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sword at the Engage. We’re almost at the guns!’
    In a daze, Colby swept the sabre up and held it out alongside the mare’s head, hand turned down slightly so that the thumb lay along the line of the blade. Infantry on either side of the battery began to pour in a heavy crossfire and he felt his foot jump as he was hit again. I must be like a bloody sieve, he thought wildly, but he could still feel no real pain, though Bess was utterly blown after the long gallop and was limping with a wound in her leg.
    The lancer on his right had his bridle arm shot away and fragments of flesh spattered Colby’s face and chest, then a shell burst overhead and he saw Ackroyd go down. Oh, Christ, he thought miserably, he’d have to answer for that! If the Ackroyd men had gone to war with the Goffs for generations they’d also always managed to come home with them, too, and his father would want to know why he hadn’t seen to it that this one had.
    His sword was in the air. He seemed to be acting from impulses outside his body and brain. ‘Steady, steady! Close in!’ He realised he had been shouting the words ever since the forward movement had begun and his voice had become cracked and strained.
    Just at that moment, the Russian battery in front fired again and he felt the heat and heard the whirr as a shell passed him. Then he was on top of the battery, and, wrenching at Bess’ head, he chose a space between two of the guns and charged into it.
     
    That last salvo had brought down most of the remnants of the first line, so that only isolated groups of men passed into the battery. Bess gave a tremendous leap into the air, but in the smoke Colby had no idea what she cleared, then horsemen were swirling about him, silhouetted against grey wraiths of smoke, and he tried to remember what little he’d been told about attacking infantry.
    ‘Let’s have none of your cissy prodding.’ The words of the sergeant-major instructor of fencing rang in his ears. ‘Make it a good jab and transfix the bastard!’
    As he lunged with all his strength, a Russian in front of him fell away, blood welling from his mouth, but, as Colby returned his sword to the slope, he almost removed Bess’ ear, and he decided that, since she always indicated with them what she intended to do, he’d be at a considerable disadvantage if he left her without them. A second Russian jabbed at him with a sponge staff and he slashed with all his strength so that the staff leapt into the air, one of the Russian’s hands still grasping it. As the gunner staggered back, staring at the stump of his wrist, a dragoon officer swept down on him and caught him across the neck with a swipe that almost severed his head, to leave Colby with a mouth full of bile.
    Suddenly alone except for Trumpeter Sparks, he saw a sergeant of the 17th sweep by and yelled at him to rally on him before he realised the sergeant was as dead as a stone, still in the saddle, his eyes fixed and staring. A dismounted Russian, like Colby thinking him alive, took a swing at him with his sword, but missed and laid open the horse’s breast instead. As the animal came to an abrupt stop, its legs trembling, its eyes rolling with terror and pain, the dead sergeant toppled from the saddle and flopped in a heap at the startled Russian’s feet, seconds before he was skewered himself. The lance which drove through him into the wheel of the gun bent like a bow and snapped off, leaving half its length still protruding from the Russian’s chest. The other half shot from the hand of the man who was holding it and lifted upwards in an uneven arc, while its owner yelled with fury and dragged at his sword as he was surrounded by a cloud of Cossacks. For a second, as he wrestled with his excited mare, Colby stared, shocked at the savagery, then he came to life and, charging from behind with Sparks, flailed about him with his sword until the Cossacks bolted into the smoke.
    The battery was full of horsemen now, the