Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803

by Bernard Cornwell

  “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 to save themselves the bother of reloading it.”

  “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 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 dispatch 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 caliber, 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 makeweights, but the guns, he added ominously, were well served and well maintained. The dispatch had been written in a hurry, and in a shaky hand, but it was concise, confident and comprehensive.

  The Colonel’s dispatch 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 absent-mindedly 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 insert 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 on
e 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 colored silk, and it would have made a marvelously 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.

  “It’s all a waste of time,” Pohlmann grumbled to Dodd, “but we have to attend.” The Colonel was fixing his newly tied stock with a diamond-studded pin. “And it isn’t a time for any European opinion except mine, understand?”

  “Yours?” Dodd, who had rather hoped to make a case for boldness, asked dourly.

  “Mine,” Pohlmann said forcibly. “I want to twist their tails, and I need every European officer nodding like a demented monkey in agreement with me.”

  A hundred men had gathered under the dripping silk. Scindia, the Maharajah of Gwalior, and Bhonsla, the Rajah of Berar, sat on musnuds, elegant raised platform-thrones that were draped in brocade and sheltered from the intrusive rain by silk parasols. Their Highnesses were cooled by men waving long-handled fans while the rest of the durbar sweltered in the close, damp heat. The high-class brahmins, all in baggy trousers cut from gold brocade, white tunics and tall white turbans, sat closest to the two thrones, while behind them stood the military officers, Indian and European, who were perspiring in their finest uniforms. Servants moved unobtrusively through the crowd offering silver dishes of almonds, sweetmeats or raisins soaked in arrack. The three senior European officers stood together. Pohlmann, in a purple coat hung with golden braid and loops of chain, towered over Colonel Dupont, a wiry Dutchman who commanded Scindia’s second compoo, and over Colonel Saleur, a Frenchman, who led the infantry of the Begum Somroo. Dodd lingered just behind the trio and listened to their private durbar. The three men agreed that their troops would have to take the brunt of the British attack, and that one of them must exercise overall command. It could not be Saleur, for the Begum Somroo was a client ruler of Scindia’s, so her commander could hardly take precedence over her feudal overlord’s officers, which meant that it had to be either Dupont or Pohlmann, but the Dutchman generously ceded the honor to the Hanoverian. “Scindia would have chosen you anyway,” Dupont said.

  “Wisely,” Pohlmann said cheerfully, “very wisely. You’re content, Saleur?”

  “Indeed,” the Frenchman said. He was a tall, dour man with a badly scarred face and a formidable reputation as a disciplinarian. He was also reputed to be the Begum Somroo’s lover, a post that evidently accompanied the command of that lady’s infantry. “What are the bastards talking about now?” he asked in English.

  Pohlmann listened for a few seconds. “Discussing whether to retreat to Gawilghur,” he said. Gawilghur was a hill fort that lay north and east of Borkardan and a group of brahmins were urging the army to retire there and let the British break their skulls against its cliffs and high walls. “Goddamn brahmins,” Pohlmann said in disgust. “Don’t know a damn thing about soldiering. Know how to talk, but not how to fight.”

  But then an older brahmin, his white beard reaching to his waist, stood up and declared that the omens were more suitable for battle. “You have assembled a great army, dread Lord,” he addressed Scindia, “and you would lock it away in a citadel?”

  “Where did they find him?” Pohlmann muttered. “He’s actually talking sense!”

  Scindia said little, preferring to let Surjee Rao, his chief minister, do the talking, while he himself sat plump and inscrutable on his throne. He was wearing a rich gown of yellow silk that had emeralds and pearls sewn into patterns of flowers, while a great yellow diamond gleamed from his pale-blue turban.

  Another brahmin pleaded for the army to march south on Seringapatam, but he was ignored. The Rajah of Berar, darker-skinned than the pale Scindia, frowned at the durbar in an attempt to look warlike, but said very little. “He’ll run away,” Colonel Saleur growled, “as soon as the first gun is fired. He always does.”

  Beny Singh, the Rajah’s warlord, argued for battle. “I have five hundred camels laden with rockets, I have guns fresh from Agra, I have infantry hungry for enemy blood. Let them loose!”

  “God help us if we do,” Dupont growled. “Bastards don’t have any discipline.”

  “Is it always like this?” Dodd asked Pohlmann.

  “Good God, no!” the Hanoverian said. “This durbar is positively decisive! Usually it’s three days of talk and a final decision to delay any decision until the next time.”

  “You think they’ll come to a decision today?” Saleur asked cynically.

  “They’ll have to,” Pohlmann said. “They can’t keep this army together for much longer. We’re running out of forage! We’re stripping the country bare.” The soldiers were still receiving just enough to eat, and the cavalrymen made certain their horses were fed, but the camp followers were near starvation and in a few days the suffering of the women and children would cause the army’s morale to plummet. Only that morning Pohlmann had seen a woman sawing at what he had assumed was brown bread, then realized that no Indian would bake a European loaf and that the great lump was actually a piece of elephant dung and that the woman was crumbling it apart in search of undigested grains. They must fight now.

  “So if we fight,” Saleur asked, “how will you win?”

  Pohlmann smiled. “I think we can give young Wellesley a problem or two,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll put the Rajah’s men behind some strong walls where they can’t do any damage, and we three will line our guns wheel to wheel, hammer them hard for their whole approach, then finish them off with some smart volleys. After that we’ll let the cavalry loose on their remnants.”

  “But when?” Dupont asked.

  “Soon,” Pohlmann said, “soon. Has to be soon. Buggers are eating dung for breakfast these days.” There was a sudden silence in the tent and Pohlmann realized a question had been addressed to him. Surjee Rao, a sinister man whose reputation for cruelty was as widespread as it was deserved, raised an eyebrow to the Hanoverian. “The rain, Your Serene Excellency,” Pohlmann explained, “the rain deafened me so I could not hear your question.”

  “What my Lord wishes to know,” the minister said, “is whether we can destroy the British?”

  “Oh, utterly,” Pohlmann said as though it was risible to even ask the question.

  “They fight hard,” Beny Singh pointed out.

  “And they die like other men when fought hard in return,” Pohlmann said dismissively.

  Scindia leaned forward and whispered in Surjee Rao’s ear. “What the Lord of our land and the conqueror of our enemy’s lands wishes to know,” the minister said, “is how you will beat the British?”

  “In the way that His Royal Highness suggested, Excellency, when he gave me his wise advice yesterday,” Pohlmann said, and it was true that he had enjoyed a private talk with Scindia the day before, though the advice had all been given by Pohlmann, but if he was to sway this durbar then he knew he must let them think that he was simply repeating Scindia’s suggestions.

  “Tell us, please,” Surjee Rao, who knew full well that his master had no ideas except how to increase the tax yields, asked suavely.

  “As we all know,” Pohlmann said, “the British have divided their forces into two parts. By now both those small armies will know that we are here at Borkardan and, because they are fools eager for death, they will both be marching towards us. Both armies lie to our south, but they are separated by some miles. They nevertheless hope to join together, then attack us, but yesterday, in his unparalleled wisdom, His Royal Highness suggested that if we move eastwards we shall draw the enemy’s easternmost column towards us and so make them march away from their allies. We can then fight the two armies in turn, defeat them in turn, and then let our dogs chew
the flesh from their carcasses. And when the last enemy is dead, Excellency, I shall bring their General to our ruler’s tents in chains and send their women to be his slaves.” More to the point, Pohlmann thought, he would capture Wellesley’s food supplies, but he dared not say that in case Scindia took the words as a criticism. But Pohlmann’s bravado was rewarded by a scatter of applause that was unfortunately spoiled as a whole section of the tent roof collapsed to let in a deluge of rain.

  “If the British are doomed,” Surjee Rao asked when the commotion had subsided, “why do they advance on us?”

  It was a good question, and one that had worried Pohlmann slightly, though he believed he had found an answer. “Because, Excellency,” he said, “they have the confidence of fools. Because they believe that their combined armies will prove sufficient. Because they do not truly understand that our army has been trained to the same level as their own, and because their General is young and inexperienced and too eager for a reputation.”

  “And you believe, Colonel, that we can keep their two armies apart?”

  “If we march tomorrow, yes.”

  “How big is the British General’s army?”

  Pohlmann smiled. “Wellesley has five thousand infantrymen, Excellency, and six thousand cavalry. We could lose as many men as that and not even notice they were gone! He has eleven thousand men, but the only ones he relies on are his five thousand infantry. Five thousand men! Five thousand!” He paused, making sure that everyone in the tent had heard the figure. “And we have eighty thousand men. Five against eighty!”