By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

lad physically straining to master his excitement, and paused while he did so. ‘Now, Casimir, listen here … when you have all those doughty troopers under your command, I want you to ride down there to where that officer with all the finery is sitting with his escort. And I want you to sound the charge as you go. And when you arrive amongst the Russians, pull up, then I want you to invite him, the one with all the finery, to dine with me tonight in Danzig, and if he declines, insist, with your sabre. His escort … drive them off, and if they refuse, then make them wish they hadn’t. But before you do all that, Casimir, I want you to tell Captain Wajda of second squadron that he is ordered to bring forward the remaining troops to me. Now go!

Casimir, his chest expanding to equal the honour he’d been thus accorded, said in a choking voice, ‘It shall be done with all dispatch, excellency!’ And was gone, racing back to his mount.

James looked back to the 200 Russian cuirassiers through the blades of grass in front of his nose. His throat felt suddenly dry and a strange, cold electricity ran through him – a feeling of being super-alive, the blades of grass suddenly becoming magical wonders in the super-clarity of his gaze and the beat of his heart in his chest like a drummer marking ritual time.

Behind him, Captain Wajda would be coming forward with a little over a full squadron of dragoons – more than 150 troopers – and when they got here, he was going to lead them in a charge against those 200 cuirassiers.

He’d been in many actions with the Dzików; been aware of the way they looked at him afterwards when they thought he wasn’t noticing, how he’d not understood at first, especially since staring at an officer in any army on this continent could end with you tied to a triangle and flogged. But then he’d realised it was his often inappropriate laughter that was to blame – his reaction to the random thoughts that were forever crowding his brain before a fight – so that his men must have thought he’d been laughing in the face of the enemy, when really, he was laughing at something else entirely. He knew it was too late to explain; as if a regiment’s colonel would ever explain ... anything. Maybe it was no bad thing his men now thought him fearless, the hardened warrior who found the battle fear so amusing. Little did they know.

But he knew. Everything until now for him had been mere skirmishes. Nasty, bloody little roadside scraps, over in minutes. Not many dead, and the rest run off. But what was about to unfold here would be his first full cavalry charge, in anger – a full squadron gallop into battle; as in a real battle, not like that mere bout of schoolboy taunting that had been Glenshiel. Or even the day he took his first man. There might be no vast collision of armies exploding around his ears right now, but if you added up the numbers, it was going to be the same as any cavalry clash on the field of Oudenarde or Malplaquet, with all the same violence and savagery. Stirrup-to-stirrup, horses lunging, troopers, their sabres levelled, thundering headlong into an enemy charging back.

Wajda was there behind him. James didn’t have to look; he could hear the jingle of the bridles. Too late to worry now, he told himself. Mount up James, m’lad, and lead them over the skyline.

A Russian officer, inspecting the straightness of the cuirassiers’ ranks, saw the Dzików first.

From the moment he was aware of the commotion his dragoons’ arrival had created, James ceased to pay attention to the Russians and turned to his own men, issuing his orders to dress their two ranks, looking back as he coached Estelle backwards into the front rank between the skinny, barely pubescent bugler and a cornet of horse clutching his squadron’s guidon. Wajda would lead the second rank; he would know just how much to space its advance behind his, so that after James’ rank had collided with the enemy, Wajda would be there to fall upon any cuirassier who had beaten his man or hacked through James’ front rank, or had eddied round its charging flanks and was trying to get at his rear.

James looked quickly to his left and right. The front rank was one long, continuous line of snorting, nodding, bridled horse muzzles. And then he looked to his front, so as to see what all his troopers would be seeing.

What he saw almost choked off his command. The Russians had all but reversed their ranks, and were now facing him, dressing off under a barrage of clipped commands that he could hear from here, at the top of the rise. He remembered that fatuous Frenchman, Chapuis, and his insistence that the Russian army was a mere rabble of dandified barbarians, and wondered what he’d have had to say about this performance.

Disorder in the enemy ranks would not be assisting him today. He covered his dismay with a bellow of his own.

‘Rysować szable!’

Draw sabres!

Then he ordered the bugler to sound the advance.

Time telescoped. The rational departed, and all feeling, thought and focus collapsed to a single point.

At first the opposing lines coming together was all but imperceptible to a bystander, and then, after a discordant trilling of bugles, the horses began to trot, and then canter, so that the lines converging speeded up like two objects falling.

He was aware that he was yelling an order, though he himself could not hear it, and then it was if a sound was filling the whole world …

Ta-da-tada-da-da-da!  ta-da-tada-da-da-da  ta-da-tada-da-da-DAAA! … blaring in his ear.

The bugler, blowing the charge, and Estelle suddenly becoming a force of nature