Sharpe's Triumph (37 page)

“It wasn't my fault,” he kept telling Swinton, and Swinton wanted to hit the bastard
every time he spoke.

“I obeyed Wellesley's orders!” Orrock insisted.

Swinton ignored the fool. Right from the beginning of the advance Swinton had sensed
that the picquets were going too far to the right.

Orrock's orders had been clear enough. He was to incline right, thus making space for
the two sepoy battalions to come into the line, then attack straight ahead, but the fool
had led his men ever more northwards and Swinton, who had been trying to loop about the
picquets to come up on their right, never had a chance to get into position. He had sent
the 74th's adjutant to speak with Orrock, pleading with the East India Company Colonel
to turn ahead, but Orrock had arrogantly brushed the man off and kept marching towards
Assaye.

Swinton had a choice then. He could have ignored Orrock and straightened his own attack
to form the right of the line that Wellesley had taken forward, but the leading half
company of Orrock's picquets were fifty men from Swinton's own regiment and the Major
was not willing to see those fifty men sacrificed by a fool and so he had followed the
picquets on their errant course in the hope that his men's fire could rescue Orrock. It had
failed. Only four of the fifty men of the half company had rejoined the regiment, the rest
were dead and dying, and now the whole 74th seemed to be doomed. They were encompassed by
noise and smoke, surrounded by enemies, dying in their square, but the piper was still
playing and the men were still fighting and the regiment still lived, and the two flags were
still lifted high though by now the fringed squares of silk were ripped and tattered by the
blast of bullets.

An ensign in the colour party took a musket ball in his left eye and fell backwards
without a sound. A sergeant gripped the staff in one hand and in his other was a halberd
with a wicked blade. In a moment, the sergeant knew, he might have to fight with the halberd.
The square would end with a huddle of bloodied men around the colours and the enemy would
fall on them and for a few moments it would be steel against steel, and the sergeant reckoned
he would give the flag to a wounded man and do what harm he could with the heavy,
long-shafted axe. It was a pity to die, but he was a soldier, and no one had yet devised a
way a man could live for ever, not even those clever bastards in Edinburgh. He thought of
his wife in Dundee, and of his woman in the camp at Naulniah, and he regretted his many
sins for it was not good for a man to go to his God with a bad conscience, but it was too late
now and so he gripped the halberd and hid his fear and determined he would die like a man
and take a few other men with him.

The muskets banged into Highlanders' shoulders. They bit the tips from new cartridges
and every bite added salty gunpowder to their mouths so that they had no spittle, only
bone-dry throats that breathed filthy smoke, and the regiment's pucka lees were far away,
lost somewhere in the country behind. The Scots went on firing, and the powder sparks from
the pan burned their cheeks, and they loaded and rammed and knelt and fired again, and
somewhere beyond the smoke the enemy's fire came flashing in to shudder the corpses of the
barricade or else

to snatch a man back in a spray of blood. Wounded men fought alongside the living, their
faces blackened by powder, their mouths parched, their shoulders bruised, and the white
facings and cuffs of their red coats were spattered with the blood of men now dead or
dying.

“Close up!” the sergeants shouted and the square shrank another few feet as dying men
were hauled back to the square's centre and the living closed the files. Men who had started
the day five or six files apart were neighbours now.

“It wasn't my fault!” Orrock insisted.

Swinton had nothing to say. There was nothing to say, and nothing more to do except
die, and so he picked up the musket of a dead man, took the cartridge box from the corpse's
pouch, and pushed into the square's western face. The man to his right was drunk, but
Swinton did not care, for the man was fighting.

“Come to do some proper work, Major?” the drunken man greeted Swinton, with a
toothless grin.

“Come to do some proper work, Tarn,” Swinton agreed. He bit the end from a cartridge,
charged the musket, primed the lock and fired into the smoke. He reloaded, fired again, and
prayed he would die bravely.

Fifty yards away William Dodd watched the cloud of smoke made by the Scottish muskets. The
cloud was getting smaller, he thought. Men were dying there and the square was shrinking,
but it was still spitting flame and lead. Then he heard the jingle of chains and turned to
see the two four-pounder guns being hauled towards him. He would let the guns fire one blast
of canister each, then he would have his men fix bayonets and he would lead them across the
rampart of corpses into the heart of the smoke.

And then the trumpet called.

Colonel McCandless had stayed close to his friend Colonel Wallace, the commander of the
brigade which formed the right of Wellesley's line.

Wallace had seen the picquciets and his own regiment, the 74th, vanish somewhere to
the north, but he had been too busy bringing his two sepoy battalions into the
s-attacking line to worry about Orrock or Swinton. He did charge an aid to keep watching
for Orrock's men, expecting to see them veering baock towards him at any moment, then he
forgot the errant picquets as his men climbed from the low ground into the fire of the
Mahratta gun line. Canister shredded Wallace's ranks, it beat like hail on his men'ss
muskets and it swept the leaves from the scattered trees through which the Madrassi
battalions marched, but, just like the 778th, the sepoys did not turn. They walked doggedly
on like men pushing into a storm, amid at sixty paces Wallace halted them to pour a
vengeful volley into the gunners and McCandless could hear the musket balls clanging
off the ppainted gun barrels. Sevajee was with McCandless and he stared in as the sepoys
reloaded and went forward again, this time carrying their bayonets to the gunners. For a
moment there was chaotic slaughter as Madrassi sepoys chased Goanese gunners around
limbers and guns, but Wallace was already looking ahead and could see this. At the vaunted
enemy infantry was wavering, evidently shaken by theae easy victory of the 778th, and
so the Colonel shouted at his sepoys to ignore the gunners and re-form and push on to
attack the infantry. It ~ took a moment to reform the line, then it advanced from the
guns. VAVallace gave the enemy infantry one volley, then charged, and all alon: j-g the
line the vaunted Mahratta foot fled from the sepoy attack.

McCandless was busy for the mext few moments. He knew that the assault had gone nowhere
near Dodd's regiment, but nor had he expected it to, and he was anticipating riding
northwards with Wallace ? 255

to find the 74th, the regiment McCandless knew was nearest to his prey, but when the
sepoys lost their self-control and broke ranks to pursue the beaten enemy infantry,
McCandless helped the other officers round them up and herd them back. Sevajee and his
horsemen stayed behind, for there was a possibility that they would be mistaken for
enemy cavalry.

For a moment or two there was a real danger that the scattered sepoys would be charged
and slaughtered by the mass of enemy cavalry to the west, but its own fleeing infantry
was in the cavalry's way, the j78th stood like a fortress on the left flank, and the
Scottish guns were skipping balls along the cavalry's face, and the Mahratta horsemen,
after a tentative move forward, thought better of the charge. The sepoys took their ranks
again, grinning because of their victory. McCandless, his small chore done, rejoined
Sevajee.

“So that's how Mahrattas fight.” The Colonel could not resist the provocation.

“Mercenaries, Colonel, mercenaries,” Sevajee said, 'not Mahrattas."

Five victorious redcoat regiments now stood in ranks on the southern half of the
battlefield. To the west the enemy infantry was still disordered, though officers were
trying to re-form them, while to the east there was a horror of bodies and blood left on
the ground across which the redcoats had advanced. The five regiments had swept through the
gun line and chased away the infantry and now formed their ranks some two hundred paces west
of where the Mahratta infantry had made their line so that they could look back on the trail
of carnage they had caused.

Riderless horses galloped through the thinning skeins of powder smoke where dogs were
already gnawing at the dead and birds with monstrous black wings were flapping down to
feast on corpses. Beyond the corpses, on the distant ground where the Scots and sepoys had
started their advance, there were now Mahratta cavalrymen, and McCandless, gazing
through his telescope, saw some of those cavalrymen harnessing British artillery that
had been abandoned when its ox teams had been killed by the bombardment that had opened the
battle.

“Where's Wellesley?” Colonel Wallace asked McCandless.

“He went northwards.” McCandless was now staring towards the village where a dreadful
battle was being fought, but he could see no details for there were just enough trees to
obscure the fight, though the mass of powder smoke rising above the leaves was as eloquent
as the unending crackle of musketry. McCandless knew his business was to be where that
battle was being fought, for Dodd was surely close to the fight if not involved, but in
McCandless's path was the stub of the Mahratta defence line, that part of the line which
had not been attacked by the Scots or the sepoys, and those men were turning to face
southwards. To reach that southern battle McCandless would have to loop wide to the east,
but that stretch of country was full of marauding bands of enemy cavalry.

“I should have advanced with Swinton,” he said ruefully.

“We'll catch up with him soon enough,” Wallace said, though without conviction. It was
clear to both men that Wallace's regiment, the 74th, had marched too far to the north and had
become entangled in the thicket of Mahratta de fences about Assaye and their commanding
officer, removed from them to lead the brigade, was plainly worried.

“Time to turn north, I think,” Wallace said, and he shouted at his two sepoy battalions
to wheel right. He had no authority over the remaining two sepoy battalions, nor over
the 778th, for those were in Harness's brigade, but he was ready to march his two remaining
battalions towards the distant village in the hope of rescuing his own regiment.

McCandless watched as Wallace organized the two battalions. This part of the
battlefield, which minutes before had been so loud with screaming canister and the
hammer of volleys, was now strangely quiet.

Wellesley's attack had been astonishingly successful, and the enemy was
regrouping while the attackers, left victorious on the Kaitna's northern bank, drew
their breath and looked for the next target. McCandless thought of using Sevajee's
handful of horsemen as an escort to take him safely towards the village, but another
rush of Mahratta cavalry galloped up from the low ground. Wellesley and his aides had
ridden northwards and they seemed to have survived the milling enemy horsemen, but the
General's passing had attracted more horsemen to the area and McCandless had no mind to
run the gauntlet of their venom and so he abandoned the idea of a galloping dash
northwards. It was just then that he noticed Sergeant Hakeswill, crouching by a dead enemy
with the reins of a riderless horse in one hand. A group of redcoats was with him, all from
his own regiment, the 33rd. And just as McCandless saw the Sergeant, so Hakeswill looked up
and offered the Scotsman a glance of such malevolence that McCandless almost turned away
in horror. Instead he spurred his horse across the few yards that separated them.

“What are you doing here, Sergeant?” he asked harshly.

“My duty, sir, as is incumbent on me,” Hakeswill said. As ever, when addressed by an
officer, he had straightened to attention, his right foot tucked behind his left, his
elbows back and his chest thrust out.

“And what are your duties?” McCandless asked.

“Puckalees, sir. In charge of pucka lees sir, making sure the scavenging little brutes
does their duty, sir, and nothing else, sir. Which they does, sir, on account of me looking
after them like a father.” He unbent sufficiently to give a swift nod in the direction
of the 778th where, sure enough, a group of pucka lees was distributing heavy skins of
water they had brought from the river.

“Have you written to Colonel Gore yet?” McCandless asked.

“Have I written to Colonel Gore yet, sir?” Hakeswill repeated the question, his face
twitching horribly under the shako's peak. He had forgotten that he was supposed to have
the warrant reissued, for he was relying instead on McCandless's death to clear the way
to Sharpe's arrest.

Not that this was the place to murder McCandless, for there were a thousand witnesses
within view.

“I've done everything what ought to be done, sir, like a soldier should,” Hakeswill
answered evasively.

“I shall write to Colonel Gore myself,” McCandless now told Hakeswill, 'because I've
been thinking about that warrant. You have it?"

“I do, sir.”

“Then let me see it again,” the Colonel demanded.

Hakeswill unwillingly pulled the grubby paper from his pouch and offered it to the
Colonel. McCandless unfolded the warrant, quickly scanned the lines, and suddenly the
falsity in the words leaped out at him.

“It says here that Captain Morris was assaulted on the night of August the fifth.”

“So he was, sir. Foully assaulted, sir.”

“Then it could not have been Sharpe who committed the assault, Sergeant, for on the night
of the fifth he was with me. That was the day I collected Sergeant Sharpe from
Seringapatam's armoury.”

McCandless's face twisted with distaste as he looked down at the Sergeant.

“You say you were a witness to the assault?” he asked Hakeswill.

Hakeswill knew when he was beaten.

“Dark night, sir,” the Sergeant said woodenly.

“You're lying, Sergeant,” McCandless said icily, 'and I know you are lying, and my
letter to Colonel Gore will attest to your lying. You have no business here, and I shall so
inform Major General Wellesley.

If it was up to me then your punishment would take place here, but that is for the
General to decide. You will give me that horse."

“This horse, sir? I found it, sir. Wandering, sir.”

“Give it here!” McCandless snapped. Sergeants had no business having horses without
permission. He snatched the reins from Hakeswill.

“And if you do have duties with the pucka lees Sergeant, I suggest you attend to them
rather than plunder the dead. As for this warrant.. .” The Colonel, before Hakeswill's
appalled gaze, tore the paper in two.

“Good day, Sergeant,” McCandless said and, his small victory complete, turned his horse
and spurred away.

Hakeswill watched the Colonel ride away, then stooped and picked up the two halves of the
warrant which he carefully stowed in his pouch.

“Scotchman,” he spat.

Private Lowry shifted uncomfortably.

“If he's right, Sergeant, and Sharpie wasn't there, then we shouldn't be here.”

Hakeswill turned savagely on the private.

“And since when, Private Lowry, did you dispose of soldiery? The Duke of York has made
you an officer, has he? His Grace put braid on your coat without telling me, did he? What
Sharpie did is no business of yours, Lowry.” The Sergeant was in trouble, and he knew it, but
he was not broken yet.

He turned and stared at McCandless who had given the horse to a dismounted officer
and was now in deep conversation with Colonel Wallace. The two men glanced towards
Hakeswill and the Sergeant guessed they were discussing him.

“We follows that Scotchman,” Hakeswill said, 'and this is for the man who puts him under
the sod." He fished a gold coin from his pocket and showed it to his six privates.

The privates stared solemnly at the coin, then, all at once, they ducked as a cannonball
screamed low over their heads. Hakeswill swore and dropped flat. Another gun sounded, and
this time a barrelful of canister flecked the grass just south of Hakeswill.

Colonel Wallace had been listening to McCandless, but now turned eastwards. Not all
the gunners in the Mahratta line had been killed and those who survived, together with the
cavalry which had been looking for employment, were now manning their guns again. They
had turned the guns to face west instead of east and were now firing at the five regiments
who were waiting for the battle to begin again.

Except the gunners had surprised them, and the captured British guns, fetched from the
east, now joined the battery to pour their shot, shell and canister into the red-coated
infantry. They fired at three hundred paces, point-blank range, and their missiles tore
bloodily through the ranks.

For the Mahrattas, it seemed, were not beaten yet.

William Dodd could smell victory. He could almost feel the sheen of the captured silk
colours in his hands, and all it would take was two blasts of canister, a mucky slaughter
with bayonets, and then the 74th would be destroyed. Horse Guards in London could cross the
first battalion of the regiment off the army list, all of it, and mark down that it had been
sacrificed to William Dodd's talent. He snarled at his gunners to load their home-made
canister, watched as the loaders rammed the missiles home, and then the trumpet
sounded.

The British and Company cavalry had been posted in the northern half of the
battlefield to guard against enemy horsemen sweeping about the infantry's rear, but now
they came to the 74th's rescue. The igth Dragoons emerged from the gully behind the
Highlanders and their charge curved northwards out of the low ground towards the 74th and
the village beyond. The troopers were mostly recruits from the English shires, young men
brought up to know horses and made strong by farm work, and they all carried the new light
cavalry sabre that was warranted never to fail. Nor did it.

They struck the Mahratta horse first. The English riders were outnumbered, but they
rode bigger horses and their blades were better made, and they cut through the cavalry
with a maniacal savagery. It was hacking work, brutal work, screaming and fast work, and
the Mahrattas turned their lighter horses away from the bloody sabres and fled northwards,
and once the enemy horsemen were killed or fleeing, the British cavalry raked back their
spurs and charged at the Mahratta infantry.

They struck the battalion from Dupont's compoo first, and because those men were not
prepared for cavalry, but were still in line, it was more an execution than a fight. The
cavalry were mounted on tall horses, and every man had spent hours of sabre drill
learning how to cut, thrust and parry, but all they had to do now was slash with their heavy,
wide-bladed weapons that were designed for just such butchery.