Sharpe's Triumph (33 page)

Wellesley did not dispute Sharpe.

“They want to put us in the bag,” he said in seeming amusement.

“Keep an eye out for them, Sharpe. I have no wish to watch the battle from the comfort of
Scindia's tent.” He looked back to the enemy's line where the last of the heavy guns were
being lugged into place. Those last two guns were the big eighteen pounder siege guns that
had done the damage as the British army crossed the ford, and now the huge pieces were being
em placed in front of Dodd's regiment. Elephants pulled the guns into position, then were
led away towards the baggage park beyond the village.

“How many guns do you reckon, Campbell?” the General asked.

“Eighty-two, sir, not counting the ones by Assaye.”

“Around twenty there, I think. We shall be earning our pay! And their line's longer than I
thought. We shall have to extend.” He was not so much speaking to Campbell as to himself,
but now he glanced at the young Scots officer.

“Did you count their infantry?”

“Fifteen thousand in the line, sir?” Campbell hazarded.

“And at least as many again in the village,” Wellesley said, snapping his telescope
shut, 'not to mention a horde of horsemen behind them, but they'll only count if we meet
disaster. It's the fifteen thousand in front who concern us. Beat them and we beat all."
He made a pencilled note in a small black book, then stared again at the enemy line beneath
its bright flags.

“They did manoeuvre well! A creditable performance. But do they fight, eh? That's the
nub of it. Do they fight?”

“Sir!” Sharpe called urgently, for, not two hundred paces away, the first enemy
horsemen had emerged from the gully with their tulwars and lances bright in the afternoon
sun, and now were spurring towards Wellesley.

“Back the way we came,” the General said, 'and fairly briskly, I think."

This was the second time in one day that Sharpe had been pursued by Mahratta cavalry,
but the first time he had been mounted on a small native horse and now he was on one of the
General's own chargers and the difference was night and day. The Mahrattas were at a full
gallop, but Wellesley and his two companions never went above a canter and still their
big horses easily outstripped the frantic pursuit. Sharpe, clinging for dear life to the
mare's pommel, glanced behind after two minutes and saw the enemy horsemen pulling up. So
that, he thought, was why officers were willing to pay a small fortune for British and
Irish horses.

The three men dropped into the valley, climbed its farther side and Sharpe saw that the
British infantry had now advanced from the road to form its line of attack along the low
ridge that lay parallel to the road, and the redcoat array looked pitifully small
compared to the great enemy host less than a mile to the west. Instead of a line of heavy
guns, there was only a scatter of light six-pounder cannon and a single battery of
fourteen bigger guns, and to face Pohlmann's three compoos of fifteen thousand men there
were scarcely five thousand red-coated infantry, but Wellesley seemed unworried by the
odds. Sharpe did not see how the battle was to be won, indeed he wondered why it was being
fought at all, but whenever the doubt made his fears surge he only had to look at Wellesley
and take comfort from the General's serene confidence.

Wellesley rode first to the left of his line where the kilted Highlanders of the 778th
waited in line.

“You'll advance in a moment or two, Harness,” he told their Colonel.

“Straight ahead! I fancy you'll find bayonets will be useful. Tell your skirmishers
that there are cavalry about, though I doubt you'll meet them at this end of the line.”

Harness appeared not to hear the General. He sat on a big horse as black as his
towering bearskin hat and carried a huge claymore that looked as if it had been killing the
enemies of Scotland for a century or more.

“It's the Sabbath, Wellesley,” he finally spoke, though without looking at the
General. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work, but the seventh is the Sabbath of the
Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work." The Colonel glowered at Wellesley.

“Are you sure, man, that you want to fight today?”

“Quite sure, Colonel,” Wellesley answered very equably.

Harness grimaced.

“Won't be the first commandment I've broken, so to hell and away with it.” He gave his
huge claymore a flourish.

“You'll not need to worry about my rogues, Wellesley, they can kill as well as any man,
even if it is a Sunday.”

“I never doubted it.”

“Straight ahead, eh? And I'll lay the lash on any dog who falters. You hear that, you
bastards! I'll flog you red!”

“I wish you joy of the afternoon, Colonel,” Wellesley said to Harness, then he rode
north to speak with his other five battalion commanders. He gave them much the same
instructions as he had given Colonel Harness, though because the Madrassi sepoys
deployed no skirmishers, he simply warned them that they had one chance of victory and
that was to march straight into the enemy fire and, by enduring it, carry their bayonets
into the Mahratta ranks. He told the commanding officers of the two sepoy battalions
in the second line that they would now need to join the front line.

“You'll incline right,” he told them, 'forming between Corben's 78th and Colonel
Orrock's picquets." He had hoped to attack in two lines, so that the men behind could
reinforce those in front, but the enemy array was too wide and so he would need to throw
every infantryman forward in one line. There would be no reserves. The General rode to
meet Colonel Wallace who today would command a brigade of his own 74th Highlanders and two
sepoy battalions which, with Orrock's picquets, would form the right side of the
attacking force. He warned Wallace of the line's extension.

“I'll have Orrock incline right to give your sepoys room,” he promised Wallace, 'and I'm
putting your own regiment on Orrock's right flank." Wallace, because he was commanding
the brigade, would not lead his own Highlanders who would be under the command of his
deputy, Major Swinton. Colonel McCandless had joined his friend Wallace, and Wellesley
greeted him.

“I see your man holds their left, McCandless.”

“So I've seen, sir.”

“But I don't wish to tangle with him early on. He's hard by the village and they've made
it a stronghold, so we'll take the right of their line, then swing north and pin the rest
against the Juah. You'll get your chance, McCandless, get your chance.”

I'm depending on it, sir," McCandless answered. The Colonel nodded a mute greeting to
Sharpe, who then had to follow Wellesley to the ranks of the 74th.

“You'll oblige me, Swinton,” Wellesley said, 'by doubling your fellows to the right and
taking station beyond Colonel Orrock's picquets. You're to form the new right flank. I've
told Colonel Orrock to move somewhat to his right, so you'll have a good way to go to make
your new position. You understand?"

“Perfectly, sir,” Swinton said.

“Orrock will incline right and we double round behind him to form the new flank and
sepoys replace us here.”

“Good man!” Wellesley said, then rode on to Colonel Orrock. Sharpe guessed that the
General had ordered the 74th to move outside Orrock because he did not trust the nervous
Colonel to hold the right flank.

Orrock's contingent of half companies was a small but potent force, but it lacked the
cohesion of the men's parent battalions.

“You're to lead them right wards Wellesley told the red-faced Colonel, 'but not too far.
You comprehend? Not too far right! Because you'll find a defended village on your front
right flank and it's a brute. I don't want any of our men near it until we've sent the enemy
infantry packing.”

“I go right?” Orrock asked.

“You incline right,” Wellesley said, 'then straighten up. Two hundred paces should do
it. Incline right, Orrock, give the line two hundred paces more width, then straighten and
march straight for the enemy.

Swinton will be bringing his men onto your right flank. Don't wait for him, let him catch
you, and don't hesitate when we attack. Just go straight in with the bayonet."

Orrock jutted his head, scratched his chin and blinked.

"I go right wards

“Then straight ahead,” Wellesley said patiently.

“Yes, sir,” Orrock said, then jerked nervously as one of his small six-pounder cannon,
which had been deployed fifty yards in front of his line, fired.

“What the devil?” Wellesley asked, turning to look at the small gun that had leaped back
five or six yards. He could not see what the gun had fired at, for the smoke of the discharge
made a thick cloud in front of the muzzle, but a second later an enemy round shot screamed
through the smoke, twitching it, to bounce between two of Orrock's half companies.
Wellesley cantered to his left to see that the enemy guns had opened fire. For the moment
they were merely sending ranging shots, but soon the guns would be pouring their metal at
the red ranks.

The General cantered back southwards. It was close to mid afternoon now and the sun
was burning the world white. The air was humid, hard to breathe, and every man in the
British line was sweating. The enemy round shot bounced on the ground in front of them, and
one shot ricocheted up to churn a file of sepoys into blood and bone. The sound of the
enemy cannon was harsh, banging over the warm ground in successive punches that came
closer and closer together as more guns joined the cannonade. The British guns replied,
and the smoke of their discharges betrayed their positions, and the enemy gunners
levered their pieces to aim at the British cannon which, hugely outnumbered, were having
by far the worst of the exchange. Sharpe saw the earth around one six-pounder struck again
and again by enemy round shot, each strike kicking up a barrow-load of soil, and then the
small gun seemed to disintegrate as a heavy ball struck it plumb on the front of its
carriage.

Splinters flew to eviscerate the crew that had been ramming the gun.

The barrel reared up, its trunnions tearing out of the carriage, then the heavy metal
tube slowly toppled onto a wounded man. Another gunner reeled away, gasping for breath,
while a third lay on the ground looking as though he slept.

A piper began to play as the General neared the kilted 778th.

“I thought I ordered all musicians to leave their instruments behind, drummers
excepted,” Wellesley said angrily.

“Very hard to go into battle without the pipes, sir,” Campbell said reprovingly.

“Hard to save the wounded without orderlies,” Wellesley complained. In battle the
pipers' job was to save the wounded, but Harness had blithely disobeyed the order and
brought his bagpipers. However, it was too late to worry about that disobedience now.
Another round shot found its mark in a sepoy battalion, flinging men aside like broken
dolls, while a high ball struck a tall tree, shaking its topmost leaves and provoking a
small green parrot to squawk as it fled the branches.

Wellesley reined in close to the 778th. He glanced to his right, then looked back to the
eight or nine hundred yards of country that separated his small force from the enemy. The
sound of the guns was constant now, its thunder deafening, and the smoke of their
cannonade was hiding the Mahratta infantry that waited for his assault. If the General
was nervous he showed no sign of it, unless the fingers drumming softly against his thigh
betrayed some worry. This was his first proper battle in the field, gun against gun and
infantry against infantry, yet he seemed entirely cool.

Sharpe licked dry lips. His mare fidgeted and Diomed kept pricking his ears at the
gunfire. Another British gun was hit, this time losing a wheel to an enemy round shot. The
gunners rolled a new wheel forward, while the officer commanding the small battery ran
forward with a handspike. The infantry waited beneath their bright silk colours, their
long line of two ranks tipped with shining bayonets.

“Time to go,” Wellesley said very quietly.

“Forward, gentlemen,” he said, but still not loudly. He took a breath.

“Forward!” he shouted and, at the same time, took off his cocked hat and waved it towards
the enemy.

The British drums began their beat. Sergeants shouted. Officers drew swords. The men
began to march.

And the battle had begun.

The redcoats advanced in a line of two ranks. The troops spread out as they walked and
sergeants shouted at the files to keep closed. The infantry first had to pass the British gun
line that was suffering badly in an unequal artillery duel with the Goanese gunners. The
enemy was firing shell as well as solid shot, and Sharpe flinched as a shell exploded
among a team of oxen that was picketed a hundred yards behind their gun. The wounded
beasts bellowed, and one broke from its picket to limp with a bleeding and trailing leg
towards the 10th Madras infantry.

A British officer ran and put the beast out of its misery with his pistol and the
sepoys stepped delicately about the shuddering corpse. Colonel Harness, seeing that his
two small battalion guns would inevitably be destroyed if they stayed in action, ordered
his gunners to limber up and follow the regiment forward.

“Do it fast, you rogues! I want you close behind me.”

The enemy gunners, seeing that they had won the fight between the batteries, turned
their pieces on the infantry. They were firing at seven hundred yards now, much too far for
canister, but a round shot could whip a file into bloody scraps in the blinking of an eye.
The sound of the guns was unending, one shot melding into the next and the whole making a
thunderous noise of deafening violence. The enemy line was shrouded in grey-white smoke
which was constantly lit by flashes of gunfire deep in the smoke's heart. Sometimes a
Mahratta battery would pause to let the smoke thin and Sharpe, riding twenty paces behind
the General who was advancing just to the right of the 778th, could watch the enemy
gunners heave at their pieces, see them back away as the gun captain swung the linstock over
the barrel, then the gun would disappear again in a cloud of powder smoke and, an instant
later, a ball would plunge down in front of the infantry. Sometimes it would bounce clean
over the men's heads, but too often the heavy shots slammed into the files and men would be
broken apart in a spray of blood. Sharpe saw the front half of a shattered musket wheel up
out of the Highlanders' ranks. It turned in the air, pursued by its owner's blood, then fell
to impale its bayonet into the turf. A gentle north wind blew a patch of gunsmoke away
from the centre of the enemy line where the guns were almost axle boss to axle boss. Sharpe
watched men ram the barrels, watched them run clear, watched the smoke blossom again and
heard the shriek of a round shot just overhead. Sometimes Sharpe could see the tongue of
dark-red fire streaking towards him in the cloud's heart, and then the lead-grey stroke of
a ball arcing towards him in the sky, and once he saw the madly spiralling wisp of smoke
left by the burning fuse of a shell, but every time the shots went wide or else fell short to
churn up a dusty patch of earth.

“Close the files!” the sergeants shouted.

“Close up!”

The drummer boys beat the advance. There was low ground ahead, and the sooner the
attacking line was in that gentle valley, the sooner they would be out of sight of the
gunners. Wellesley looked to his right and saw that Orrock had paused in his advance and
that the 74th, who should have been forming to the right of Orrock's men, had stopped as
well.

“Tell Orrock to go! Tell him to go!” the General called to Campbell who spurred across
the advancing line. His horse galloped through a cloud of shell smoke, leaped a broken
limber, then Sharpe lost sight of the aide. Wellesley urged his horse closer to the ySth who
were now drawing ahead of the sepoys. The Highlanders were taller than the Madrassi
battalions and their stride was longer as they hurried to gain the dead ground where the
bombardment could not reach them. A bouncing shell came to rest near the grenadier company
that was on the right of the 778this line and the kilted soldiers skipped aside, all but for
one man who dashed out of the front rank as the missile spun crazily on the ground with its
fuse spitting out a tangle of smoke. He rammed his right boot on the shell to make it still,
then struck hard down with the brass butt of his musket to knock the fuse free.

“Am I spared the punishment now, Sergeant?” he called.

“You get in file, John, get in file,” the sergeant answered.

Wellesley grinned, then shuddered as a ball went perilously close to his hat. He looked
round, seeking his aides, and saw Barclay.

“The calm before the storm,” the General remarked.

“Some calm, sir.”

“Some storm,” an Indian answered. He was one of the Mahratta chiefs who were allied to
the British and whose horsemen were keeping the cavalry busy south of the river. Three
such men rode with Wellesley and one had a badly trained horse that kept skittering
sideways whenever a shell exploded.

Major Blackiston, the engineer on Wellesley's staff who had been sent to reconnoitre
the land north of the army, now galloped back behind the advancing line.

“Broken ground up by the village, sir, cut by gullies,” he reported, 'no place to
advance."

Wellesley grunted. He had no intention of sending infantry near the village yet, so
Blackiston's report was not immediately useful.

“Did you see Orrock?”

“He was worried about his two guns, sir. Can't take them forward because the teams have
all been killed, but Campbell's chivvying him on.”

Wellesley stood in his stirrups to look north and saw Orrock's picquets at last moving
smartly away. They were marching obliquely, without their two small guns, making space for
the two sepoy battalions to come into the line. The 74th was beyond them, vanishing
into a fold of ground.

“Not too far, Orrock, not too far,” Wellesley muttered, then he lost sight of Orrock's
men as his horse followed the 778th into the lower ground.

“Once we have them pinned against the river,” he asked Blackiston, gesturing to show he
meant the River Juah to the north, 'can they get away?"

“Eminently fordable, sir, I'm afraid,” Blackiston answered.

“I doubt they can move more than a handful of the guns down the bank, but a man can escape
easily enough.”

Wellesley grunted an acknowledgement and spurred ahead, leaving the engineer
behind.

“He didn't even ask if I was chased!” Blackiston said to Barclay with mock
indignation.

“Were you, John?”

“Damned sure I was. Two dozen of the bastards on those wiry little ponies. They look like
children riding to hounds.”

“But no bullet holes?” Barclay asked.

“Not a one,” Blackiston said regretfully, then saw Sharpe's surprised look.

“It's a wager, Sergeant,” the engineer explained.

“Whichever of the General's family ends up with the most bullet holes wins the
pot.”

“Do I count, sir?”

“You replace Fletcher, and he didn't have to pay to get in because he claimed he was
penniless. We admitted him from the goodness of our hearts. But no cheating now. We can't
have fellows poking their coats with swords to win points.”

“How many points does Fletcher get, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“For having his head blown off?”

“He's disqualified, of course, on grounds of extreme carelessness.”

Sharpe laughed. Blackiston's words were not funny, of course, but the laughter burst out
of him, causing Wellesley to turn in his saddle and give him a scowl. In truth Sharpe was
fighting a growing fear. For the moment he was safe enough, for the left flank of the
attack was now in dead ground and the enemy bombardment was concentrating on the sepoy
battalions who had still not reached the valley, but Sharpe could hear the whip-fast
rumble of the round shots tearing up the air, he could hear the cannon fire, and every few
seconds a howitzer shell would fall into the valley and explode in a puff of flaming
smoke. So far the howitzers had failed to do any damage, but Sharpe could see the small
bushes bend away from their blasts and hear the scraps of shell casing rip through leaves. In
places the dry brush had caught fire.

He tried to concentrate on the small things. One of the canteens had a broken strap, so
he knotted it. He watched his mare's ears flicker at every shell burst and he wondered if
horses felt fear. Did they understand this kind of danger? He watched the Scots, stolidly
advancing through the shrubs and trees, magnificent in their feathered bearskin hats and
their pleated kilts. They were a long way from bloody home, he thought, and was surprised
that he did not really feel that for himself, but he did not know where home was. Not
London, for sure, though he had grown up there. England? He supposed so, but what was
England to him? Not what it was to Major Blackiston, he guessed. He wondered again about
Pohlmann's offer, and thought what it would be like to be standing in sash and sword behind
that line of Mahratta guns. Safe as houses, he reckoned, just standing there and watching
through the smoke as a thin line of redcoat enemies marched into horror. So why had he not
accepted? And he knew the real reason was not some half-felt love of country, nor an
aversion to Dodd, but because the only sash and sword he wanted were the ones that would
let him go back to England and spit on the men who had made his life miserable. Except
there would be no sash and sword. Sergeants did not get made into officers, not often, and
he was suddenly ashamed of ever having quizzed McCandless about the matter. But at least
the Colonel had not laughed at him.

Wellesley had turned to speak to Colonel Harness.

“We'll give the guns a volley of musketry, Harness, at your discretion. That should
give us time to reload, but save the second volley for their infantry.”

“I'd already worked out the same for myself,” Harness answered with a scowl.

“And I'll not use skirmishers, not on a Sunday.” Usually the light company went ahead
of the rest of the battalion and scattered into a loose line that would fire at the enemy
before the main attack arrived, but Harness must have decided that he would rather
reserve the light company's fire for the one volley he planned to unload on the
gunners.

“Soon be over,” Wellesley said, not contesting Harness's decision to keep his light
company in line, and Sharpe decided the General must be nervous for those last three
words were unusually loquacious. Wellesley himself must have decided he had betrayed
his feelings, for he looked blacker than ever. His high spirits had vanished ever since
the enemy artillery had started firing.

The Scots were climbing now. They were tramping through stubble and at any minute they
would cross the brow of the gentle hill and find themselves back in the gunners' sights. The
first the gunners would see would be the two regimental standards, then the officers on
horseback, then the line of bearskins, and after that the whole red, white and black array
of a battalion in line with the glint of their fixed bayonets showing in the sun. And God
help us then, Sharpe thought, because every buggering gun straight ahead must be reloaded
by now and just waiting for its target, and suddenly the first round shot banged on the
crest just a few paces ahead and ricocheted harmlessly overhead.

“That man fired early,” Barclay said.

“Take his name.”

Sharpe looked to his right. The next four battalions, all sepoys, were safe in the dead
ground now, while Orrock's picquets and the 74th had vanished among the trees north of the
valley. Harness's Scots would climb into view first and, for a moment or two, would have
the gunners' undivided attention. Some of the Highlanders were hurrying, as if to get
the ordeal over.

“Hold your dressing!” Harness bellowed at them.

“This ain't a race to the tavern! Damn you!”

Elsie. Sharpe suddenly remembered the name of a girl who had worked in the tavern near
Wetherby where he had fled after running away from Brewhouse Lane. Why had he thought of
her, he wondered,

and he had a sudden vision of the taproom, all steaming on a winter night from men's
wet coats, and Elsie and the other girls carrying the ale on trays and the fire sputtering
in the hearth and the blind shepherd getting drunk and the dogs sleeping under the tables,
and he imagined walking back into that smoke-blackened room with his officer's sash and
sword, and then he forgot all about Yorkshire as the 778th, with Wellesley's family on its
right, emerged onto the flat land in front of the enemy guns.

Sharpe's first surprised reaction was how close they were. The low ground had brought
them within a hundred and fifty paces of the enemy guns, and his second reaction was how
splendid the enemy looked, for their guns were lined up as though for inspection, while
behind them the Mahratta battalions stood in four closely dressed ranks beneath their
flags, and then he thought that this was what death must look like, and just as he thought
that, so the whole gorgeous array of the enemy army vanished behind a vast bank of smoke,
a roiling bank in which the smoke twisted as though it was tortured, and every few yards
there was a spear of flame in the whiteness, while in front of the cloud the crops flattened
away from the blast of the exploding powder as the heavy round shots tore through the
Highlanders' files.

There seemed to be blood everywhere, and broken men falling or sliding in the carnage.
Somewhere a man gasped, but no one was screaming. A piper dropped his instrument and ran to
a fallen man whose leg had been torn away. Every few yards there was a tangle of dead and
dying men, showing where the round shot had snatched files from the regiment. A young
officer tried to calm his horse which was edging sideways in fright, its eyes white and
head tossing. Colonel Harness guided his own horse round a disembowelled man without
giving the dead man a glance. Sergeants shouted angrily for the files to close up, as
though it was the Highlanders' fault that there were gaps in the line. Then everything
seemed oddly silent. Wellesley turned and spoke to Barclay, but Sharpe did not hear a thing,
then he realized that his ears were ringing from the terrible sound of that discharge of
gunnery. Diomed pulled away from him and he tugged the grey horse back. Fletcher's blood had
dried to a crust on Diomed's flank. Flies crawled all over the blood. A Highlander was
swearing terribly as his comrades marched away from him. He was on his hands and knees,
with no obvious wound, but then he looked up at Sharpe, spoke one last obscenity and
collapsed forward.