up. Near on thirty volleys, until the barrels of the muskets began to overheat and men burnt their fingers on the metal. The smoke was chokingly dense now and there was no way to tell the condition of the enemy. Only a man on horseback, above СКАЧАТЬ