The Bravest Of The Brave

© Copyright David Cook 2014

 

Ney watched the Old Garde from the shattered trunks of the farmhouse’s orchard. The Garde marched up the valley rise, slow, like the inevitable flow of lava; creeping, majestic and unstoppable.

‘Here they come, sire!’ Colonel Pierre-Agathe Heymes, Ney’s aide-de-camp, uttered excitedly. He was wearing a red Hussar jacket with corn-flower blue breeches. ‘My God, what a sight.’

Marshal Michel Ney, 1st Duc d’Elchingen and 1stPrince de La Moskowa, grinned. Ahead of the Garde, the battalions of huge bearskin capped Grenadiers and Chasseurs, rode the greatest man Ney had ever known.

Napoleon Bonaparte.

The emperor surged forward of the Imperial General Staff, and for a moment a shaft of sunlight  hit him and his grey Arab, Marengo, illuminating them in soft light. It only lasted a second before the roiling clouds of battle-smoke darkened the world monochrome, but it was enough to make all who saw gasp in reverence.

‘The battle is over, sire,’ Heymes said, smile threatening to slice his head in to two. ‘We’ve won. We’ve won!’

Ney’s smile vanished and he said nothing. His heart banged in his chest. The emperor would have sent the Garde only when he was sure of victory, but Ney knew this was Napoleon’s last gamble. A ruse to trick his men in the dying evening’s light that they had won the battle. Marshal Grouchy had reached them on the right flank and Wellington’s patchwork army was doomed. A triumph to match the bitter killing fields of Borodino, Wagram and Austerlitz. But the mass of dark coats swarming towards the flank was not Grouchy and his Corps. It was the Prussians and Napoleon knew that. The Garde were to snatch victory before it was too late.

Too late, a voice echoed in Ney’s head. This is all too late.

On the right were the weary survivors of d’Erlon’s corps. Men who had fought hard all day, as though they had wanted to make up for their absence at Quatre Bras and Ligny two days ago. Incompetence had kept the corps from attending either battle. Marching and counter-marching on the Nivelles-Namur road. Ney bristled. It had not been his fault, but he felt slighted. Napoleon had distanced himself from the cavalryman, knowing that if d’Erlon had engaged in either battle the outcome of the campaign might very well be different.

Ney gazed up at La Haie Sainte; the farmhouse was battered and pock-marked by shot. Hundreds of bodies lay beneath the blood-stained walls, nearly two divisions had fallen so that the farm could be taken. The green-clad Germans put up a very stubborn defence, but were annihilated. A ragged tricolour hung from the rafters. Victory, he thought, at such a cost. To the west, beyond the burning chateau of Hougoumont, the evening sun glimmered the world gold. A great lance of it sparkled through the great clouds of acrid, throat-clogging stink of powder smoke and burning timber. The chateau was now a blackened shell, flames rose from the ground, flickering like orange tendrils of some Hellish world.

‘What time is it, Heymes?’ Ney’s watch had been damaged in the massed cavalry charge and where he lost his fourth mount of the day. British musketry had withered Ney’s cavalry upon the allied-held ridge. Bullets had plucked at him, some a hair’s breadth from his face. A ball had snatched an epaulette away, another had shot through his left boot, luckily causing no injury and another had shattered his gold watch. He still wore it clipped to his waistcoat, but it was beyond repair.