Sharpe's Triumph

by Bernard Cornwell

  The leading half company of picquets had reached the thorn hedge and there they had checked, at last unwilling to continue their suicidal progress towards the waiting Mahrattas. Some artillery from further up the line, wrhich did not lie under Dodd's control, had opened fire on the column, but the white-coated Mahratta forces immediately to the front of the column were silent and the picquets' commanding officer seemed encouraged by that and now urged his men onwards.

  "Why doesn't he deploy?" Dodd asked no one, and prayed that they would not deploy, but as soon as the half company of kilted Highlanders had filed through a gap in the cactus thorn they began to spread out and Dodd knew his moment was close. But wait, he told himself, wait for more victims, and sure enough the sepoys pushed through the breaks in the hedge until all the picquets were in front of the cactus and their officers and sergeants began chivvying them forward onto the open pasture where there would be more space for the half companies to deploy into line.

  Captain Joubert was worried that Dodd was leaving the command to open fire too late. The second British formation was close to the hedge now, and once they were through the gaps they would add a vast weight of musketry to the attack. But Dodd knew it would take that regiment a long time to manoeuvre through the hedge, and he was concerned solely with the three or four hundred men of the pic-quets who were now just eighty yards from his gun line and still not properly deployed. His own men were a hundred paces behind the guns, but now he took them forward.

  "Regiment will advance," he ordered, 'at the double!" His interpreter shouted the order and Dodd watched proudly as his men ran smartly forward. They kept their ranks, and checked promptly on his command when they reached the em placed artillery.

  "Thank you, Lord," he prayed. The picquets, suddenly aware of the horror that awaited them, began to hurry as they spread into line, but still Dodd did not fire. Instead he rode his new horse behind his men's ranks.

  "You fire low!" he told his Cobras.

  "Make sure you fire low! Aim at their thighs." Most troops fired high and thus a man who aimed at his enemy's knees would as like as not hit his chest. Dodd paused to watch the picquets who were now advancing in a long double line. Dodd took a deep breath.

  "Fire!"

  Forty guns and over eight hundred muskets were aimed at the picquets and scarce a gun or a musket missed. One moment the ground in front of the hedge was alive with soldiers, the next it was a charnel house, swept by metal and flayed by fire, and though Dodd could see nothing through the powder smoke, he knew he had virtually annihilated the redcoat line. The volley had been massive. Two of the guns, indeed, had been the eighteen-pounder siege guns and Dodd's only regret was that they had been loaded with round shot instead of canister, but at least they could now reload with canister and so savage the British battalion that had almost reached the cactus hedge.

  "Reload!" Dodd called to his men. The smoke was writhing away, thinning as it went, and he could see enemy bodies on the ground. He could see men twitching, men crawling, men dying. Most did not move at all, though miraculously their commanding officer, or at least the only man who had been on horseback, still lived. He was whipping his horse back through the hedge.

  "Fire!" Dodd shouted, and a second volley whipped across the killing ground to thrash through the hedge and strike the battalion behind.

  That battalion was taking even worse punishment from the artillery which was now firing canister, and the blasts of metal were tearing the hedge apart, destroying the redcoats' small cover. The little four-pounder guns, which fired such puny round shot, now served as giant shotguns to spray the redcoats with Dodd's home-made bags of canister. His sepoys loaded and rammed their muskets. The dry grass in front of them flickered with hundreds of small pale flames where the burning wadding had started fires.

  "Fire!" Dodd shouted again, and saw, just before the cloud of powder smoke blotted out his view, that the enemy was stepping backwards.

  The volley crashed out, filling the air with the stench of rotten eggs.

  "Reload!" Dodd shouted and admired his men's efficiency. Not one had panicked, not one had fired his ramrod by mistake. Clockwork soldiers, he thought, as soldiers ought to be, while the enemy's return fire was pathetic. One or two of Dodd's men had been killed, and a handful were wounded, but in return they had destroyed the leading British unit and were driving the next one back.

  "The regiment will advance!" he shouted and listened to his interpreter repeat the order.

  They marched in line through their own powder smoke and then across the scores of dead and dying enemy picquets. Soldiers stooped to the bodies to filch keepsakes and loot and Dodd shouted at them to keep going. The loot could wait. They reached the remnants of the cactus hedge where Dodd halted them. The British battalion was still going backwards, evidently seeking the safety of the gull)'. "Fire!" he shouted, and his men's volley seemed to push the redcoats even further back.

  "Reload!"

  Ramrods rattled in barrels, dog heads were dragged back to the full.

  The British line was retreating fast now, but from the north, from the land hard by the river, a mass of Mahratta cavalry was riding south to join the slaughter. Dodd wished the cavalry would stay out of it, for he had an idea that he could have pursued this British battalion clear down the tongue of land to where the rivers met and the last of their men would die in the Kaitna's muddy shallows, but he dared not fire another volley in case he hit the cavalry.

  "The regiment will advance!" he told his interpreter. He would let the cavalry have their moment, then go on with the slaughtering himself.

  The British battalion commander saw the cavalry and knew his retreat must stop. His men were still in line, a line of only two ranks, and cavalrymen dreamed of encountering infantry in line.

  "Form square!" their commanding officer shouted, and the two wings of the line dutifully withdrew towards the centre. The double rank became four, the four ranks wheeled and dressed, and suddenly the cavalry faced a fortress of redcoats, muskets and bayonets. The front rank of the square knelt and braced their muskets on the ground while the other three readied their muskets for the coming horsemen.

  The cavalry should have sheered away at the sight of the square, but they had seen the earlier slaughter and thought to add to it, and so they dipped their penn anted lances, raised their tulwars and screamed their war cries as they galloped straight towards the redcoats. And the redcoats let them come, let them come perilously close before the order was shouted and the face of the square nearest the cavalry exploded in flame and smoke and the horses screamed as they were hit and died. The surviving horsemen swerved aside and received another killing volley as they swept past the sides of the square. More horses tumbled, dust spewing from their sliding bodies. A tulwar spun along the ground, its owner shrieking as his trapped leg was ground into bloody ruin by the weight of his dying horse.

  "Reload!" a Scots voice shouted from inside the square and the redcoats recharged their muskets.

  The cavalry charged on into open country and there wheeled about.

  Some of the horses were riderless now, others were bloody, but all came back towards the square.

  "Let them come close!" a mounted British officer shouted inside the square.

  "Let them come close. Wait for it! Fire!"

  More horses tumbled, their legs cracking as the bones shattered, and this time the cavalry did not sheer away to ride down the square's lethal flanks, but instead wheeled clean about and spurred out of range. Two lessons were sufficient to teach them caution, but they did not go far away, just far enough to be out of range of the redcoats' muskets. The cavalry's leaders had seen Dodd's regiment come through the cactus hedge and they knew that their own infantry, attacking in line, must overwhelm the square with musketry and, when the square shattered, as it must under the infantry's assault, the horsemen could sweep back to pick off the survivors and pluck the great gaudy banners as trophies to lay before Scindia.

  Dodd cou
ld scarcely believe his luck. At first he had resented the cavalry's intrusion, believing that they were about to steal his victory, but their two impotent charges had forced the enemy battalion to form square and mathematics alone dictated that a battalion in square could only use one quarter of its muskets against an attack from any one side.

  And the British battalion, which Dodd now recognized from its white facings as the 74th, was much smaller than Dodd's Cobras, probably having only half the numbers Dodd possessed. And, in addition to Dodd's men, a ragged regiment of the Rajah of Berar's infantry had poured out of Assaye to join the slaughter while a battalion from Dupont's compoo, which had been posted immediately on Dodd's right, had also come to join the killing. Dodd resented the presence of those men whom he feared might dilute the glory of his victory, but he could scarcely order them away. The important thing was to slaughter the Highlanders.

  "We're going to kill the bastards with volley fire," he told his men, then waited for his translator to interpret.

  "And then we'll finish them off with bayonets. And I want those two colours! I want those flags hanging in Scindia's tent tonight."

  The Scots were not waiting idly for the attack. Dodd could see small groups of men dashing out of the square and at first he thought they were plundering the dead cavalrymen, and then he saw they were dragging the bodies of men and horses back to make a low rampart. The few survivors of the picquets were among the Scots, who were now caught in a terrible dilemma. By staying in square they would keep themselves safe from any attack by the cavalry which still hovered to the south, though the square made them into an easy target for the enemy's muskets, but if they deployed into line, so that they could use all their muskets against the enemy's infantry line, they made themselves into cavalry bait. Their commanding officer decided to stay in square.

  Dodd reckoned he would do the same if he was ever so foolish as to be trapped like these fools were trapped. They still had to be finished off, and that promised to be grim work for the 74th was a notoriously tough regiment, but Dodd had the advantage of numbers and the advantage of position and he knew he must win.

  Except that the Scotsmen did not agree with him. They crouched behind their barricade of dead men and horses and poured a blistering fire of musketry at the white-coated Cobras. A lone piper, who had disobeyed the order to leave his instrument at Naulniah, played in the square's centre. Dodd could hear the sound, but he could not see the piper, nor, indeed, the square itself, which was hidden by a churning fog of dark powder smoke. The smoke was illuminated by the flashes of musket fire, and Dodd could hear the heavy balls thumping into his men. The Cobras were no longer advancing, for the closer they got to the deadly smoke the greater their casualties and so they had paused fifty yards from the square to let their own muskets do the work. They were reloading as fast as their enemies, but too many of their bullets were being wasted on the barricade of corpses. All four faces of the square were firing now, for the 74th was surrounded. To the west they fired at Dodd's attacking line, to the north they fired at the Rajah's infantry, while to the east and south they kept the cavalry at bay.

  The Mahratta horsemen, scenting the Scottish regiment's death, were prowling ever closer in the hope that they could dash in and take the colours before the infantry.

  Dodd's Cobras, together with the battalion from Dupont's compoo, began to curl about the southern flank of the trapped regiment. It should take only three or four volleys, Dodd thought, to end the business, after which his men could go in with the bayonet. Not that his men were firing volleys any longer; instead they were firing as soon as their muskets were charged and Dodd felt their excitement and sought to curb it.

  "Don't waste your fire!" he shouted.

  "Aim low!" William Dodd had no desire to lead a charge through the stinking smoke to find an unbroken formation of vengeful Highlanders waiting with bayonets. Dodd might dislike the Scots, but he had a healthy fear of fighting them with cold steel. Thin the bastards first, he thought, batter them, bleed them, then massacre them, but his men were too excited at the prospect of imminent victory and far too much of their fire was either going high or else being wasted on the barricade of the dead.

  "Aim low!" he shouted again.

  "Aim low!"

  "They won't last,"Joubert said. Indeed the Frenchman was amazed that the Scots still survived.

  "Awkward things to kill, Scotsmen," Dodd said. He took a drink from his canteen.

  "I do hate the bastards. All preachers or thieves. Stealing Englishmen's jobs. Aim low!" A man was thrown back near Dodd, blood bright on his white coat.

  "Joubert?" Dodd called back to the Frenchman.

  "Monsieur?"

  "Bring up two of the regiment's guns. Load with canister." That would end the bastards. Two gouts of canister from the four-pounders would blow great gaps in the Scottish square and Dodd could then lead his men into those gaps and fillet the dying regiment from its inside out.

  He would be damned if the cavalry would take the flags. They were his!

  It was Dodd who had fought these Highlanders to a standstill and Dodd who planned to carry the silk banners to Scindia's tent and there fetch his proper reward.

  "Hurry, Joubert!" he called.

  Dodd drew his pistol and fired over his men's ranks into the smoke that hid the dying square.

  "Aim low!" he shouted.

  "Don't waste your fire!"

  But it would not be long now. Two blasts of canister, he reckoned, and then the bayonets would bring him victory.

  Major Samuel Swinton stood just behind the western face of the square which looked towards the white-coated infantry. He could hear an English voice shouting orders and encouragement in the enemy lines and, though Swinton himself was an Englishman, the accent angered him. No English bastard was going to destroy the 74th, not while Major Swinton commanded, and he told his men that a Sassenach was their enemy and that seemed to add zest to their efforts.

  "Keep low!" he told them.

  "Keep firing!" By staying low the Scots kept behind the protection of their makeshift barricade, but it also made their muskets much more difficult to reload and some men took the risk of standing after each shot. Their only protection then was the mask of smoke that hid the regiment from its enemies. And thank God, Swinton thought, that the enemy had brought no artillery forward.

  The square was swept by musket fire. Much of it, especially from the north, flew high, but the white-coated regiment was better trained and their musketry was having an effect, so much so that Swinton took the inside rank of the eastern face and added it to the west. The sergeants and corporals closed the ranks as the enemy bullets hurled men back into the bloody interior of the shrinking square where the Major stepped among the Scottish dead and wounded. Swinton's horse had died, struck by three musket balls and put out of its misery by the Major's own pistol. Colonel Orrock, who had first led the picquets to disaster, had also lost his horse.

  "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.