Sharpe's Triumph

by Bernard Cornwell

  "You're hurting me," the girl said.

  "Liebchen, I'm so sorry," Pohlmann said, releasing his grip.

  "I was thinking."

  "Sir?" Dodd asked, thinking the Hanoverian was speaking to him.

  "I was thinking, Dodd, that it is no bad thing that we wander so aimlessly."

  "It isn't?" Dodd retorted with astonishment.

  "Because if we do not know where we are going, then nor will the British, so one day they will march a few miles too far and then we shall pounce on them. Someone will blunder, Dodd, because in war someone always does blunder. It is an immutable rule of war; someone will blunder. We must just have patience." In truth Pohlmann was just as impatient as Dodd, but the Colonel knew it would not serve any purpose to betray that impatience. In India, he had learned, matters moved at their own pace, as imponderable and unstoppable as an elephant. But soon, Pohlmann reckoned, one of the British forces would make a march too far and find itself so close to the vast Mahratta army that even Scindia could not refuse battle. And even if the two enemy armies joined, what did that matter? Their combined forces were small, the Mahratta horde was vast, and the outcome of their meeting as certain as anything could be in war. And Pohlmann was confident that Scindia would eventually give him command of the army, and Pohlmann would then roll over the enemy like the great Juggernaut of Hindu legend and with that happy prospect he was content.

  Dodd looked up to say something more, but the howdah's green curtains had been drawn shut. The girl giggled, while the mahout, seated just in front of the closed howdah, stared impassively ahead. The Mahrattas were on the march, covering the earth like a swarm, just waiting for their enemies to blunder.

  Sharpe was tired of being hungry so one day he took his musket and walked in search of game. He reckoned anything would do, even a tiger, but he hoped to find beef. India seemed full of beeves, but that day he saw none, though after four miles he found a herd of goats grazing in a small wood. He drew his bayonet, reckoning it would be easier to cut one of the beast's throats than shoot it and so attract the attention of the herd's vengeful owner, but when he came close to the animals a dog burst out of the trees and attacked him.

  He clubbed the dog down with his musket butt, and the brief commotion put the goats to flight and it took him the best part of an hour to find the animals again and by then he could not have cared if he attracted half the population of India and so he aimed and fired, and all he succeeded in doing was wounding one poor beast that started bleating pitifully. He ran to it, cut its throat, which was harder than he had thought, then hoisted the carcass onto his shoulder.

  The widow boiled the stringy flesh which tasted foul, but it was still meat and Sharpe wolfed it down as though he had not eaten in months.

  The smell of the meat roused Colonel McCandless who sat up in his bed and frowned at the pot.

  "I could almost eat that," he said.

  "You want some, sir?"

  "I haven't eaten meat in eighteen years, Sharpe, I won't start now."

  He ran a hand through his lank white hair.

  "I do declare I'm feeling better, God be praised."

  The Colonel swung his feet onto the floor and tried to stand.

  "But I'm weak as a kitten," he said.

  "Plate of meat will put some strength in you, sir."

  '"Get thee behind me, Satan," the Colonel said, then put a hand on one of the posts which held up the roof and hauled himself to his feet.

  "I might take a walk tomorrow."

  "How's the leg, sir?"

  "Mending, Sharpe, mending." The Colonel put some weight on his left leg and seemed pleasantly surprised that it did not buckle.

  "God has preserved me again."

  "Thank God for that, sir."

  "I do, Sharpe, I do."

  Next morning the Colonel felt better still. He ducked out of the hut and blinked in the bright sunlight.

  "Have you seen any soldiers these last two weeks?"

  "Not a one, sir. Nothing but farmers."

  The Colonel scraped a hand across the white bristles on his chin.

  "A shave, I think. Would you be so kind as to fetch my box of razors? And perhaps you could heat some water?"

  Sharpe dutifully put a pot of water on the fire, then stropped one of the Colonel's razors on a saddle's girth strap. He was just perfecting the edge when McCandless called him from outside the house.

  "Sharpe!"

  Something in McCandless's voice made Sharpe snatch up his musket, then he heard the beat of hooves as he ducked under the low doorway and he hauled back the musket's cock in expectation of enemies, but McCandless waved the weapon down.

  "I said Sevajee would find us!" the Colonel said happily.

  "Nothing stays secret in this countryside, Sharpe."

  Sharpe lowered the musket's flint as he watched Sevajee lead his men towards the widow's house. The young Indian grinned at McCandless's dishevelled condition.

  "I heard there was a white devil near here, and I knew it would be you."

  "I wish you'd come sooner," McCandless grumbled.

  "Why? You were ill. The folks I spoke to said you would die." Sevajee slid out of the saddle and led his horse to the well.

  "Besides, we've been too busy."

  "Following Scindia, I trust?" the Colonel asked.

  "Here, there and everywhere." Sevajee hauled up a skin of water and held it under his horse's nose.

  "They've been south, east, back north again. But now they're going to hold a durbar, Colonel."

  "A durbar” McCandless brightened, and Sharpe wondered what on earth a durbar was.

  "They've gone to Borkardan," Sevajee announced happily.

  "All of them! Scindia, the Rajah of Berar, the whole lot! A sea of enemies."

  "Borkardan," McCandless said, summoning a mental map in his head.

  "Where's that? Two days' march north?"

  "One for a horseman, two on foot," Sevajee agreed.

  McCandless, his shave forgotten, stared northwards.

  "But how long will they stay there?"

  "Long enough," Sevajee said gleefully, 'and first they have to make a place fit for a prince's durbar and that will take them two or three days, and then they'll talk for another two or three days. And they need to rest their animals too, and in Borkardan they've found plenty of forage."

  "How do you know?" McCandless asked.

  "Because we met some brin dames Sevajee said with a smile, and turned at the same time to indicate four small, lean and riderless horses that were the trophies of that meeting.

  "We had a talk with them," Sevajee said airily, and Sharpe wondered how brutal that talk had been.

  "Forty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry," Sevajee said, 'and over a hundred guns."

  McCandless limped back into the house to fetch paper and ink from his saddlebag. Then, back in the sunlight, he wrote a despatch and Sevajee detailed six of his horsemen to take the precious news south as fast as they could. They would need to search for Wellesley's army and Sevajee told them to whip their horses bloody because, if the British moved fast, there was a chance to catch the Mahrattas while they were encamped for their durbar and then to attack them before they could form their battle array.

  "That would even things up," McCandless announced happily.

  "A surprise attack!"

  "They're not fools," Sevajee warned, 'they'll have a host of picquets."

  "But it takes time to organize a hundred thousand men, Sevajee, a lot of time! They'll be milling about like sheep while we march into battle!"

  The six horsemen rode away with the precious despatch and McCandless, tired again, let Sharpe shave him.

  "All we can do now is wait," the Colonel said.

  "Wait?" Sharpe asked indignantly, believing that McCandless was implying that they would do nothing while the battle was being fought.

  "If Scindia's at Borkardan," the Colonel said, 'then our armies will have to march this way to reach him. So w
e might as well wait for them to come to us. Then we can join up again."

  It was time to stop dreaming. It was time to fight.

  Wellesley's army had crossed the Godavery and marched towards Aurungabad, then heard that Scindia's forces had gone far to the east before lunging south towards the heartland of Hyderabad, and the report made sense for the old Nizam had just died and left a young son on the throne and a young ruler's state could make for rich pickings, and so Wellesley had turned his small army and hurried back to the Godavery.

  They laboriously recrossed the river, swimming the horses, bullocks and elephants to the southern bank, and floating the guns, limbers and wagons across on rafts. The men used boats made from inflated bladders, and it took two whole days to make the crossing and then, after a day's march south towards threatened Hyderabad, more news came that the enemy had turned about and gone back northwards.

  "Don't know what they're bleeding doing," Hakeswill declared.

  "Captain Mackay says we're looking for the enemy," Private Lowry suggested helpfully.

  "Looking for his arse, more like. Bloody Wellesley." Hakeswill was sitting beside the river, watching the bullocks being goaded back into the water to cross once again to the north bank.

  "In the water, out the water, up one road, down the next, walk in bleeding circles, then back through the bleeding river again." His blue eyes opened wide in indignation and his face twitched.

  "Arthur Wellesley should never be a general."

  "Why not, Sarge?" Private Kendrick asked, knowing that Hakeswill wanted the opportunity to explain.

  "Stands to reason, lad, stands to reason." Hakeswill paused to light a clay pipe.

  "No bleeding experience. You remember that wood outside Seringapatam?

  Bloody chaos, that's what it was, bloody chaos and who caused it? He did, that's who." He gestured at Wellesley who, mounted on a tall white horse, had come to the bluff above the river.

  "He's a general," Hakeswill explained, 'because his father's an earl and because his elder brother's the Governor General, that's why. If my father had been a bleeding earl, then I'd be a bleeding general, says so in the scriptures. Lord Obadiah Hakeswill, I'd be, and you wouldn't see me buggering about like a dog chasing fleas up its arse.

  I'd bleeding well get the job done. On your feet, lads, look smart now!"

  The General, with nothing to do except wait while his army crossed the river, had turned his horse up the bank and his path brought him close to where Hakeswill had been seated. Wellesley looked across, recognized the Sergeant and seemed about to turn away, but then an innate courtesy overcame his distaste for speaking with the lower ranks.

  "Still here, Sergeant?" he asked awkwardly.

  "Still here, sir," Hakeswill said. He was quivering at attention, his clay pipe thrust into a pocket and his firelock by his side.

  "Doing my duty, sir, like a soldier."

  "Your duty?" Wellesley asked.

  "You came to arrest Sergeant Sharpe, isn't that right?"

  "Sir!" Hakeswill affirmed.

  The General grimaced.

  "Let me know if you see him. He's with Colonel McCandless, and they both seem to be missing. Dead, probably." And on that cheerful note the General tugged on his reins and spurred away.

  Hakeswill watched him go, then retrieved his clay pipe and sucked the tobacco back to glowing life. Then he spat onto the bank.

  "Sharpie ain't dead," he said malevolently.

  "I'm the one who's going to kill Sharpie. Says so in the scriptures."

  Then Captain Mackay arrived and insisted that Hakeswill and his six men help organize the transfer of the bullocks across the river. The animals carried packs loaded with spare round shot for the artillery, and the Captain had been provided with two rafts for that precious ammunition.

  "They're to transfer the shot to the rafts, understand?

  Then swim the beasts over. I don't want chaos, Sergeant. Make them |, line up decently. And make sure they don't roll the shot into the river w to save themselves the bother of reloading it." y "It isn't a soldier's job," Hakeswill complained when the Captain was || gone.

  "Chivvying bullocks? I ain't a bleeding Scotchman. That's all ?l they're good for, chivvying bullocks. Do it all the time, they do, down "' the green roads to London, but it ain't a job for an Englishman." But [ he nevertheless did an effective job, using his bayonet to prod men and animals into the queue which slowly snaked its way down to the water. By nightfall the whole army was over, and next morning, long | before dawn, they marched north again. They camped before midday, thus avoiding the worst of the heat, and by mid-afternoon the first enemy cavalry patrols showed in the distance and the army's own cavalry rode out to drive the horsemen away.

  They did not move at all for the next two days. Cavalry scouts tried to discover the enemy's intentions, while Company spies spread gold throughout the north country in search of news, but the gold was wasted for every scrap of intelligence was contradicted by another. One said Holkar had joined Scindia, another said Holkar was declaring war on Scindia, then the Mahrattas were said to be marching west, or east, or perhaps north, until Wellesley felt he was playing a slow version of blind man's buff.

  Then, at last, some reliable news arrived. Six Mahratta horsemen in the service of Syud Sevajee came to Wellesley's camp with a hastily written despatch from Colonel McCandless. The Colonel regretted his absence and explained that he had taken a wound that had been slow to heal, but he could assure Sir Arthur that he had not abandoned his duty and could thus report, with a fair degree of certainty, that the forces of Dowlut Rao Scindia and the Rajah of Berar had finally ceased their wanderings at Borkardan. They planned to stay there, McCandless wrote, to hold a durbar and to let their animals recover their strength, and he estimated those intentions implied a stay in Borkardan of five or six days. The enemy numbered, he reported, at least eighty thousand men and possessed around a hundred pieces of field artillery, many of inferior calibre, but an appreciable number throwing much heavier shot.

  He reckoned, from his own earlier observations in Pohlmann's camp, that only fifteen thousand of the enemy's infantry were trained to Company standards, while the rest were make weights but the guns, he added ominously, were well served and well maintained. The despatch had been written in a hurry, and in a shaky hand, but it was concise, confident and comprehensive.

  The Colonel's despatch drove the General to his maps and then to a flurry of orders. The army was readied to march that night, and a galloper went to Colonel Stevenson's force, west of Wellesley's, with orders to march north on a parallel course. The two small armies should combine at Borkardan in four days' time.

  "That will give us, what?"

  Wellesley thought for a second or two.

  "Eleven thousand prime infantry and forty-eight guns." He jotted the figures on the map, then absentmindedly tapped the numbers with a pencil.

  "Eleven thousand against eighty," he said dubiously, then grimaced.

  "It will serve," he concluded, 'it will serve very well."

  "Eleven against eighty will serve, sir?" Captain Campbell asked with astonishment. Campbell was the young Scottish officer who had thrice climbed the ladder to be the first man into Ahmednuggur and his reward had been a promotion and an appointment as Wellesley's aide.

  Now he stared at the General, a man Campbell considered as sensible as any he had ever met, yet the odds that Wellesley was welcoming seemed insane.

  "I'd rather have more men," Wellesley admitted, 'but we can probably do the job with eleven thousand. You can forget Scindia's cavalry, Campbell, because it won't manage a thing on a battlefield, and the Rajah of Berar's infantry will simply get in everyone else's way, which means we'll be fighting against fifteen thousand good infantry and rather too many well-served guns. The rest don't matter. If we beat the guns and the infantry, the rest of them will run. Depend on it, they'll run."

  "Suppose they adopt a defensive position, sir?" Campbell felt impelled to in
sert a note of caution into the General's hopes.

  "Suppose they're behind a river, sir? Or behind walls?"

  "We can suppose what we like, Campbell" but supposing is only fancy, and if we take fright at fancies then we might as well abandon soldiering. We'll decide how to deal with the rogues once we find them, but the first thing to do is find them." Wellesley rolled up the map.

  "Can't kill your fox till you've run him down. So let's be about our business."

  The army marched that night. Six thousand cavalry, nearly all of them Indian, led the way, and behind them were twenty-two pieces of artillery, four thousand sepoys of the East India Company and two battalions of Scots, while the great clumsy tail of bullocks, wives, children, wagons and merchants brought up the rear. They marched hard, and if any man was daunted by the size of the enemy's army, they showed no sign of it. They were as well trained as any men that had ever worn the red coat in India, they had been promised victory by their long-nosed General, and now they were going for the kill. And, whatever the odds, they believed they would win. So long as no one blundered.

  Borkardan was a mere village with no building fit for a prince, and so the great durbar of the Mahratta chiefs was held in an enormous tent that was hastily made by sewing a score of smaller tents together, then lining the canvas with swathes of brightly coloured silk, and it would have made a marvellously impressive structure had the heavens not opened when the durbar began so that the sound of men's voices was half drowned by the beat of rain on stretched canvas and if the hastily made seams had not opened to let the water pour through in streams.