Sharpe's Triumph

by Bernard Cornwell

  Hakeswill laughed.

  "Got you, didn't I? You thought I was putting a goalie in your belly!

  But that's what you do to McCandless. A goo he in his belly or in his brain or in any other part what kills him. And you do it tomorrow."

  The six men looked dubious, and Hakeswill grinned.

  "Extra shares for you all if it happens, boys, extra shares. You'll be paying the officers' whores when you get home, and all it will take is one goo he He smiled wolfishly.

  "Tomorrow, boys, tomorrow."

  But across the river, where the blue-coated patrol of the igth Dragoons was exploring the countryside south of the Kaitna, everything was changing.

  Wellesley had dismounted, stripped off his jacket and was washing his face from a basin of water held on a tripod. Lieutenant Colonel Orrock, the Company officer who commanded the picquets that day, was complaining about the two galloper guns that were supposedly attached to his small command.

  "They wouldn't keep up, sir. Laggards, sir. I found myself four hundred yards ahead of them! Four hundred yards!"

  "I asked you to set a brisk pace, Orrock," the General said, wishing the fool would go away. He reached for a towel and vigorously scrubbed his face dry.

  "But if we'd been challenged!" Orrock protested.

  "Gallopers can move briskly when they must," the General said, then sighed as he realized the prickly Orrock needed placating.

  "Who commanded the guns?"

  "Barlow, sir."

  "I'll speak to him," the General promised, then turned as the patrol of iqth Dragoons that had crossed the River Purna to reconnoitre the ground on the far bank came threading through the rising tents towards him. Wellesley had not expected the patrol back this scon and their return puzzled him, then he saw they were escorting a group ofbkinjarries, the black-cloaked merchants who traversed India buying and selling food.

  "You'll excuse me, Orrock," the General said, plucking his coat from a stool.

  "You will talk with Barlow, sir?" Orrock asked.

  "I said so, didn't I?" Wellesley called as he walked towards the horsemen.

  The patrol leader, a captain, slid off his horse and gestured at the bhinjarries' leader.

  "We found these fellows a half-mile north of the river, sir. They've got eighteen pack oxen loaded with grain and they reckon the enemy ain't in Borkardan at all. They were planning to sell the grain in Assaye."

  "Assaye?" The General frowned at the unfamiliar name.

  "It's a village four or five miles north of here, sir. He says it's thick with the enemy."

  "Four or five miles?" Wellesley asked in astonishment.

  "Four or five?"

  The cavalry captain shrugged.

  "That's what they say, sir." He gestured at the grain merchants who stood impassively among the mounted troopers.

  Dear God, Wellesley thought, four or five miles? He had been humbugged! The enemy had stolen a march on him, and at any moment that enemy might appear to the north and launch an attack on the British encampment and there was no chance for Stevenson to come to his help.

  The 74th were singing hymns and the enemy was five miles away, maybe less? The General spun round.

  "Barclay! Campbell! Horses!

  Quick now!"

  The flurry of activity at the General's tent sent a rumour whipping through the camp, and the rumour was fanned into alarm when the whole of the igth Dragoons and the 4th Native Cavalry trotted through the river on the heels of the General and his two aides. Colonel McCandless had been walking with Sharpe towards the 74th's lines, but seeing the sudden excitement, he turned and hurried back towards his horse.

  "Come on, Sharpe!"

  "Where to, sir?"

  "We'll find out. Sevajee?"

  "We're ready."

  McCandless's party left the camp five minutes after the General.

  They could see the dust left by the cavalry ahead and McCandless hurried to catch up. They rode through a landscape of small fields cut by deep dry gulches and cactus-thorn hedges. Wellesley had been following the earth road northwards, but after a while the General swerved westwards onto a field of stubble and McCandless did not follow, but kept straight on up the road.

  "No point in tiring the horses unnecessarily," he explained, though Sharpe suspected the Colonel was merely impatient to go north and see whatever had caused the excitement. The two British cavalry regiments were in sight to the east, but there was no enemy visible.

  Sevajee and his men had ridden ahead, but when they reached a crest some two hundred yards in front of McCandless they suddenly wrenched on their reins and swerved back. Sharpe expected to see a horde of Mahratta cavalry come boiling over the crest, but the skyline stayed empty as Sevajee and his men halted a few yards short of the ridge and there dismounted.

  "You'll not want them to see you, Colonel," Sevajee said drily when McCandless caught up.

  Them?"

  Sevajee gestured at the crest.

  "Take a look. You'll want to dismount."

  McCandless and Sharpe both slid from their saddles, then walked to the skyline where a cactus hedge offered concealment and from where they could stare at the country to the north and Sharpe, who had never seen such a sight before, simply gazed in amazement.

  It was not an army. It was a horde, a whole people, a nation.

  Thousands upon thousands of the enemy, all in line, mile after mile of them. Men and women and children and guns and camels and bullocks and rocket batteries and horses and tents and still more men until there seemed to be no end to them.

  "Jesus!" Sharpe said, the imprecation torn from him.

  "Sharpe!"

  "Sorry, sir." But no wonder he had sworn, for Sharpe had never imagined that an army could look so vast. The nearest men were no more than half a mile away, beyond a discoloured river that flowed between steep mud banks. A village lay on the nearer bank, but on the northern side, just beyond the mud bluff, there was a line of guns.

  Big guns, the same painted and sculpted cannon that Sharpe had seen in Pohlmann's camp. Beyond the guns was the infantry and behind the infantry, and spreading far out of sight to the east, was a mass of cavalry and beyond them the myriad of camp followers. More infantry were posted about a distant village where Sharpe could just see a cluster of bright flags.

  "How many are there?" he asked.

  "At least a hundred thousand men?" McCandless ventured.

  "At least," Sevajee agreed, 'but most are adventurers come for loot."

  The Indian was peering through a long ivory-clad telescope.

  "And the cavalry won't help in a battle."

  "It'll be down to these fellows," McCandless said, indicating the infantry just behind the gun line.

  "Fifteen thousand?"

  "Fourteen or fifteen," Sevajee said.

  "Too many."

  "Too many guns," McCandless said gloomily.

  "It'll be a retreat."

  "I thought we came here to fight!" Sharpe said belligerentiy.

  "We came here expecting to rest, then march on Borkardan tomorrow,"

  McCandless said testily.

  "We didn't come here to take on the whole enemy army with just five thousand infantry. They know we're coming, they're ready for us and they simply want us to walk into their fire. Wellesley's not a fool, Sharpe. He'll march us back, link up with Stevenson, then find them again."

  Sharpe felt a pang of relief that he would not discover the realities of bat de but the relief was tempered by a tinge of disappointment. The disappointment surprised him, and the relief made him fear he might be a coward.

  "If we retreat," Sevajee warned, 'those horsemen will harry us all the way."

  "We'll just have to fight them off," McCandless said confidently, then let out a long satisfied breath.

  "Got him! There, the left flank!" He pointed and Sharpe saw, far away at the very end of the enemy gun line a scatter of white uniforms.

  "Not that it helps us," McCandless said wryly
, 'but at least we're on his heels."

  "Or he's on ours," Sevajee said, then he offered his telescope to Sharpe.

  "See for yourself, Sergeant."

  Sharpe rested the glass's long barrel on a thick cactus leaf. He moved the lens slowly along the line of infantry. Men slept in the shade, some were in their small tents and others sat in groups and he could have sworn a few were gambling. Officers, Indian and European, strolled behind their men, while in front of them the massive line of guns waited with their ammunition limbers. He moved the glass to the very far left of the enemy line and saw the white jackets of Dodd's men, and saw something else. Two huge guns, much bigger than anything he had seen before.

  "They've got their siege guns in the line, sir," he told McCandless, who trained his own telescope.

  "Eighteen-pounders," McCandless guessed, 'maybe bigger?" The Colonel collapsed his glass.

  "Why aren't they patrolling this side of the river?"

  "Because they don't want to frighten us away," Sevajee said.

  "They want us to stroll up to their guns and die in the river, but they'll still have some horsemen hidden on this bank, waiting to tell them when we retreat."

  The sound of hooves made Sharpe whip round in expectation of those enemy cavalry, but it was only General Wellesley and his two aides who cantered along the lower ground beneath the crest.

  "They're all there, McCandless," the General shouted happily.

  "So it seems, sir."

  The General reined in, waiting for McCandless to come down from the skyline and join him.

  "They seem to presume we'll make a frontal attack," Wellesley said wryly, as though he found the idea amusing.

  "They're certainly formed for it, sir."

  "They must assume we're blockheads. What time is it?"

  One of his aides consulted a watch.

  "Ten minutes of noon, sir."

  "Plenty of time," the General murmured.

  "Onwards, gentlemen, stay below the skyline. We don't want to frighten them away!"

  "Frighten them away?" Sevajee asked with a smile, but Wellesley ignored the comment as he spurred on eastwards, parallel with the river. Some troops of Company cavalry were scouring the fields and at first Sharpe thought they were looking for concealed enemy picquets, then he saw they were hunting down local farmers and harrying them along in the General's wake.

  Wellesley rode two miles eastwards, a string of horsemen behind him.

  The farmers were breathless by the time they reached the place where his horse was picketed just beneath a low hill. The General was kneeling on the crest, staring east through a glass.

  "Ask those fellows if there are any fords east of here!" he shouted down to his aides.

  A hurried consultation followed, but the farmers were quite sure there was no ford. The only crossing places, they insisted, were directly in front of Scindia's army.

  "Find a clever one," Wellesley ordered, 'and bring him up here.

  Colonel? Maybe you'd translate?"

  McCandless picked one of the farmers and led him up the hill.

  Sharpe, without being asked, followed and Wellesley did not order him back, but just muttered that they should all keep their heads low.

  "There' the General pointed eastwards to a village on the Kaitna's southern bank 'that village, what's it called?"

  Teepulgaon," the farmer said, and added that his mother and two sisters lived in the huddle of mud-walled houses with their thatched roofs.

  Peepulgaon lay only a half-mile from the low hill, but it was all of two miles east of Taunklee, the village that was opposite the eastern extremity of the Mahratta line. Both villages were on the river's southern bank while the enemy waited on the Kaitna's northern side, and Sharpe did not understand Wellesley's interest.

  "Ask him if he has any relatives north of the river," the General ordered McCandless.

  "He has a brother and several cousins, sir," McCandless translated.

  "So how does his mother visit her son north of the river?" Wellesley asked.

  The farmer launched himself into a long explanation. In the dry season, he said, she walked across the river bed, but in the wet season, when the waters rose, she was forced to come upstream and cross at Taunklee. Wellesley listened, then grunted in apparent disbelief.

  He was staring intently through the glass.

  "Campbell?" he called, but his aide had gone to another low rise a hundred yards westwards that offered a better view of the enemy ranks.

  "Campbell?" Wellesley called again and, getting no answer, turned.

  "Sharpe, you'll do. Come here."

  "Sir?"

  "You've got young eyes. Come here, and keep low."

  Sharpe joined the General on the crest where, to his surprise, he was handed the telescope.

  "Look at the village," Wellesley ordered, 'then look at the opposite bank and tell me what you see."

  It took Sharpe a moment to find Peepulgaon in the lens, but suddenly its mud walls filled the glass. He moved the telescope slowly, sliding its view past oxen, goats and chickens, past clothes set to dry on bushes by the river bank, and then the lens slid across the brown water of the River Kaitna and up its opposite bank where he saw a muddy bluff topped by trees and, just beyond the trees, a fold of land. And in the fold of land were roofs, straw roofs.

  "There's another village there, sir," Sharpe said.

  "You're sure?" Wellesley asked urgently.

  "Pretty sure, sir. Might just be cat de sheds."

  "You don't keep cattle sheds apart from a village," the General said scathingly, 'not in a country infested by bandits." Wellesley twisted round.

  "McCandless? Ask your fellow if there's a village on the other side of the river from Peepulgaon."

  The farmer listened to the question, then nodded.

  "Waroor," he said, then helpfully informed the General that his cousin was the village headman, the naique.

  "How far apart are those villages, Sharpe?" Wellesley asked.

  Sharpe judged the distance for a couple of seconds.

  "Three hundred yards, sir?"

  Wellesley took the telescope back and moved away from the crest.

  "Never in my life," he said, 'have I seen two villages on opposite banks of a river that weren't connected by a ford."

  "He insists not, sir," McCandless said, indicating the farmer.

  "Then he's a rogue, a liar or a blockhead," Wellesley said cheerfully.

  "The latter, probably." He frowned in thought, his right hand drumming a tattoo on the telescope's barrel.

  "I'll warrant there is a ford," he said to himself.

  "Sir?" Captain Campbell had run back from the western knoll.

  "Enemy's breaking camp, sir."

  "Are they, by God!" Wellesley returned to the crest and stared through the glass again. The infantry immediately on the Kaitna's north bank were not moving, but far away, close to the fortified village, tents were being struck.

  "Preparing to run away, I daresay," Wellesley muttered.

  "Or readying to cross the river and attack us," McCandless said grimly.

  "And they're sending cavalry across the river," Campbell added ominously.

  "Nothing to worry us," Wellesley said, then turned back to stare at the opposing villages of Peepulgaon and Waroor.

  "There has to be a ford," he said to himself again, so quietly that only Sharpe could hear him.

  "Stands to reason," he said, then he went silent for a long time.

  "That enemy cavalry, sir," Campbell prompted him.

  Wellesley seemed startled.

  "What?"

  "There, sir." Campbell pointed westwards to a large group of enemy horsemen who had appeared from a grove of trees, but who seemed content to watch Wellesley's group from a half-mile away.

  "Time we were away," Wellesley said.

  "Give that lying blockhead a rupee, McCandless, then let's be off."

  "You plan to retreat, sir?" McCandless asked.


  Wellesley had been hurrying down the slope, but now stopped and stared in surprise at the Scotsman.

  "Retreat?"

  McCandless blinked.

  "You surely don't intend to fight, sir, do you?"

  "How else are we to do His Majesty's business? Of course we'll fight!

  There's a ford there." Wellesley flung his arm east towards Peepulgaon.

  "That wretched farmer might deny it, but he's a blockhead! There has to be a ford. We'll cross it, turn their left flank and pound them into scraps! But we must hurry! Noon already. Three hours, gentlemen, three hours to bring on battle. Three hours to turn his flank." He ran on down the hill to where Diomed, his white Arab horse, waited.

  "Good God," McCandless said.

  "Good God." For five thousand infantry would now cross the Kaitna at a place where men said the river was uncross able then fight an enemy horde at least ten times their number.

  "Good God," the Colonel said again, then hurried to follow Wellesley south. The enemy had stolen a march, the redcoats had journeyed all night and were bone tired, but Wellesley would have his bat de

  Chapter 9

  "There!" Dodd said, pointing.

  "I can't see," Simone Joubert complained.

  "Drop the telescope, use your naked eye, Madame. There! It's flashing."

  "Where?"

  "There!" Dodd pointed again.

  "Across the river. Three trees, low hill."

  "Ah!" Simone at last saw the flash of reflected sunlight from the lens of a telescope that was being used on the far bank of the river and well downstream from where Dodd's Cobras held the left of Pohlmann's line.

  Simone and her husband had dined with the Major who was grimly happy in anticipation of a British attack which, he claimed, must inevitably fall hardest on his Cobras.

  "It will be slaughter, Ma'am," Dodd said wolfishly, 'sheer slaughter!"

  He and Captain Joubert had walked Simone to the edge of the bluff above the Kaitna and shown her the fords, and demonstrated how any men crossing the fords must be caught in the mangling crossfire of the Mahratta cannon, then maintained that the British had no option but to walk forward into that weltering onslaught of canister, round shot and shell.

  "If you wish to stay and watch, Madame," Dodd had offered, "I can find a place of safety for you." He gestured towards a low rise of ground just behind the regiment.