The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [17]
The real killing started in the woodlands to their south. They could not see it, but its signs were clear. The rattle of musket fire amongst the trees; smoke boiling up through the canopy; shouting, and screaming, and the beating of feet upon the soft earth.
“They’ll hold them,” Jamie breathed.
He was crouched down behind the wall, hugging his musket to him. His voice was unsteady, trembling with that fretful blend of hope and fear that Quire had heard in so many others over the years.
“Maybe,” Quire muttered.
He stared out towards the trees. He could imagine what it was like in there, how foul it would be. Fighting close, seeing the eyes of the man who meant to kill you. Bayonet work. Muskets wielded as bone-breaking clubs. Too much of the fighting he had done all across Portugal and Spain had been like that: chaotic, hand-to-hand, merciless. He excelled at it, the savage business of killing, but the burden of it, the misery of it, had only grown over time. A pity, that a man should be so good at something he loathed.
The battle in the woods came closer. Men were spilling back out from the plantation, scattering towards the gates into the farm complex, or around it entirely, hurrying back towards the main lines. It went on and on.
“Oh fuck,” Jamie murmured over and over. “Oh, fuck.”
“Shut up,” Quire said eventually, softly, “or I’ll fuck you myself.”
And then it was the French, streaming out from under the trees in their dark jackets, shouting, running across the narrow stretch of open ground beneath the walls. The Foot Guards spat fire and musket balls at them, flames and smoke churning along the top of the wall as volley after volley went out, laying down men like so many windblown trees. Quire fired once, twice, thrice. Jamie never rose from his crouch. The wave of the attack broke on those rocks of lead and fire.
A pause. A space between furies. Men laughed. A few dared to imagine they had already faced the worst, and would be spared now. Somewhere, someone was crying, but Quire did not look to see who it was, or why. You did not seek out such sights.
From that moment, that quiet interlude, the day raced down into the darkness. Across a great stretch of land eastward from Hougoumont, titanic battle ranged. Armies tore at one another, charged and counter-charged. War swallowed up that one piece of the world and carried it off, for a span of time, to its own place where all else was in abeyance and nothing of any consequence existed save the clash of wills and of bodies and of flesh and steel.
At Hougoumont, the French came, again and again. They flooded up to the walls and the gates, lapping at them, clawing at them. Quire fell into the calm emptiness of battle. The inner silence in which thought gave way to ritual. Fire, reload, fire. Over and over, over and over. Breathing always the smoke and grit and dust.
Musket balls and splinters of stone blasted off the wall, filling the air like hornets. Ducking down, reloading, Quire listened to them chattering above his head. Many of the others were firing blind, raising only their guns above their protective bulwark and loosing off shots wildly. That served little purpose. It needed a man to lift his head up there, into the place where the shot was whining and the stone chips flying and the smoke boiling. Some would not do it, and Quire did not begrudge them that.
He did not begrudge Jamie Boswell his fearful paralysis, either. The youth stayed hunkered down, murmuring to himself, wincing now and again. He could never have seen anything like this before, and it seemed only sense to Quire that a man caught up for the first time in such a tempest should choose not to die on behalf of distant folk in their parliaments and palaces.
Not all those present agreed, though. Sergeant Walker was striding along the line of the wall, all bile and bellows. He was a bastard of a man, in Quire’s judgement, but then he had come to feel that way about almost all save the common mass of the soldiery.
“Get up, that man,