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 attack 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.
Dodd’s Cobras, together with the battalion from Dupont’s compoo, began to curl about the southern flank of the trapped regiment. It should take only three or four volleys, Dodd thought, to end the business, after which his men could go in with the bayonet. Not that his men were firing volleys any longer; instead they were firing as soon as their muskets were charged and Dodd felt their excitement and sought to curb it. “Don’t waste your fire!” he shouted. “Aim low!” William Dodd had no desire to lead a charge through the stinking smoke to find an unbroken formation of vengeful Highlanders waiting with bayonets. Dodd might dislike the Scots, but he had a healthy fear of fighting them with cold steel. Thin the bastards first, he thought, batter them, bleed them, then massacre them, but his men were too excited at the prospect of imminent victory and far too much of their fire was either going high or else being wasted on the barricade of the dead. “Aim low!” he shouted again. “Aim low!”
“They won’t last,” Joubert said. Indeed the Frenchman was amazed that the Scots still survived.
“Awkward things to kill, Scotsmen,” Dodd said. He took a drink from his canteen. “I do hate the bastards. All preachers or thieves. Stealing Englishmen’s jobs. Aim low!” A man was thrown back near Dodd, blood bright on his white coat. “Joubert?” Dodd called back to the Frenchman.
“Monsieur?”
“Bring up two of the regiment’s guns. Load with canister.” That would end the bastards. Two gouts of canister from the four-pounders would blow great gaps in the Scottish square and Dodd could then lead his men into those gaps and fillet the dying regiment from its inside out. He would be damned if the cavalry would take the flags. They were his! It was Dodd who had fought these Highlanders to a standstill and Dodd who planned to carry the silk banners to Scindia’s tent and there fetch his proper reward. “Hurry, Joubert!” he called.
Dodd drew his pistol and fired over his men’s ranks into the smoke that hid the dying square. “Aim low!” he shouted. “Don’t waste your fire!” But it would not be long now. Two blasts of canister, he reckoned, and then the bayonets would bring him victory.
Major Samuel Swinton stood just behind the western face of the square which looked towards the white-coated infantry. He could hear an English voice shouting orders and encouragement in the enemy lines and, though Swinton himself was an Englishman, the accent angered him. No English bastard was going to destro
y the 74th, not while Major Swinton commanded, and he told his men that a Sassenach was their enemy and that seemed to add zest to their efforts. “Keep low!” he told them. “Keep firing!” By staying low the Scots kept behind the protection of their makeshift barricade, but it also made their muskets much more difficult to reload and some men took the risk of standing after each shot. Their only protection then was the mask of smoke that hid the regiment from its enemies. And thank God, Swinton thought, that the enemy had brought no artillery forward.
The square was swept by musket fire. Much of it, especially from the north, flew high, but the white-coated regiment was better trained and their musketry was having an effect, so much so that Swinton took the inside rank of the eastern face and added it to the west. The sergeants and corporals closed the ranks as the enemy bullets hurled men back into the bloody interior of the shrinking square where the Major stepped among the Scottish dead and wounded. Swinton’s horse had died, struck by three musket balls and put out of its misery by the Major’s own pistol. Colonel Orrock, who had first led the pickets to disaster, had also lost his horse. “It wasn’t my fault,” he kept telling Swinton, and Swinton wanted to hit the bastard every time he spoke. “I obeyed Wellesley’s orders!” Orrock insisted.
Swinton ignored the fool. Right from the beginning of the advance Swinton had sensed that the pickets were going too far to the right. Orrock’s orders had been clear enough. He was to incline right, thus making space for the two sepoy battalions to come into the line, then attack straight ahead, but the fool had led his men ever more northwards and Swinton, who had been trying to loop about the pickets to come up on their right, never had a chance to get into position. He had sent the 74th’s adjutant to speak to Orrock, pleading with the East India Company Colonel to turn ahead, but Orrock had arrogantly brushed the man off and kept marching towards Assaye.
Swinton had a choice then. He could have ignored Orrock and straightened his own attack to form the right of the line that Wellesley had taken forward, but the leading half company of Orrock’s pickets were fifty men from Swinton’s own regiment and the Major was not willing to see those fifty men sacrificed by a fool and so he had followed the pickets on their errant course in the hope that his men’s fire could rescue Orrock. It had failed. Only four of the fifty men of the half company had rejoined the regiment, the rest were dead and dying, and now the whole 74th seemed to be doomed. They were encompassed by noise and smoke, surrounded by enemies, dying in their square, but the piper was still playing and the men were still fighting and the regiment still lived, and the two flags were still lifted high though by now the fringed squares of silk were ripped and tattered by the blast of bullets.
An ensign in the color party took a musket ball in his left eye and fell backwards without a sound. A sergeant gripped the staff in one hand and in his other was a halberd with a wicked blade. In a moment, the sergeant knew, he might have to fight with the halberd. The square would end with a huddle of bloodied men around the colors and the enemy would fall on them and for a few moments it would be steel against steel, and the sergeant reckoned he would give the flag to a wounded man and do what harm he could with the heavy, long-shafted axe. It was a pity to die, but he was a soldier, and no one had yet devised a way a man could live for ever, not even those clever bastards in Edinburgh. He thought of his wife in Dundee, and of his woman in the camp at Naulniah, and he regretted his many sins for it was not good for a man to go to his God with a bad conscience, but it was too late now and so he gripped the halberd and hid his fear and determined he would die like a man and take a few other men with him.
The muskets banged into Highlanders’ shoulders. They bit the tips from new cartridges and every bite added salty gunpowder to their mouths so that they had no spittle, only bone-dry throats that breathed filthy smoke, and the regiment’s puckalees were far away, lost somewhere in the country behind. The Scots went on firing, and the powder sparks from the pan burned their cheeks, and they loaded and rammed and knelt and fired again, and somewhere beyond the smoke the enemy’s fire came flashing in to shudder the corpses of the barricade or else to snatch a man back in a spray of blood. Wounded men fought alongside the living, their faces blackened by powder, their mouths parched, their shoulders bruised, and the white facings and cuffs of their red coats were spattered with the blood of men now dead or dying.
“Close up!” the sergeants shouted and the square shrank another few feet as dying men were hauled back to the square’s center and the living closed the files. Men who had started the day five or six files apart were neighbors now.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Orrock insisted.
Swinton had nothing to say. There was nothing to say, and nothing more to do except die, and so he picked up the musket of a dead man, took the cartridge box from the corpse’s pouch, and pushed into the square’s western face. The man to his right was drunk, but Swinton did not care, for the man was fighting. “Come to do some proper work, Major?” the drunken man greeted Swinton, with a toothless grin.
“Come to do some proper work, Tam,” Swinton agreed. He bit the end from a cartridge, charged the musket, primed the lock and fired into the smoke. He reloaded, fired again, and prayed he would die bravely.
Fifty yards away William Dodd watched the cloud of smoke made by the Scottish muskets. The cloud was getting smaller, he thought. Men were dying there and the square was shrinking, but it was still spitting flame and lead. Then he heard the jingle of chains and turned to see the two four-pounder guns being hauled towards him. He would let the guns fire one blast of canister each, then he would have his men fix bayonets and he would lead them across the rampart of corpses into the heart of the smoke.
And then the trumpet called.
CHAPTER 11
Colonel McCandless had stayed close to his friend Colonel Wallace, the commander of the brigade which formed the right of Wellesley’s line. Wallace had seen the pickets and his own regiment, the 74th, vanish somewhere to the north, but he had been too busy bringing his two sepoy battalions into the attacking line to worry about Orrock or Swinton. He did charge an aide to keep watching for Orrock’s men, expecting to see them veering back towards him at any moment, then he forgot the errant pickets as his men climbed from the low ground into the fire of the Mahratta gun line. Canister shredded Wallace’s ranks, it beat like hail on his men’s muskets and it swept the leaves from the scattered trees through which the Madrassi battalions marched, but, just like the 78th, the sepoys did not turn. They walked doggedly on like men pushing into a storm, and at sixty paces Wallace halted them to pour a vengeful volley into the gunners and McCandless could hear the musket balls clanging off the painted gun barrels. Sevajee was with McCandless and he stared in awe as the sepoys reloaded and went forward again, this time carrying their bayonets to the gunners. For a moment there was chaotic slaughter as Madrassi sepoys chased Goanese gunners around limbers and guns, but Wallace was already looking ahead and could see that the vaunted enemy infantry was wavering, evidently shaken by the easy victory of the 78th, and so the Colonel shouted at his sepoys to ignore the gunners and re-form and push on to attack the infantry. It took a moment to re-form the line, then it advanced from the guns. Wallace gave the enemy infantry one volley, then charged, and all along the line the vaunted Mahratta foot fled from the sepoy attack.
McCandless was busy for the next few moments. He knew that the assault had gone nowhere near Dodd’s regiment, but nor had he expected it to, and he was anticipating riding northwards with Wallace to find the 74th, the regiment McCandless knew was nearest to his prey, but when the sepoys lost their self-control and broke ranks to pursue the beaten enemy infantry, McCandless helped the other officers round them up and herd them back. Sevajee and his horsemen stayed behind, for there was a possibility that they would be mistaken for enemy cavalry. For a moment or two there was a real danger that the scattered sepoys would be charged and slaughtered by the mass of enemy cavalry to the west, but its own fleeing infantry
was in the cavalry’s way, the 78th stood like a fortress on the left flank, and the Scottish guns were skipping balls along the cavalry’s face, and the Mahratta horsemen, after a tentative move forward, thought better of the charge. The sepoys took their ranks again, grinning because of their victory. McCandless, his small chore done, rejoined Sevajee. “So that’s how Mahrattas fight.” The Colonel could not resist the provocation.
“Mercenaries, Colonel, mercenaries,” Sevajee said, “not Mahrattas.”
Five victorious redcoat regiments now stood in ranks on the southern half of the battlefield. To the west the enemy infantry was still disordered, though officers were trying to re-form them, while to the east there was a horror of bodies and blood left on the ground across which the redcoats had advanced. The five regiments had swept through the gun line and chased away the infantry and now formed their ranks some two hundred paces west of where the Mahratta infantry had made their line so that they could look back on the trail of carnage they had caused. Riderless horses galloped through the thinning skeins of powder smoke where dogs were already gnawing at the dead and birds with monstrous black wings were flapping down to feast on corpses. Beyond the corpses, on the distant ground where the Scots and sepoys had started their advance, there were now Mahratta cavalrymen, and McCandless, gazing through his telescope, saw some of those cavalrymen harnessing British artillery that had been abandoned when its ox teams had been killed by the bombardment that had opened the battle.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress Page 68