Someone had blundered.
The left flank of William Dodd’s regiment lay just a hundred paces from the mud walls of Assaye where the twenty guns which defended the village gave that flank an added measure of safety. In front of the Cobras were another six guns, two of them the long-barreled eighteen-pounders that had bombarded the ford, while Dodd’s own small battery of four-pounder guns was bunched in the small gap between his men’s right flank and the neighboring regiment. Pohlmann had chosen to array his guns in front of the infantry, but Dodd expected the British to attack in line and a gun firing straight towards an oncoming line could do much less damage than a gun firing obliquely down the line’s length, and so he had placed his cannon wide on the flank where they could work the most havoc.
It was not a bad position, Dodd reckoned. In front of his line were two hundred yards of open killing ground after which the land fell into a steepish gully that angled away eastwards. An enemy could approach in the gully, but to reach Dodd’s men they would have to climb onto the flat farmland and there be slaughtered. A cactus-thorn hedge ran across the killing ground, and that would give the enemy some cover, but there were wide gaps in the thorns. If Dodd had been given time he would have sent men to cut down the whole hedge, but the necessary axes were back with the baggage a mile away. Dodd, naturally, blamed Joubert for the missing tools. “Why are they not here, Monsewer?” he had demanded.
“I did not think. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! Sorry don’t win battles, Monsewer.”
“I shall send for the axes,” Joubert said.
“Not now,” Dodd said. He did not want to send any men back to the baggage camp, for their loss would momentarily weaken his regiment and he expected to be attacked at any moment. He looked forward to that moment, for the enemy would need to expose himself to a withering fire, and Dodd kept standing in his stirrups to search for any sign of an approaching enemy. There were some British and Company cavalry far off to the east, but those horsemen were staying well out of range of the Mahratta guns. Other enemies must have been within the range of Pohlmann’s guns, for Dodd could hear them firing and see the billowing clouds of gray-white smoke pumped out by each shot, but that cannonade was well to his south and it did not spread down the line towards him and it slowly dawned on Dodd that Wellesley was deliberately avoiding Assaye. “God damn him!” he shouted aloud.
“Monsieur?” Captain Joubert asked resignedly, expecting another reprimand.
“We’re going to be left out,” Dodd complained.
Captain Joubert thought that was probably a blessing. The Captain had been saving his meager salary in the hope of retiring to Lyons, and if General Wellesley chose to ignore Captain Joubert then Captain Joubert was entirely happy. And the longer he stayed in India, the more attractive he found Lyons. And Simone would be better off in France, he thought, for the heat of India was not good for her. It had made her restless, and inactivity gave her time to brood and no good ever came from a thinking woman. If Simone was in France she would be kept busy. There would be meals to cook, clothes to mend, a garden to tend, even children to raise. Those things were women’s work, in Joubert’s opinion, and the sooner he could take his Simone away from India’s languorous temptations the better.
Dodd stood in his stirrups again to stare southwards through his cheap glass. “The 78th,” he grunted.
“Monsieur?” Joubert was startled from his happy reverie about a house near Lyons where his mother could help Simone raise a busy little herd of children.
“The 78th,” Dodd said again, and Joubert stood in his stirrups to gaze at the distant sight of the Scottish regiment emerging from low ground to advance against the Mahratta line. “And no support for them?” Dodd asked, puzzled, and he had begun to think that Boy Wellesley had blundered very badly, but just then he saw the sepoys coming from the valley. The attacking line looked very thin and frail, and he could see men being snatched backwards by the artillery fire. “Why won’t they come here?” he asked petulantly.
“They are, Monsieur,” Joubert answered, and pointed eastwards.
Dodd turned and stared. “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” he said softly. “The fools!” For the enemy was not just coming towards Dodd’s position, but approaching in a column of half companies. The enemy infantry had suddenly appeared at the upper edge of the gully, but on Dodd’s side of that obstacle, and it was clear that the redcoats must have wandered far out of their position for they were a long way from the rest of the attacking British infantry. Better still, they had not deployed into line. Their commander must have decided that they would make better progress if they advanced in column and doubtless he planned to deploy into line when he launched his attack, but the men showed no sign of deploying yet.
Dodd aimed his telescope and was momentarily puzzled. The leading half company were King’s troops in red jackets, black shakoes and white trousers, while the forty or fifty men of the half company behind were in kilts, but the other five half companies were all sepoys of the East India Company. “It’s the pickets of the day,” he said, suddenly understanding the strange formation. He heard a shout as a gun captain ordered his cannon to be levered around to take aim at the approaching men, and he hurriedly shouted to his gunners to hold their fire. “No one’s to fire yet, Joubert,” Dodd ordered, then he spurred his horse northwards to the village.
The infantry and gunners defending the village of Assaye were not under Dodd’s command, but he issued them orders anyway. “You’re to hold your fire,” he snapped at them, “hold your fire. Wait! Wait!” Some of the Goanese gunners spoke a little English, and they understood him and passed the order on. The Rajah’s infantry, on the mud walls above the guns, were not so quick and some of those men opened fire on the distant redcoats, but their muskets were far outranged and Dodd ignored them. “You fire when we fire, understand?” he shouted at the gunners, and some of them understood what he was doing, and they grinned approval of his cunning.
He spurred back to the Cobras. A second British formation had appeared a hundred paces behind the pickets. This second unit was a complete battalion of redcoats advancing in line and, because marching an extended line across country was inevitably slower than advancing in a column of half companies, they had fallen behind the pickets who, in sublime disregard of Assaye’s waiting defenders, continued their progress towards the cactus hedge. It seemed to be an isolated attack, far from the clamor in the south that Dodd now ignored. God had given Dodd a chance of victory and he felt the excitement rise in him. It was bliss, pure bliss. He could not lose. He drew the elephant-hilted sword and, as if to give thanks, kissed the steel blade.
The leading half company of pickets 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, which 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 pickets’ 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 pickets 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 maneuver through the hedge, and he was concerned solely with the three or four hundred men of the pickets 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 emplaced artillery. “Thank you, Lord,” he prayed. The pickets, 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 pickets 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 pickets 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 pickets. 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 gully. “Fire!” he shouted, and his men’s volley seemed to push the redcoats even further back. “Reload!”
Ramrods rattled in barrels, dogheads 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 center. 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 pennanted 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 could 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 colors! 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 pickets were among the Scots, who were now caught in a terrible dilemma. By staying in square they would keep themselves safe from any a
ttack 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 center. 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 colors before the infantry.
Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803 Page 31