Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

'We will, sir,' Sharpe said.

  'Maybe.' The Colonel smiled at Sharpe's serene confidence. 'But the Tippoo might decide to kill us first.' McCandless fell silent for a while, then shook his head. 'I wish I understood the Tippoo.'

  'Nothing to understand, sir. He's just an evil bastard, sir.'

  'No, he's not that,' the Colonel said severely. 'He's actually rather a good ruler. Better, I suspect, than most of our Christian monarchs. He's certainly been good for Mysore. He's fetched it a deal of wealth, given it more justice than most countries enjoy in India and he's been tolerant to most religions, though I fear he did persecute some unfortunate Christians.' The Colonel grimaced as a shudder racked his body. 'He's even kept the Rajah and his family alive, not in comfort, but alive, and that's more than most monarchs would ever do. Most usurpers kill their country's old ruler, but not here. I can't forgive him for what he did to those poor prisoners of ours, of course, but I suppose some capricious cruelty is probably necessary in a ruler. All in all, I think, and judging him by the standards of our own monarchy, we should have to give the Tippoo fairly high marks.'

  'So why the hell are we fighting him, sir?'

  McCandless smiled. 'Because we want to be here, and he doesn't want us to be here. Two dogs in a small cage, Sharpe. And if he beats us out of Mysore he'll bring in the French to chase us out of the rest of India and then we can bid farewell to the best part of our eastern trade. That's what it's about, Sharpe, trade. That's why you're fighting here, trade.'

  Sharpe grimaced. 'It seems a funny thing to be fighting about, sir.'

  'Does it?' McCandless seemed surprised. 'Not to me, Sharpe. Without trade there's no wealth, and without wealth there's no society worth having. Without trade, Private Sharpe, we'd be nothing but beasts in the mud. Trade is indeed worth fighting for, though the good Lord knows we don't appreciate trade much. We celebrate kings, we honour great men, we admire aristocrats, we applaud actors, we shower gold on portrait painters and we even, sometimes, reward soldiers, but we always despise merchants. But why? It's the merchant's wealth that drives the mills, Sharpe; it moves the looms, it keeps the hammers falling, it fills the fleets, it makes the roads, it forges the iron, it grows the wheat, it bakes the bread and it builds the churches and the cottages and the palaces. Without God and trade we would be nothing.'

  Sharpe laughed softly. 'Trade never did 'owt for me, sir.'

  'Did it not?' McCandless asked gently. The Colonel smiled. 'So what do you think is worth fighting for, Private?'

  'Friends, sir. And pride. We have to show that we're better bastards than the other side.'

  'You don't fight for King or country?'

  'I've never met the King, sir. Never even seen him.'

  'He's not much to look at, but he's a decent enough man when he's not mad.' McCandless stared across at Hakeswill. 'Is he mad?'

  'I think so, sir.'

  'Poor soul.'

  'He's evil, too,' Sharpe said, speaking too softly for Hakeswill to hear him. 'Takes a joy, sir, in having men punished. He thieves, he lies, he rapes, he murders.'

  'And you've done none of those things?'

  'Never raped, sir, and as for the others, only when I had to.'

  'Then I pray God you'll never have to again,' McCandless said fervently, and with that he leaned his grey head against the wall and tried to sleep.

  Sharpe watched the dawn light seep into the dungeon pit. The last bats of the night wheeled in the patch of sky above, but soon they were gone and the first gun of the day spoke. It was clearing its throat, as the gunners liked to say, for the city and its besiegers were waking and the fight would go on.

  The opening shot of the day was aimed at the low mud wall that plugged the gap in the glacis and kept the water dammed in the ditch behind. The wall was thick and the shot, which fell low and so lost much of its force as it ricocheted up from the riverbank, did little more than shiver dust from the wall's crevices.

  One by one the other siege guns woke and had their throats blasted clear. The first few shots were often lackadaisical as the gun barrels were still cool and thus caused the balls to fly low. A handful of guns answered the fire from the city walls, but none of them was large. The Tippoo was hiding his big guns for the assault, but he permitted his gunners to mount and fire their small cannon, some of which discharged a ball no bigger than a grapeshot. The defenders' fire did no damage, but even the sound of their guns gave the citizens a feeling that they were fighting back.

  This morning the British guns seemed erratic. Every battery was at work, but their fire was uncoordinated. Some aimed at the wall in the glacis while others targeted the higher ramparts, but an hour after dawn they all fell silent and, a moment later, the Tippoo's gunners also ceased firing. Colonel Gudin, staring through a spyglass from the western ramparts, distinctly saw the sepoy gunners in one breaching battery heaving at the trail of their piece. Gudin reckoned that the big guns were at last being carefully aligned on the section of wall that had been chosen for the breach. The guns were hot now, they would fire true, and soon they would concentrate a dreadful intensity of iron against the chosen spot in the city's defences. With his spyglass he could see men straining at the gun, but he could not see the gun itself for the embrasure had been momentarily stopped up with wicker baskets filled with earth. Gudin prayed that the British would take the Tippoo's bait and aim their pieces at the weakest section of the wall.

  He trained his glass on the nearest battery which was scarce four hundred yards from the vulnerable section of wall. The gunners were stripped to the waist, and no wonder, for the temperature would soon be well over ninety degrees and the humidity was already stifling and these men had to handle enormous weights of gun and shot. An eighteen-pounder siege gun weighed close to twelve tons, and all that mass of hot metal was hurled back with each shot and the gun then had to be manhandled back into its firing position. The shot of such a gun measured a little over five inches across, and each gun could fire perhaps one such ball every two minutes and the Tippoo's spies had reported that General Harris now had thirty-seven of these heavy guns, and two more cannon, even heavier, that each fired a twenty-four-pound missile. Gudin, waiting for the gunfire to start again, made a simple computation in his head. Each minute, he reckoned, about three hundred and fifty pounds of iron, travelling at unimaginably high velocities, would hammer into the city wall. And to that hefty weight of metal the British could add a score of howitzers and several dozen twelve-pounders that would be used to bombard the walls either side of the place General Harris had chosen to make his breach.

  Gudin knew that the serious business of making the breach was about to begin and he almost held his breath as he waited for the first shot, for that opening gun would tell him whether or not the Tippoo's gamble had succeeded. The waiting seemed to stretch for ever, but at last one of the batteries unmasked a gun and the great brute belched a jet of smoke fifty yards in front of its embrasure. The sound came a half-second later, but Gudin had already seen the shot fall.

  The British had swallowed the bait. They were coming straight for the trap.

  The rest of the breaching guns now opened fire. For a moment a rumbling thunder filled the sky that was flapping with the wings of startled birds. The shots seared over the dry land, across the river and slammed into the brief curtain wall that joined the sections of glacis. The wall lasted less than ten minutes before an eighteen-pounder shot pierced through it and suddenly the water of the inner ditch was gushing out into the South Cauvery. For a few seconds the water was a clear, thin spurt arcing out to the river, then the force of the flow abraded the remaining mud and the wall collapsed so that a murky flood washed irresistibly down the riverbank.

  The guns scarcely paused, only now they raised their aim very slightly so that the balls could strike against the base of the outer rampart which had been completely unmasked by the collapse of the glacis's brief connecting wall. Shot after shot slammed home, their impacts reverberating down the whole length of the
ancient battlements, and each shot punched out a handful of mud bricks. The water from the punctured ditch kept flowing out, and the shots kept slamming home as the gunners sweated and hauled and spiked and sponged out and rammed and fired again.

  All day long they fired, and all day long the old wall crumbled. The shots were kept low, aimed to strike at the foot of the wall so that the bricks above would collapse to make a ramp of rubble that would lead up and through the gap that the guns were making.

  By nightfall the wall still stood, but at its base there was a crumbling, dusty cavern that had been carved deep into the rampart. A few British guns fired in the night, mostly scattering canister or grapeshot in an attempt to stop the Tippoo's men from repairing the cavern, but in the dark it was difficult to keep the guns aimed true and most of the shots went wild, and in the morning the British gunners pointed their telescopes and saw that the cavern had been plugged with earth-filled wicker gabions and baulks of timber. The first few shots made short shrift of those repairs, scattering the timber and soil in huge gouts as the balls bit home, and once the cavern was re-exposed the gunners went to work on it. The land between the aqueduct and the river became shrouded with a mist of powder smoke as the artillery poured in their fire until, at midday, a cheer from the British lines marked the wall's collapse.

  It crumpled slowly, jetting a cloud of dust into the air, a cloud so thick that at first no man could see the extent of the damage, but as the small wind cleared the smoke away from the guns and the dust from the wall they could see that a breach had been made. The lime-washed wall now had a gap twenty yards wide, and the gap was filled with a mound of rubble up which a man could climb so long as he was unencumbered by anything other than a musket, a bayonet and his cartridge box. That made the breach practicable.

  Yet still the guns fired. Now the gunners were trying to flatten the slope of the breach and some of their shots ricocheted up to the inner wall and for a time Gudin feared that the British were planning to blast a passage clean through that new inner rampart, but then the gunners lowered their aim to keep their balls hammering at the newly-made breach or else to gnaw at the shoulders of the outer wall's gap.

  A half-mile away from Gudin, in the British lines, General Harris and General Baird stared at the breach through their telescopes. Now, for the first time, they could inspect a short stretch of the new inner wall. 'It isn't as high as I feared,' Harris commented.

  'Let's pray it's unfinished,' Baird growled.

  'But still I think it's better to ignore it,' Harris decreed. 'Capture the outer wall first.'

  Baird turned to stare at some clouds that lay heavy and low on the western horizon. He feared the clouds presaged rain. 'We could go tonight, sir,' he suggested. Baird was remembering the forty-four months he had endured in the Tippoo's dungeons, some of them spent chained to the wall of his cell, and he wanted revenge. He was also eager to get the bloody business of storming the city done.

  Harris collapsed his glass. 'Tomorrow,' he said firmly, and scratched beneath the edge of his wig. 'We risk more by rushing things. We'll do it properly, and we'll do it tomorrow.'

  That night a handful of British officers crept out from the leading trenches with small white cotton flags attached to bamboo poles. The sky was laced with a tracery of thin clouds that intermittently hid the waning moon, and in the cloud shadows the officers explored the South Cauvery to find the river's treacherous deep pools. They marked the shallows with their flags and so pointed the path towards the breach.

  And all through that night the assault troops filed down the long trenches. Harris was determined that his assault would be overwhelming. He would not tickle the city, he told Baird, but swamp it with men, and so Baird would lead two columns of troops, half of them British and half sepoys, but nearly all of them prime men from the army's elite flanking companies. The six thousand attackers would either be grenadiers, who were the biggest and strongest men, or else from the light companies who were the quickest and cleverest soldiers, and those picked men would be accompanied by a detachment of Hyderabad's finest warriors. The attackers would also be accompanied by engineers carrying fascines to fill in any ditches that the defenders might have dug on the breach's summit and bamboo ladders to scale the edges of the breach. Volunteer gunners would follow the leading troops up onto the ramparts and there turn the Tippoo's own cannon against the defenders on the inner wall. Two Forlorn Hopes would go ahead of the columns, each Hope composed solely of volunteers and each led by a sergeant who would be made an officer if he survived. Both the Forlorn Hopes would carry the British colours into the breach, and those colour-bearers would be the very first men to climb into the enemy's guns. Once on the breach the Forlorn Hopes were ordered not to go on into the space between the walls, but to climb the broken stumps of the shoulders either side of the breach's ramp and from there lead the fight north and south around the whole ring of Seringapatam's ramparts.

  'God knows,' Harris said that night at supper, 'but I can think of nothing left undone. Can you, Baird?'

  'No, sir, I can't,' Baird said. 'Upon my soul, I can't.' He was trying to sound cheerful, but it was still a subdued meal, though Harris had done his best to make it festive. His table was spread with a linen cloth and was lit by fine spermaceti candles that burned with a pure white light. The General's cooks had killed their last chickens to provide a change from the usual half-ration of beef, but none of the officers round the table had much appetite, nor, it seemed, any enthusiasm for conversation. Meer Allum, the commander of the Hyderabad army, did his best to encourage his allies, but only Wellesley seemed capable of responding to his remarks.

  Colonel Gent, who as well as being Harris's chief engineer, had taken on himself the collation of what intelligence came out of the city, poured himself some wine. It was rancid stuff, soured by its long journey from Europe and by the heat of India. 'There's a rumour,' he said heavily when a break in the desultory conversation had stretched for too long, 'that the heathen bastards have planted a mine.'

  'There are always such rumours,' Baird said curtly.

  'A bit late to tell us, surely?' Harris remonstrated mildly.

  'Only heard of it today, sir,' Gent said defensively. 'One of their cavalry fellows deserted. He could be making up tales, [missing text].'

  [Missing text] would regard the appointment as a slight, yet in truth Baird's hatred of all things Indian disqualified him from such a post. Britain needed a friendly Mysore, and Wellesley was a tactful man who harboured no prejudice against natives. 'Good of you, Wellesley,' Harris said when the toast had been drunk. 'Very good of you, I'm sure.'

  'This time tomorrow,' Meer Allum said in his odd English accent, 'we shall all dine in the Tippoo's palace. Drink from his silver and eat from his gold.'

  'I pray that we do,' Harris said, 'and I pray we manage it without grievous loss.' He scratched his old wound beneath his wig.

  The officers were still sombre when the meal ended. Harris bade them a good night, then stood for a while outside his tent staring at the moon-glossed walls of the distant city. The lime-washed ramparts seemed to glow white, beckoning him, but to what? He went to his bed where he slept badly and, in his waking moments, found himself rehearsing excuses for failure. Baird also stayed awake for a while, but drank a good measure of whisky and, afterwards, in full uniform and with his big claymore propped beside his cot, he slipped in and out of a restless sleep. Wellesley slept well. The men crammed in the trenches hardly slept at all.

  Bugles greeted the dawn. The storm clouds had thickened in the west, but there was no rain, and the rising sun soon burned the small wispy clouds from above the city. The assaulting troops crouched in the trenches where they could not be seen from Seringapatam's walls. The small white flags fluttered in the river. The siege guns kept firing, some attempting to open the breach wider, but most just trying to discourage the defenders from making any attempt to repair the breach or place obstacles on its forward slope. The undamaged ramparts gleamed
white in the sun, while the breach appeared as a red-brown scar in the long city wall.

  The Tippoo had spent the night in a small sentry shelter on the north walls. He woke early for he expected an attack at dawn and he had ordered that all his soldiers should be ready on the walls, but no assault came and, as the sun climbed higher, he allowed some of the defenders back to their barracks to rest while he himself went to the Inner Palace. He sensed a nervous expectancy in the crowded streets, and he himself was a troubled man for during his restless night he had dreamed of monkeys, and monkeys were ever a bad omen, and the Tippoo's mood was not helped when his diviners reported that the oil in their pots had been clouded. Today, it seemed, was an inauspicious day, but luck, as the Tippoo knew, was malleable and he attempted to change the day's ill-starred beginning by giving gifts. He summoned a Hindu priest and presented the man with an elephant, a sack of oilseed and a purse of gold. To the Brahmins who accompanied the priest he gave a bullock, a nanny goat, two buffalo, a black hat, a black coat and one of his precious pots of divining oil. Then he washed his hands and donned a cloth-padded war helmet that had been dipped in a sacred fountain to make its wearer invulnerable. On his right arm, his sword arm, he wore a silver amulet inscribed with verses from the Koran. A servant pinned the great red ruby onto the helmet's plume, the Tippoo slung the gold-hilted sword at his waist, then went back to the western walls.

  Nothing had changed. Beyond the gently flowing South Cauvery the sun baked the ground where the British guns still fired. Their massive round shots churned up the rubble ramp, but no redcoats stirred from their trenches and the only signs that an assault might be imminent were the small pennants stuck in the riverbed.

  'They want another day to widen the breach,' an officer opined.

  Colonel Gudin shook his head. 'They'll come today,' he insisted.

  The Tippoo grunted. He was standing just north of the breach from where he watched the enemy trenches through a spyglass. Some of the British round shot struck dangerously close to where he stood, and his aides tried to persuade him to move to a safer place, but even when a stone shard thrown up by a cannonball flicked at his white linen tunic, he would not move. 'They would have come at dawn,' he finally said, 'if they were coming today.'