Man of Honour Read Online Free Page A

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    Feeling his heart beating hard against his ribs, he pulledback the cock with his right thumb. Felt the coldness of the barrel in his left hand and pressed his cheek close into the action. At that precise moment the Frenchman levelled his own weapon. Steel heard the crack of the man’s shot, saw the flash. He felt the ball as it scudded past his cheek and that same instant gave the gentlest squeeze of his own trigger and felt the reassuring recoil as the piece jumped back into his shoulder. The Frenchman dropped stone dead, a bullet in the centre of his forehead. But the two shots had roused the other enemy sentries and the defences in front of Steel now began to fill with men in white coats who looked with dumbstruck amazement at their dead comrade and the apparently suicidal solitary British officer standing before them. Hoisting his gun coolly over his shoulder, Steel drew his sword from its sheath and turned to the redcoats in the gulley below him.
    ‘Grenadiers. With me. Kill the bastards.’
    He turned to face the French. Raising the sword above his head, Steel turned its point towards the enemy.
    ‘Farquharson’s Foot, follow me. For Marlborough and Queen Anne.’
    Suddenly Slaughter was up beside him. A corporal joined them and other men followed. And then, with a great cheer, they were all up and running with him towards the French defences. Steel saw out of the corner of his eye, Hansam charging forward at the head of his half-company; far beyond him on the left of the attack a milling mass of redcoats indicated that the main body of the assault was still floundering. The white-coated infantry, taken completely by surprise by the sea of redcoats that had appeared out of the ground, at last began to cock their weapons. A couple of them dropped their muskets and ran. An enemy officer appeared waving his sword and gesturing at the French Grenadiers.Five yards to go now, thought Steel. Three. At two yards the French opened up, with a ragged volley. Three Grenadiers fell. The remainder carried on and, reaching the earthworks, hurled their fizzing grenades deep over the defences exploding in a hail of flying metal and the screams of unseen men. Steel climbed on to one of the gabions:
    ‘Come on. Follow me. Into them.’
    Managing to scramble over the top of the parapet, and followed swiftly by Slaughter and a dozen British Grenadiers, Steel slashed blindly down with his sword. The huge weapon was, apart from his gun, the only thing he had brought out of his father’s house. His first cut severed the forearm of a white-coated infantryman who collapsed screaming in the mud.
    To his left he was aware of a flash of metal as a Frenchman, attempting to thrust home his bayonet into Steel’s side, was beaten off by a Grenadier corporal who swiftly turned the deadly point and stabbed home with his own bayonet, deep into the man’s gut. Another Frenchman, a huge sapper armed with a hatchet, attempted a swipe at Steel’s feet but he jumped clear and brought down his blade, splitting the man’s skull in two so that his head fell apart like two halves of a melon. A French officer approached him warily. A man almost as tall as Steel himself, with the chiselled features of an aristocrat. For a moment Steel thought that the officer was about to challenge him to single combat. Then the Frenchman saw Steel’s great sword and stopped. He nodded his head, presented his own rapier-thin weapon in a salute, close to his face, and brought it down with a flourish to his side, before making a shallow bow and backing away. Doing so, and with his piercing gaze still fixed on Steel’s eyes, he called to what was left of his command. Then, quite suddenly, the defences were empty.
    Steel looked left and right and through the smoke could see nothing but white-coated bodies. He turned one over with his foot: the coat collar and cuffs were all white, the pockets cut in the upright. He searched his memory. That could mean one of three