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

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You sure?”

  “Large as life.”

  “God bless you, Lowry, God bless you.” And God, Hakeswill thought, had certainly blessed him. He had feared that he would have to endure a battle, but now Sharpe had come and Hakeswill could produce his precious warrant and be on his way south. Let the army fight its battle, and let it win or lose, Hakeswill did not care, for Sergeant Hakeswill had what he wanted and he would be rich.

  CHAPTER•8

  General Wellesley was like a gambler who had emptied his purse onto the table and now had to wait for the cards to fall. There was still time to scoop the money back and walk away from the game, but if he ever felt that temptation, he did not betray it to his aides, nor to any of the army’s senior officers. The colonels in his army were all older than Wellesley, some much older, and Wellesley courteously sought their advice, though he largely ignored it. Orrock, a Company colonel and commander of the 8th Madras Infantry, recommended an extravagant outflanking march to the east, though so far as Wellesley could determine the only ambition of such a maneuver was to remove the army as far as possible from the enemy horde. The General was forced to pay more attention to his two Williams, Wallace and Harness, the commanding officers of his two Scottish battalions who were also his brigade leaders. “If we join Stevenson, sir, we might manage the business,” Wallace opined, his tone making it clear that, even combined, the two British armies would be dangerously outnumbered. “I’ve no doubt Harness will agree with me, sir,” Wallace added, though William Harness, the commander of the 78th, seemed surprised to have his opinion sought. “Your business how you fight them, Wellesley,” he growled. “Point my men and I warrant they’ll fight. The bastards had better fight. I’ll flog the scum witless if they don’t.”

  Wellesley forbore to point out that if the 78th refused to fight then there would be no one left to flog, for there would be no army. Harness would not have listened anyway, for he had taken the opportunity to lecture the General on the ameliorative effects of a flogging. “My first colonel liked to see one well-scourged back a week, Wellesley,” he said. “He reckoned it kept the men to their duty. He once flogged a sergeant’s wife, I recall. He wanted to know if a woman could take the pain, you see, and she couldn’t. The lass was fair wriggling.” Harness sighed, recalling happier days. “D’you dream, Wellesley?”

  “Dream, Harness?”

  “When you sleep.”

  “At times.”

  “A flogging will stop it. Nothing to bring on a good night’s sleep like a well-whipped back.” Harness, a tall black-browed man who seemed to wear a constant expression of wide-eyed disapproval, shook his head sadly. “A dreamless sleep, that’s what I dream of! Loosens the bowels too, y’know?”

  “Sleep?”

  “A flogging!” Harness snapped angrily. “Stimulates the blood, y’see?”

  Wellesley disliked making inquiries about senior officers, but he took care to ride alongside his new aide, Colin Campbell. “Was there much flogging in the 78th?” he asked the aide who, until the siege of Ahmednuggur, had served under Harness.

  “There’s been much recent talk of it, sir, but not in practice.”

  “Your Colonel seems much enamored of the practice.”

  “His enthusiasms come and go,” Campbell said blandly. “But until a few weeks ago, sir, he was not a man for enthusiasms. Now, suddenly, he is. He encouraged us to eat snakes in July, though he didn’t insist on it. I gather he tried some cobra seethed in milk, but it didn’t agree with him.”

  “Ah!” the General said, understanding the carefully phrased message. So Harness was going out of his wits? Wellesley chided himself for not guessing as much from the Colonel’s fixed glare. “The battalion has a doctor?”

  “You can take a horse to water, sir,” Campbell said carefully.

  “Indeed, indeed.” Not that the General could do anything about Harness’s incipient madness now, nor had the Colonel done anything that deserved dismissal. Indeed, mad or not, he led a fine battalion and Wellesley would need the Scotsmen when he came to Borkardan.

  He thought constantly of Borkardan, though what that place was other than a mark on the map, he did not know. He simply imagined the village as swirls of dust and bellowing noise, a place of galloping horses where big guns would flatten the air with their hot thumps and the sky would be ripped apart with shrieking metal and murderous volleys. It would be Wellesley’s first field battle. He had fought skirmishes enough, and led a cavalry charge that rode a bandit army into bloody oblivion, but he had never commanded guns and horse and infantry together, and he had never tried to impose his own will on an enemy general. He did not doubt his ability, nor did he doubt that he would stay calm amidst the dust and smoke and flame and blood, but he did fear that some unlucky shot would kill or maim him and the army would then be in the hands of a man without a vision of victory. Stevenson or Wallace would be competent enough, though Wellesley privately thought them both too cautious, but God help an army guided by Harness’s enthusiasms.

  The other colonels, all Company men, echoed Wallace’s advice to make sure of the junction with Stevenson before battle was joined, and Wellesley recognized the wisdom of that opinion, even while he refused to deflect his army to join Stevenson before they both reached Borkardan. There was no time for such a nicety, so instead whichever army first came to the enemy must engage him first, and the other must join the battle, to which end Wellesley knew he must keep his left flank open, for that was where Stevenson’s men would join his own. The General reckoned he must put the bulk of his cavalry on the left and station one of his two Highland regiments to serve as a bulwark on that flank, but beyond that he did not know what he would do once he reached Borkardan except attack, attack and attack again. He reasoned that when a small army faced a great horde then the small army had better keep moving and so destroy the enemy piece by piece, but if the small army stayed still then it risked being surrounded and pulverized into surrender.

  Borkardan on the twenty-fourth day of September, that was the goal, and Wellesley marched his men hard. The cavalry vanguard and the infantry picquets of the day were roused at midnight and, an hour later, just as the rest of the army was being stirred into sullen wakefulness, those men would start the northwards march. By two o’clock the whole army was moving. Dogs barked as the cavalry vanguard clattered through the villages, and after the horsemen came heavy guns hauled by oxen, marching Highlanders and long ranks of sepoys under their leather-cased colors. Ten miles to the west Stevenson’s army marched parallel to Wellesley’s, but ten miles was a half-day’s march and if either force was confronted by the enemy then the other could do nothing to help. Everything hinged on their meeting at Borkardan.

  Most of the men had little idea of what waited for them. They sensed the sudden urgency and guessed it presaged battle, but though the rumors spoke of the enemy as a numberless horde, they marched confidently. They grumbled, of course, for all soldiers grumble. They complained about being hungry, they swore at being made to tramp through the cavalry’s manure, and they cursed the oppressive heat that seemed scarcely alleviated by marching at night. Each march finished by midday when the men would rig their tents and sprawl in the shade while the picquets set guards, the cavalry watered horses and the commissary butchered bullocks to provide ration meat.

  The cavalry were the busiest men. Their job was to ride ahead and to the flanks of the army to drive any enemy scouts far away so that Scindia would not know that the two red-coated armies marched to trap him, but each morning, as the eastern horizon turned gray, then flushed with pink, then glowed gold and red before finally exploding into light, the patrols searched in vain for any enemies. The Mahratta horse seemed to be staying home, and some of the cavalry officers feared that their enemy might have slipped away again.

  As they were nearing Naulniah which would be Wellesley’s last resting place before he marched through the night to Borkardan, the General called his patrols closer to the army, orde
ring them to ride just a mile or two in front of his column. If the enemy was asleep, he explained to his aides, then it was best to do nothing to wake him. It was Sunday, and if the enemy was still engaged in its durbar, then the next day would bring battle. One day to let fears harass hope, though Wellesley’s aides seemed careless enough as they marched the last few miles to Naulniah. Major John Blackiston, an engineer on Wellesley’s staff, was needling Captain Campbell by saying that the Scots had no harvest to speak of. “Oats alone, isn’t that it, Captain?”

  “You’ve not seen barley, Major, till you’ve been to Scotland,” Campbell declared. “You could hide a regiment in a field of Scottish barley.”

  “Can’t think why you’d want to do such a thing, but doubtless you have your reasons. But as I understand it, Campbell, you heathen Scots have no order of service to give thanks to God for a harvest?”

  “You’ve not heard of the kirn, Major? The mell feast?”

  “Kirn?”

  “Harvest-home, you call it, when you scavenge those few weeds in England, then beg us generous Scots to send you food. Which we do, being Christian folk who take pity on those less fortunate than ourselves. And talking of the less fortunate, Major, here’s the sick list.” Campbell handed Blackiston a piece of paper on which was tallied the number of men from each regiment who were too sick to march. Those men were now being carried on the ox carts of the baggage train and, routinely, those who were unlikely to recover quickly were sent southwards on returning convoys, but Blackiston knew the General would not want to detach any cavalry to protect a convoy just before a battle.

  “Tell Sears the sick can all wait in Naulniah,” Blackiston ordered, “and warn Captain Mackay to have at least a score of empty wagons ready.” He did not specify why Mackay should prepare empty wagons, but nor did he need to do so. The wagons would carry the men wounded in battle, and Blackiston fervently prayed that no more than a score of ox carts would be needed.

  Captain Mackay had anticipated the need for empty wagons and had already put chalk marks on those whose burdens were light and could be transferred to other carts. Once at Naulniah he would have the cargoes rearranged, and he sought out Sergeant Hakeswill to supervise the business, but Obadiah Hakeswill had other plans. “My criminal’s back with the army, sir.”

  “And you haven’t arrested him already?” Mackay asked in surprise.

  “Can’t march a man in irons, sir, not at this pace. But if you’re establishing a camp, sir, at Naulniah, sir, I can hold my prisoner under guard like my duties say I should.”

  “So I shall be losing your services, Sergeant?”

  “It ain’t what I want, sir,” Hakeswill lied, “but I has my responsibilities, sir, and if we’re leaving baggage at Naulniah, sir, then I shall have to stay there with my prisoner. Colonel Gore’s orders, sir. Is that Naulniah up ahead, sir?”

  “It seems to be,” Mackay said, for the distant village was busy with men laying out the lines for the regiments’ tents.

  “Then, if you’ll forgive, sir, I have to be about my duties.”

  Hakeswill had deliberately waited for this moment, reckoning that it would be far too great a bother to keep marching northwards with Sharpe under escort. It would be better to wait until the army had established the baggage camp where Hakeswill could keep Sharpe while the battle was fought, and if one more redcoat died that day, who would miss him? So now, freed from Mackay’s baggage guard, the Sergeant hurried his six men up the column to find Colonel McCandless.

  McCandless’s leg was still throbbing, and the fever had left him weak, but his spirits had recovered, because riding Aeolus had convinced him that no finer horse had ever stepped on earth. The gelding was tireless, McCandless declared, and better schooled than any horse he had ever ridden. Sevajee was amused by the Colonel’s enthusiasm. “You sound like a man with a new woman, McCandless.”

  “If you say so, Sevajee, if you say so,” McCandless said, not rising to the Indian’s bait. “But isn’t he a beauty?”

  “Magnificent.”

  “County Meath,” the Colonel said. “They breed good hunters in County Meath. They have big hedges! Like jumping a haystack.”

  “County Meath is in Ireland?” Sevajee asked.

  “It is, it is.”

  “Another country beneath Britain’s heel?”

  “For a man beneath my heel, Sevajee,” the Colonel said, “you look in remarkably fine fettle. Can we talk about tomorrow? Sharpe! I want you to listen.”

  Sharpe urged his small Mahratta horse alongside the Colonel’s big gelding. Like Wellesley, Colonel McCandless was planning what he would do at Borkardan and, though the Colonel’s task was much smaller than the General’s, it was no less important to him. “Let us assume, gentlemen, that we shall win this battle at Borkardan tomorrow,” he said, and waited for the invariable riposte from Sevajee, but the tall Indian said nothing. “Our task, then,” the Colonel went on, “is to hunt Dodd among the fugitives. Hunt him and capture him.”

  “If he still lives,” Sevajee remarked.

  “Which I pray God he does. He must face British justice before he goes to God’s condemnation. So when the battle is joined, gentlemen, our task is not to get involved with the fighting, but to search for Dodd’s men. It won’t be difficult. So far as I know they’re the only regiment in white jackets, and once we have them, we stay close. Stay close till they break, then we pursue.”

  “And if they don’t break?” Sevajee asked.

  “Then we march again and fight again,” the Colonel answered grimly. “But by God’s grace, Sevajee, we shall find this man even if we have to hunt him into the deserts of Persia. Britain has more than a heavy heel, Sevajee, it has a long arm.”

  “Long arms are easily cut off,” Sevajee said.

  Sharpe had stopped listening. He had heard a commotion behind as a group of army wives were thrust off the road and had turned to see who had barged the women aside and, at first, all he had seen was a group of redcoats. Then he had recognized the red facings on the jackets and he had wondered what on earth men of the 33rd were doing here, and then he had recognized Sergeant Hakeswill.

  Obadiah Hakeswill! Of all people, Hakeswill! Sharpe stared in horror at his long-time enemy and Obadiah Hakeswill caught his eye and grinned maliciously and Sharpe knew that his appearance boded no good. Hakeswill broke into a lumbering run so that his haversack, pouches, bayonet and musket thumped against his body. “Sir!” he called up to Colonel McCandless. “Colonel McCandless, sir!”

  McCandless turned and frowned at the interruption, then, like Sharpe, he stared at the Sergeant as though he did not believe his eyes. McCandless knew Hakeswill, for Hakeswill had been imprisoned in the Tippoo Sultan’s dungeons at the same time as Sharpe and the Colonel, and what McCandless knew he did not like. The Scotsman scowled. “Sergeant Hakeswill? You’re far from home.”

  “As are we all, sir, doing our duties to King and country in an ’eathen land, sir.” Hakeswill slowed to a march, keeping pace with the Scotsman’s horse. “I’m ordered to see you, sir, by the General himself, sir. By Sir Arthur Wellesley, sir, God bless him, sir.”

  “I know who the General is, Sergeant,” McCandless said coldly.

  “Glad to hear it, sir. Got a paper for you, sir. Urgent paper, sir, what needs your urgent attention, sir.” Hakeswill gave a venomous glance at Sharpe, then held the warrant up to McCandless. “This paper, sir, what I’ve been carrying in my pouch, sir, on Colonel Gore’s orders, sir.”

  McCandless unfolded the warrant. Sevajee had hurried ahead, going to find somewhere to billet his men in the village and, while McCandless read the orders for Sharpe’s arrest, Hakeswill fell back so that he was walking beside Sharpe. “We’ll have you off that horse in a quick minute, Sharpie,” he said.

  “Go and boil your head, Obadiah.”

  “You always did have ideas above your station, Sharpie. Won’t do! Not in this army. We ain’t the Frogs. We don’t wear pretty long red boots like yours, we d
on’t, ‘cos we don’t have airs and graces, not in this army. Says so in the scriptures.”

  Sharpe tugged on his rein so that his small horse swerved into Hakeswill’s path. The Sergeant skipped aside. “Under arrest, you are, Sharpie!” Hakeswill crowed. “Under arrest! Court-martial offense. Be a shooting job, I dare say.” Hakeswill grinned, showing his yellow teeth. “Bang bang, you’re dead. Taken me a long time, Sharpie, but I’m going to be evens with you. All over for you, it is. Says so in the scriptures.”

  “It says nothing of the sort, Sergeant!” McCandless snapped, turning in his saddle and glaring at the Sergeant. “I’ve had occasion to speak to you before about the scriptures, and if I hear you cite their authority one more time I shall break you, Sergeant Hakeswill, I shall break you!”

  “Sir!” Hakeswill acknowledged. He doubted that McCandless, a Company officer, could break anyone in the King’s army, at least not without a deal of effort, but he did not let his skepticism show for Obadiah Hakeswill believed in showing complete subservience to all officers. “Never meant to upset you, sir,” he said, “apologize, sir. No offense meant, sir.”

  McCandless read the warrant a third time. Something about the wording worried him, but he could not quite place his concern. “It says here, Sharpe,” McCandless said, “that you struck an officer on August the fifth this year.”

  “I did what, sir?” Sharpe asked, horrified.

  “Assaulted Captain Morris. Here.” And McCandless thrust the warrant towards Sharpe. “Take it, man. Read it.”

  Sharpe took the paper and while he read Sergeant Hakeswill embellished the charge to Colonel McCandless. “An assault, sir, with a jakes pot, sir. A full one, sir. Liquids and solids, sir, both. Right on the Captain’s head, sir.”

  “And you were the only witness?” McCandless asked.

  “Me and Captain Morris, sir.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” McCandless growled.

  “Up to a court to decide, sir, begging your pardon. Your job, sir, is to deliver the prisoner to my keeping.”