Time to disillusion him.
‘Battalions... stand to your arms!’
The men rose, shook themselves, rapidly dressed ranks and ordered firelocks.
‘Mr Welladvice, cease firing! Pray load case - and hold your fire till the muskets open.’
The battleground fell abruptly quiet. Only the enemy drums’ rubadubbing broke the sudden silence. Todd swallowed nervously. File or platoon firing - which should it be? Both ensured, despite reloading, that continuous fire harassed the foe. File firing meant simultaneous volleys along the entire front, files shooting in succession. Alternatively whole platoons fired in turn, the volleys rolling inwards from the flanks. The latter, he decided: when firing by files the middle files’ reloading sometimes hindered the third line’s shooting.
‘Battalions will fire by platoons! Front files... kneel!’
The enemy trudged closer, extending on the right and left beyond the battalions’ wings. Variegated uniforms banded the line: standards floated high above the bayonets. They halted a hundred yards away, and levelled muskets.
Todd gritted his teeth. ‘Hold hard, brothers!’
Here was the test of discipline, the climax reached from months of merciless drilling, the iron chains which bound men in their places, kept them steady, rocklike, faces firmly fronted while death sang past their ears. Provided they stood and endured victory was theirs: if the order once was broken panic and rout were certain.
Volleys crashed in splintering stars of flame. Balls whined overhead, spurted sand, thudded in flesh and bone. Sepoys grunted and fell. Reloading behind their smoke, the line advanced within sixty yards and stopped. Todd could count the buttons on their tunics, saw eyeballs white in nutbrown faces, and clearly heard the firing orders snapping.
This was the killing distance. Get in first!
‘Present!’ he shouted. ‘Fire!’
Flame-spurts flickering up and down the lines, smoke rolled down, cleared and rolled again and curdled in blinding clouds. Priming, ramming, shooting, every file was blanketed in the smoke his piece created, his vision confined to a yard-square space, seeing nothing but his musket’s fiery flash, the white vapour which clung to his clothes. Men fanned it away from their faces, and strove to sight their targets. Barrels became too hot to hold: they grasped the stocks beneath the iron. Incessant recoil bruised shoulders black; powder from bitten cartridges, mingling with sweat, blackened mouths and chins and dribbled down on facings. The air was scorching, stank of powder, cracked and whined with the whistle of shot.
Raked by invisible volleys the sepoys fell singly and in groups. Todd cantered behind the ranks, bawling encouragement, ordering serrefiles to fill the bloodied gaps. Six-pounders roared and kicked and buried trails deep in the sand. Welladvice ran from gun to gun, ordered ammunition numbers to dig away the sand which, preventing free recoil, jumped a barrel from the trunnions and left five guns in action, served by diminishing crews.
A protracted close-range fire fight could not last indefinitely; one side or the other had either to give or close. Every man, Todd reckoned, had fired a hundred rounds, and the volleys were growing ragged as tired or wounded sepoys failed to reload in time. He stood in his stirrups and tried to look over the smoke, swore aloud as a ball ripped his epaulette and numbed his shoulder. The ensign heard the enemy’s fire slackening, the waning whirr of bullets and his men no longer falling.
He galloped to a flank.
The Maratha battalions were backing away, long wavering shot-rent lines retreating step by step from bodies heaped in rows. The pace quickened, soldiers turned and ran, forcing through the close-packed files behind. Formations began to disintegrate, whipped by musket balls and case that remorselessly riddled their ranks. The space between the armies widened until volleys pattered harmlessly in sand. The Marathas lugged light guns to the front, and opened sporadic fire.
‘Battalions, cease firing,’ Todd commanded. ‘Roundshot salvoes, Mr Welladvice, if you please.’
Officers dressed the ranks, closing in on the centre to plug the hideous gaps; the length of the line contracted by eighty yards. Tongues and gullets powder-gritted, parched with thirst, sepoys begged a sip from spongemen’s buckets-, from waterskins hooked on limbers - pleas that were brusquely refused, for without the wet-sponge ramming no cartridge could safely be loaded.
The enemy had given ground; were they so demoralized Todd could launch a bayonet charge? A third of his men were wounded or dead; he needed fresh troops to support an attack.
Where was Amaury?
Amaury dropped the gallopers’ trails a half mile from the levies who advanced to help. Kohlabad’s stormers, and opened fire. When the sepoys overtook them the cannon limbered up, galloped on, unlimbered into action a musket shot ahead, and waited again for the companies’ arrival. So, in successive bounds, he brought his force within firelock range.
The Marathas reacted slowly to his movements. Their objective was Kohlabad, where stormers thronged the ladders they had planted against the walls. Najibs immediately hurled them down, and fired at point blank range into the masses swarming below. The throng that followed up was curiously insensitive to Amaury’s diversion, and simply carved a wider arc in a bid to escape beyond gun range.
Amaury, annoyed, closed to a hundred yards and opened rapid fire, ball and case.
This fused a quick response. A cohort of Pathans bounded to the front, discharged a scattered matchlock volley, dropped the one-shot weapons, unscabbarded swords and charged. One berserker reached the guns; a gunner flailed his spongestaff, cracked his skull. The gallopers’ point-blank salvoes killed his friends in droves.
Amaury’s thrust, directed at the crescent’s centre, dented the horn as a knife-point stretches rubber. The Pathans’ dispersal snapped it. His front was void of all but fleeing stragglers; on the right raged Kohlabad’s storming; to the left the irregulars’ main guard circled in orderless bands. Quickly he limbered up - in this dangerous situation, an enemy hard on either flank, gun and wagon teams stayed close behind the guns - and moved further into the gap. A compact column, two hundred yards in length by fifty broad, drove like a wedge in the broken horn. Amaury meant to wheel left and rout the irregulars’ main guard; then turn about and fall upon the stormers.
The boom of heavy artillery altered his intention.
Shielded from view by the irregulars’ array two elephant-drawn twenty-fours had rumbled into action to support the escalade. Long gouts of flame lanced the smoke mushrooming from their muzzles. Ponderous iron balls thumped home, the walls shed plaster and brick in chunks, merlons on the battlements dissolved in dusty clouds.
Amaury scratched the blood crust on his cheek. Najibs, though staunch behind walls, would not for long withstand a pounding by heavy guns. Kohlabad was in danger: the cannon must be destroyed.
The redoubt remained inactive since the Maratha cavalry’s flight except for two six-pounders hurling harassing long-range shot at the flanks of the town’s attackers. Amaury scribbled a message, called a trooper, looked at the redoubt again and crumpled the paper up. Wrangham had foreseen the action he wanted. Sky-blue uniforms filed from the abattis’ entrance and formed in company columns; bullock teams dragged out guns. The general had a half-mile march before he could strike the besiegers; meanwhile the twenty-four pounders must be silenced, and the levies’ shaken main guard finally routed.
‘Subhadar sahib, wheel companies left into line. Da Souza, detach a six-pounder under my hand; place the others at close-gun intervals between the centre companies. Half the cavalry behind you, half with me.’ He pointed to the irregulars who flooded and ebbed alternately as leaders urged them onwards and cravens held them back. ‘There is your enemy. Advance and halt and fire, beat the rascals back and charge. I don’t want to see them again!’
Amaury led his twenty troopers, the single gun and wagon team perilously near the welter round the walls, swinging round the fringes as he hunted a position to enfilade the siege guns. He found a li
ttle hillock, a pimple on the plain, the twenty-fours four hundred yards away.
‘Action front!’
The detachment unlimbered, loaded, fired. The balls fell short and wide. ‘Elevate! Trail left!’ Amaury called urgently. A levy of Mewaris, attracted by the banging at their backs, turned about and ran towards the gun. Again the cannon fired; the roundshot fountained dust and bounded high above the target. Amaury dismounted, flung Hannibal’s reins to a trooper, knelt on the trail and sighted. ‘Wheels uneven!’ he snapped. ‘The shot are flinging left, towards the lower wheel! Advance trail - quick!’ Gunners manhandled spokes and shoved the cannon forward. Amaury heard Mewari war-cries howling ever closer. ‘Attack!’ he told the Rahtors. ‘Hold them back!’ The troop formed line and charged. He squinted along the barrel, turned the screw. ‘Trail, right...steady! Advance portfire!’
He followed the roundshot’s flight in the air and saw it shatter a siege gun’s wheel, canting the barrel aslant. ‘One gone,’ he panted. ‘Load! Load!’ Sponging, cartridge rammed, and ball; the detachment ran up the gun. In a concentrated frenzy Amaury layed; portfire touched vent. He stood to observe the shot. An oxhide buckler crashed his shoulder and hurled him flat on his face.
With the courage of desperation twenty-odd Mewaris had broken through and around the Rahtor charge. Amaury crawled beneath the trail and tugged his sabre. The ventsman, spouting blood, fell across his legs. A blade came searching, probing, reaching for his throat. He released his half drawn sword, groped in his sash for a pistol. The blade plunged deep in his shoulder.
A pistol cracked. The hand on the hilt splayed open, the swordsman moaned and died. Hooves scraped dust in Amaury’s eyes. He grasped the steel and jerked it out, rolled weakly against a wheel. A pistol banged again. Hoof beats thudded round the gun. Dazedly he rubbed away the blinding grit.
Anstruther dropped the empty pistol, whipped sabre from scabbard, leaned from the saddle and sliced an arm at the shoulder, swung his horse and cleft a skull to the teeth. Gunners ran from the wagon, dirks in hand. The Mewaris fled to the broken band the Rahtor charge had scattered.
Amaury crawled from the gun. ‘Trail left,’ he croaked. ‘Shoot case and keep ’em running!’ Caroline knelt beside him. Her face was white, burnt powder smeared her cheek. Amaury tried to rise. ‘Lie still!’ She opened his coat, ripped the bloodsoaked shirt and bared the thrust in his shoulder. Tearing off her cravat she plugged and bound the wound while the gun detachment’s survivors loaded and fired around her. The swirling smoke stung Amaury’s eyes; her countenance swam in his vision like a disembodied wraith.
‘I will find you a litter!’
‘Stuff!’ Amaury smiled weakly. ‘Arrant disobedience once again - but I cannot bring myself to reprimand you. Pray help me up.’
Caroline’s arm about his waist, he climbed unsteadily to his feet. Anstruther gentled his horse, which shied from the banging gun. ‘ ‘Tis all prodigiously alarming,’ he observed, distastefully regarding his dripping sabre, ‘and bloodshed gives me the gripes. I collect, sir,’ he added glumly, ‘for this third dereliction I must face a firing squad!’
‘No, Richard. I am persuaded St Michael and all his angels could not control Miss Wrangham!’ Blearily he surveyed the battle. The twenty-fours were silent: his shot had disabled the second gun. Wrangham’s force engaged the stormers, volley following volley, salvo after salvo. The levies recoiled from the walls and retreated across the plain. Amaury’s ‘mass of manoeuvre’, advancing steadily in line, hustled the railed irregulars into panic-stricken rout.
‘The horns are broken and beat.’ Amaury looked at the sand ridge cresting the horizon. ‘Does Henry still hold on?’
Todd had seen the vanquished cavalry flying past his flank; the levies far on his right now rolled backwards in defeat. On his front the regulars unevenly retreated. Among the ruffled ranks an ornately spangled elephant lumbered to and fro; a figure in the gilded howdah gesticulated frantically. The formations he addressed showed definite signs of rallying; men resumed their broken lines and checked the rearward slide. Vithujee himself, Todd thought, trying to muster his battalions.
‘Mr Welladvice,’ he said, ‘oblige me by knocking that fellow down!’
Welladvice, smoke-blackened from head to foot, bleeding at the neck where a musket ball had grazed, skipped among his guns like a devil escaped from hell. A shot from the second salvo hit the wretched elephant. The grey bulk sank like a foundering ship and crushed the howdah beneath its weight.
The infantry around it recoiled from the falling beast. A cry went up: ‘Prince Vithujee is dead!’ Even before Welladvice reloaded and layed his guns the Bhonsla’s proud battalions split in pieces, burst into flying wedges which collided and broke asunder as they beat upon each other’s backs and hammered a way to the rear like mad stampeding cattle.
Todd had chanced upon a notorious weakness common to native armies - dependence over the ages on the leader’s visible presence. Repeatedly when the general fell - or merely disappeared from view - his troops disintegrated in quick uncontrollable panic. Todd hardly believed his eyes. Relief like a healing balm flooded his tired limbs. Lifting sword on high he cantered along the line.
‘Rest your firelocks! Forward! Mr Welladvice, limber up and follow!’
The remnants of the Jat battalions plodded down the slope.
Half an hour’s marching brought Todd to the Maratha camp. His advance was never hindered - the enemy had gone beyond sight. Their wounded were forsaken, moaning in a symphony of pain, cringing from the bayonets, begging helplessly for water. Guns hastily abandoned stood unspiked, bullock teams waited patiently in harness, jettisoned firelocks littered the ground.
The camp was deserted. Todd halted his men at the margin, discovered a well and quenched the sepoys’ raging thirst, and sent patrols to search the canvas city. They found shot-torn men so badly hurt they could not move, a few women and small children cowering in tents. Beasts of burden wandered unattended, carts and wagons rested on their shafts, the tents still stood in rows. Cooking pots simmered on fires; flies buzzed round the sweetmeats, fruit and spices which loaded stalls in the camp buzar.
Soldiers, sices, cooks and barbers, drovers, servants, clerks and coolies - all had gone in panic, streaming across the countryside for haven in far Nagpur.
He posted guards, went to the huge pavilion which towered like a cathedral in the centre and wandered around the resplendent recesses of Vithujee’s mobile palace. Gold-embroidered tapestries hid all the canvas walls, magnificent Persian carpets covered the grassy floor. Diamonds, pearls and rubies studded gold and silver effigies which flanked the doors. A throne, gold- plated, gem encrusted, glittered beneath a velvet canopy tasselled by golden bells. Silver platters, bowls and ewers, brooches, necklaces and clothing sprinkled the ground in a brilliant jetsam spilt by a fear-crazed flight. Todd kicked open an iron-strapped coffer, and gaped at the jewels, pagodas and mohurs cascading on the carpet.
The ensign heard a commotion, accoutrements clashing and thudding hooves. Guiltily he slipped an emerald bracelet in his pocket, went out, saluted Amaury and blenched at his bloodied appearance.
‘The enemy, Hugo, has gone. Their camp is ours for the looting.’
Amaury dismounted, and clung to the saddle peak. The ground heaved like a turbulent sea beneath his feet. ‘Pursue!’ he said feverishly. ‘Chase until we drop!’
Todd surveyed the Rahtors behind him, drooping on listless horses, the smoke-blacked, dust-grimed sepoys and battle-exhausted gun teams. ‘We have fought for seven hours, Hugo,’ he said quietly. ‘Our men are done. I doubt they could catch a donkey hopping lame!’
Amaury swayed. Todd stepped forward quickly, Caroline slipped from the saddle. Together they guided his tottering steps to a couch inside the pavilion and laid him gently on silk- embroidered cushions.
‘Fetch water, Henry, bandages and basins. Run!’
Amaury tried to rise. ‘We must pursue, otherwise our victory is squandered. Fre
sh troops . . . Wrangham’s men, the najibs . . . send a galloper … ‘
Caroline pushed him down. ‘Be quiet, Hugo.’ Todd brought a brimming basin; she dipped a cloth and carefully washed his scalp, cleansing the blood that clotted the hanging flap. ‘Cut away his breeches, Henry, uncover the wound on his thigh.’
Welladvice came running, a flask in either hand. ‘Here y’are, sir - I found a likker store. Arrack or brandy: take yer pick!’
Todd half-filled a goblet and held it to Amaury’s lips. ‘Not too much, Henry,’ said Caroline severely. ‘I think he has a fever.’ Welladvice clicked his tongue. ‘Sink him a sailor’s tot, ma’am: nothin’ like the booze ter send a fever packin’. Couldn’t find no rum, more’s the pity - that’d bring the cap’n into wind faster’n a tiller hard a’larboard!’ He tilted a flask; arrack gurgled in his throat like storm-rain down a drainpipe.
Jat and Rahtor officers crowded the pavilion, distress on their faces, summoned by the rumour of Amaury’s mortal hurt. Vedvyas shouldered through and knelt beside the couch. His rugged face was working, tears stood in the fierce dark eyes. ‘Umree Sahib . . .’ He bowed his head, and lifted Amaury’s hand to his cheek.
‘Send them away, Henry,’ Caroline said. Her fingers flitted, bathing and binding. ‘You may promise he will recover. Hugo has lost a deal of blood, but is not,’ she added briskly, ‘anywhere near death.’
Todd urged the officers out. Amaury opened his eyes. ‘In that event... pray permit me ... write a message ... mount a chase ...’ He looked at his legs. ‘God’s death, woman,’ he whispered, ‘you strip me naked!’
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