There was no clear ending. The fighting petered out as darkness fell. The two sides were left not far from the positions in which they had begun the day.
The last message Wellington received came from Blücher. The Prussians had taken heavy casualties, he said, but they could hold their positions until nightfall.
Kit fell asleep on a bench and did not wake until dawn.
*
Sal and Jarge erected a makeshift shelter in the wood using leafy branches. It was far from waterproof but it kept some of the rain off. They wrapped themselves in blankets and went to sleep on the wet ground.
Sal woke at first light. The rain had stopped. She heard faint cries for help. Leaving Jarge asleep, she walked west to the edge of the wood and looked across the battlefield.
It was a sight she would never forget. The dead and wounded lay in the trampled wheat, thousands of them, dismembered and disfigured, heads without bodies, bowels spilling on the ground, severed legs and arms, faces covered with blood. There was a vile smell of entrails and crushed crops.
Sal was not a stranger to bloodshed. She had seen men and women maimed in mill accidents, and her own Harry had been horribly killed by Will Riddick’s cart, but she had never imagined suffering on this scale. She was filled with despair. Why did people do this to one another? Spade said the war was to stop the French dominating Europe, but would that be such a bad thing? In any case this was surely worse.
Her gaze fell on a man with shattered legs, and he caught her eye and said in a croak: ‘Help me.’ She saw that a dead man lay across him and he could not move the body or himself. She pulled the corpse away.
‘Water,’ said the wounded man. ‘For the love of the Lord.’
‘Where’s your canteen?’
‘Backpack.’
She managed to open his pack and extract the flask. It was empty. ‘I’ll bring you water,’ she said.
She had noticed a ditch in the woods. Now she returned to it and followed it to a pond. To her horror, there was a dead man in the water. She considered looking for another source but decided against. The man with the shattered legs would not care about the taste ofblood. She filled his canteen, returned to him, and helped him to drink. He slurped the tainted water greedily.
Gradually others roused themselves and began to move around. The walking wounded set off on the long road back to Brussels. Others were picked up by their comrades and carried to the crossroads, where carts were waiting to take them away. Kenelm Mackintosh was conducting non-stop burial services.
Sal learned that the 107th Foot had lost several senior officers yesterday. The lieutenant-colonel, one of the two majors, and several captains were dead or seriously wounded. The surviving major was in command.
The living looted the dead. Any equipment lost or damaged could be replaced from the corpses of men who would never again need knives, cups, belts, cartridges – or money. Sal took the riding boots of a small-b0ned officer to replace her own worn-out footwear. In the backpack of a dead Frenchman she found a cheese and a bottle of wine, and she took them both to Jarge for breakfast.
*
Before dawn on Saturday 17 June, Wellington had again asked the question: ‘Where is Blücher?’ This time Müffling had no new information, so Wellington sent an aide to look for the Prussian commander. The man returned at nine to say Blücher was missing, presumed dead.
And there was worse news. The Prussians had fled north in the night and planned to regroup at Wavre.
‘Wavre?’ said Wellington. ‘Where the devil is Wavre?’
An aide produced a map. ‘Good God, that’s miles away!’ said Wellington furiously. Kit looked hard at the map and calculated that Wavre was fifteen miles from Ligny. So far from joining up, the British and the Prussians were now even farther apart.
This was a catastrophe. Bonaparte had succeeded in splittingthe allies into two smaller armies, each easier to defeat than the joint force would have been. Meanwhile the road was open for him to march from Ligny to Quatre Bras, join the French force already here, and with that enlarged army attack the smaller Anglo-Dutch force.
Indeed, Kit reckoned, Bonaparte was probably on his way here already. The solution was obvious, and Wellington announced it: they had to retreat, and immediately.
The army would fall back to Mont St-Jean and camp there tonight, Wellington said. It was twelve miles from Wavre. If the Prussians could make it to Mont St-Jean to reinforce the British, together they could still beat Bonaparte.
Kit’s spirits lifted a little.
Wellington wrote to Blücher saying he would stand and fight at Mont St-Jean tomorrow if the Prussians could get there.
The message was sent, the orders went out, and the retreat began.
*
‘I don’t understand why we’re retreating,’ said Jarge. ‘I thought we won yesterday.’
