Where the Light Falls(28)

To his left, André heard the crackle of a wall of French muskets. The men had grown louder now, too, with officers barking out orders and soldiers shrieking out battle cries. A layer of smoke had begun seeping over the field, so that it filled André’s nostrils. He coughed once, turning back to ensure his men were in formation. The enemy was close enough now that he could begin to make out individual facial features from within the wall of Prussians before him. He noticed that one of the men directly opposite him had a thick golden mustache and a wide brow.

“Company, halt!” André stopped his men in their march. Mouth dry, he waited a few seconds, falling back on his training where otherwise his nerve might have faltered. “Company, load!”

While André’s men began to front-load the gunpowder and bullets into the muzzles of their muskets, the German officer opposite André barked out an order in words André couldn’t understand. At this, the Prussians halted as well, standing with muskets poised in front of them.

A feeling of dread settled over André, but he forced out the hoarse command: “Company, present arms!” André watched as his words turned to action with a quickness that surprised even him. His men were ready to fight.

They cocked back their muskets’ hammers. Just before the enemy could open fire, André lifted his sword and shouted: “Fire!”

Forty weapons fired in that moment, deafening André as the musket balls ripped through the field and a wall of smoke enveloped the French line. Seconds later, André heard the crack of enemy fire in reply. But the Prussians were too late. The first French volley had been effective enough to disorient the enemy and obscure their view, so that the majority of Prussian rounds flew high or fell short of their intended targets. André heard a lone, sickening thud, as one of his soldiers grabbed his stomach and dropped to the ground. Farther down the line, several men cried out and fell to the ground as well.

As the smoke cleared, André saw that more Prussians had stepped forward to fill in the line where their comrades had been felled. The brief elation André had felt by unleashing and surviving the first volley was now replaced by the cold, unwavering exigency of his years of drilling and training: he had to get the second round into the enemy before they had recovered from their own initial shock.

“Company, reload!” André yelled. But he noticed, with disappointment, that some of his men were moving unsteadily, numb and dazed after their baptism by enemy fire. The man to André’s left, his hands trembling violently, was having trouble sliding the ramrod into the barrel of his musket to lodge the ball and powder into place.

They couldn’t delay any longer. “Company, make ready! Fire!” André’s men fired off their second volley almost simultaneously with the enemy’s. This time, the Prussian bullets proved more accurate and more devastating. To André’s left and right, men went down. A bullet flew past his ear, buzzing like an angry hornet, and André saw through the wall of smoke that three men in the front of his line lay flat on the ground. Behind him, Sergeant Digne called out to the men in the second line to fill in these new gaps. The Prussians would not pause their assault to show sympathy for the dying French, André reminded himself, and neither could he.

Behind them the roar of the French artillery continued, adding to the chaos. This was how it had to happen, André knew: they must keep loading and reloading, killing one another until either one of the lines exhausted its numbers or its men lost their will to keep fighting. The best thing André could do for his men was have them send more shots downrange than the enemy.

André noticed that his men were distracted, their attention pulled down the slope toward the right flank. There, a cluster of blue-coated guardsmen were shouting like fiends. They had forced the Austrians opposite them into a fighting withdrawal, so that some of the men in the enemy line were beginning to fall back. A handful of the more eager French militiamen were urging their comrades onward to pursue the Austrians, confusing the temporary retreat for a rout. The bluecoats moved en masse toward that breach, surging forward in an unorganized frenzy.

When they advanced to within a hundred meters of the enemy, the Austrians halted, regrouping. With machinelike efficiency, they performed an about-face and the front rank dropped to their knees. André saw a flurry of sudden gray as the Austrian muskets fired all at once, pouring their deadly hail into the unsuspecting Frenchmen. The efficiency of this sudden counterfire was staggering, and the bluecoats fell like stalks of wheat before a scythe. André felt his stomach turn as he heard so many of his countrymen cry out in agony. The survivors, seeing the carnage all around them, turned and fled, leaving their screaming comrades in the grass as the onslaught of Austrian bayonets turned the wounded into corpses.