By My Sword Alone by David Black (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

determined, eerie silence to their mark. Except, there had been no silence, really. Everything was unfolding to the thin staccato of shouted orders; the relentless tum-tee-tum! tum-tee-tum! of drummer boys leading every company in every battalion. It was just that there were so many men, and yet an utter, desolate absence of talk that made it seem like a silence.

And then they had swung round the end of the army’s line of battle, and into their position as ordered. And now, they waited.

That was when the tum-tee-tum! tum-tee-tum! of drummer boys started up again. The beat came drifting to them out of the smoke along with the booming of the guns; and then, suddenly, the intensity of the artillery fire abruptly fell away and the beat of the drums rose. Somewhere in the smoke, battalions were on the move. This time, James remembered to check his timepiece.

‘What time is it, excellency?’ It was Beart. The first words he had spoken since they had formed up here at the edge of the dunes.

‘It is almost three of the clock,’ said James. ‘M’sieur Estaing de Sailland moves at his own pace, eh, Beart?’

The two men smiled thinly at each other while time resumed its treacle drip.

*

In the dense swirling of the smoke, the regiments Gensac and Royal-Comtois stepped out, side by side, each one three ranks deep, colours in their front ranks, their colonels leading them on foot, drummer boys beating the advance. Experienced sergeants, a pace or two ahead, their eyes measuring the distance to bring them to musket shot of the enemy; the dull thud, thud, thud of 2,000 men’s boots on the ground, marching to the same step.

James couldn’t see them, nor hear the beat of their boots, but he could hear their drummer boys. And when they suddenly stopped, the absence of their sound made him flinch. For a moment, then a moment more, there was nothing; just the background noise that masses of men make even when they are doing nothing. Then a different sound; like ripping linen, and again, and again. Separate rips running together, volley after volley of musketry.

And it went on like that, for an age; the intensity rising and falling in random crescendos. James could not imagine what was unfolding in that smoke.

What was, did not bear imagining.

The regiments Gensac and Royal-Comtois had come to a halt just shy of 270 paces from the Russian trench line, and their front ranks had, on the order, ‘Kneel!’, dropped onto one knee. The two ranks behind had closed up on them, and on the order, ‘Present!’ had as one pointed their Charleville-pattern muskets at the enemy.

On the order ‘Front rank, fire!’, 300 or more kneeling soldiers from each regiment pulled their triggers, and their flints ignited the black gunpowder in their firing pans, creating a small explosion that sent the those 300-odd lead/tin balls shooting towards the enemy at a muzzle velocity of over 1,200 feet per second.

Even at that relatively long range for muskets, any ball hitting a man did the most appalling damage, penetrating deep into the flesh, the soft metal distorting as it went, opening horrific wounds, splintering any bone it hit and carrying with it tiny torn patches of coat and shirt, which if left the soldier’s body, would later cause infection and death.

The French front rank’s volley hit very few Russian soldiers, safe behind their earthwork. The second rank fared no better, or the third, as they delivered their volleys too. As the Frenchmen fumbled to reload, the Russians replied; their volleys ripping and tearing into the bodies of over seventy French soldiers along the frontage of the two regiments, crumpling them in heaps for the men behind to step over and fill the gaps.

The drummer boys, lying flat to be fired over, stood up and began their tum-tee-tum! tum-tee-tum! again. French line was once more advancing, another fifty paces. Line upon line of faces, smeared now with powder smoke; not men really, although they marched the way men march. No room to be men here, pressed shoulder to shoulder, so nowhere to run to the side; with rank upon rank of others behind, so nowhere to run back, and with an enemy and their muskets and bayonets to their front. No room for flight, only fight. So, on they marched, towards the fight. Line upon line of faces, many, frozen in probably the last expression they would ever wear.

The volleys began again. The French fired, paused to reload, then marched forward, another fifty paces. And all the while the lead/tin balls reaped their harvest. So that the lines following behind could see where the line ahead had absorbed each Russian reply; the bodies neatly arrayed and the ground beneath them beginning to slick with the blood flowing out of all those commodious holes. From the groans and the screams, here, at last, it appeared there was room to be a man again, or at least to suffer like one.

James saw none of that; he just watched from his saddle at the other end of the army’s line as all the smoke down towards the Mottlau continued to cling to that corner of the pale blue sky; an indifferent pall with only the continuous tum-tee-tum! tum-tee-tum! and the musketry, suggesting anything at all was unfolding; just that the rip after rip after rip.

*

James cantered back to the rear squadron to talk to Poinatowski.

‘Your insistence that nothing you said could ever prepare me was true,’ James observed, reining in Estelle so they both now stood looking towards the Mottlau and the smoke.

Poinatowski took one look at James’ weary countenance and started to laugh. ‘If I had come out and said battles could also be boring, you would not have believed me,’ he said. Both of them looked at the lines of grenadiers in front of them. Their officers had stood