Hougoumont – Details

Teaser

There were gates. After what felt like an eternity of tramping through the sliding, sticky mud, the rain sheeting down to blind and confuse him, the night filled with restless shifting, the chink of metal against leather, sharp laughter and distant shouts – the noises of a great, unseen army all around him – there were gates, rough wood planks, pale against the darker brick. And then a challenge.

‘Halt! Who goes there?’

It was the unmistakable accent of Wapping, the words no different to the ones he had heard used a hundred times before, yet something about the urgency, the sheer, bloody reality of them here outside a farm building in Belgium left John in no doubt that if he answered wrong he would be met by a threshing machine of musket balls, tearing into his wet, cold flesh.

‘C-Captain W-Wyndham-Price.’

And a voice the other side of the gate muttered ‘It’s young Windy, must ’a decided to come an’ piss down the Crapauds’ musket barrels after all.’

‘Gawd help us.’

Then there was a thumping scrape and the gates juddered and shook and one gate swung open a narrow crack. John edged inside – the group of men behind the gate re-slinging their muskets as they saw his face, then turning away, slamming the gates shut and dropping a heavy bar in place.

Corporal Graham looked at him with the sneer he normally reserved for a man found with a missing flint at parade. ‘Morning, Mr Price.’

Morning? Yes, he supposed it must be past midnight. These men looked tired. And yet behind the tiredness was an ease, a confidence in who they were and what they could do, even the ones who had been Johnny Newcomes a few weeks ago, as green to the regiment as John himself.

‘I lost my horse,’ John said and then cursed himself as Graham’s look of contempt deepened. It was a foolish thing to have said, no business of the man’s that the horse had slipped and staggered in the confounded mud, vanishing into the darkness before he could recover from the fall.

Read on…

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