Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803

by Bernard Cornwell

  Colonel Wallace’s party was still a good hundred yards from the gate, slowed by the weight of their six-pounder cannon. It seemed to Sharpe that Wallace needed more men to handle the cumbersome gun and the enemy’s musket fire was taking its toll of the few men he did have shoving at the wheels or dragging at the traces. Wellesley was not far behind Wallace, and just behind the General, mounted on one of his spare horses and with a second on a leading rein, was Daniel Fletcher. The musket fire spurted scraps of dried mud all around Wellesley and his aides, but the General seemed to have a charmed life.

  The 78th returned to the attack on the left, only this time they ran their two ladders directly at the bastion which flanked the wall where their first attempt had failed. The threatened bastion reacted with an angry explosion of musket fire. One of the ladders fell, its carriers hard hit by the volley, but the other swung on up and as soon as its top struck the bastion’s summit a kilted officer climbed the rungs. “No!” McCandless cried, as the officer was hit and fell. Other men took his place, but the defenders tipped a basket of stones over the parapet and the tumbling rocks scoured the ladder clear. A volley of musketry made the defenders duck and when the smoke cleared Sharpe saw that the kilted officer was again ascending the ladder, this time without his tall hat. He carried his claymore in his right hand and the big sword hampered him. An Arab fleetingly appeared at the top of the ladder with a lump of timber that he hurled down at the attacker, and the officer was thrown back a second time. “No!” McCandless lamented again, but then the same officer appeared a third time. He was determined to have the honor of being first into the city, and this time he had tied his red waist-sash to his wrist and let his claymore hang by its hilt from a loop of the silk, thus leaving both hands free and allowing him to climb much faster. He kept climbing, and his men crowded behind him in their big bearskin hats, and the loopholes in the bastion’s galleries spat flame and smoke as they scrambled past the bastion’s stories, but magically the officer survived the fusillade and Sharpe had his heart in his mouth as the man drew nearer and nearer to the top. He expected to see a defender appear at any moment, but the attackers who were not queuing at the foot of the ladder were now hammering the bastion’s summit with musket fire and under its cover the bareheaded officer scrambled up the last few rungs, paused to take hold of his claymore’s hilt, then leaped over the top of the wall. Someone cheered, and Sharpe caught a distinct view of the officer’s claymore rising and falling above the red wall’s coping. More Highlanders were clambering up the ladder and though some were blasted off by musket fire from the bastion’s loopholes, others were at last reaching the high parapet and following their officer onto the defenses. The second ladder was swung into place and the trickle of attackers became a stream. “Thank God,” McCandless said fervently, “thank God indeed.”

  The 78th were in the bastion, and now the 74th, which had been reduced to just one ladder, also made their lodgement. An officer had organized two companies to give the parapet a blast of musketry just as a sergeant reached the top of the ladder, and the fusillade cleared the embrasures as the sergeant clambered over the wall. His bayonet stabbed down, then he reeled backwards as a defender slashed at him with a tulwar, but a lieutenant was behind him and he hacked down with his claymore and then kicked the defender in the face. A third man crossed, the fourth was killed, and then another man was on the wall and the Scotsmen screamed their war cries as they began the grim job of clearing the defenders off the firestep. Sharpe could hear the clash of blades on the wall, and see a cloud of powder smoke above the crenellations where the Scots of the 74th were fighting their way along the parapet, but he could see nothing on the bastion where the kilted 78th were fighting. He guessed they were clearing the bastion floor by floor, charging down the steep stone steps and carrying their bayonets to the gunners and infantrymen who manned the lower galleries.

  The Scots at last reached the bastion’s ground floor where they killed one last defender and then burst out of the tower’s inner doorway to be faced by a horde of Arabs who poured a volley of matchlock fire into the attackers’ ranks. “Charge the bastards! Charge them!” The same young officer who had led the assault now rallied his men and led them against the robed defenders who were reloading their long-barreled muskets. The Highlanders attacked with bayonets and a ferocity born of desperation.

  The Scots were inside the city, but so far the only route to reinforce them was up the three remaining ladders, and one of those was bending dangerously after being struck by a small round shot. Wellesley was shouting at Wallace to get the gate open, and Colonel Wallace was bellowing at his gunners to get their damned weapon into place. The defenders above the gate did their best to stop the advancing cannon, but Wallace ordered a company of infantry to help the gunners roll the cannon forward and those men cheered as they bounced and rattled the heavy gun towards the gate. “Give them fire,” Wallace shouted, “give them fire!” and his remaining infantrymen blasted a ragged volley up at the gate’s defenders. The flags above the rampart twitched as the balls snatched at the silk. The six-pounder rumbled forward, thumping over the uneven road surface that was being pocked by musket balls spat from the gatehouse loopholes. A bagpipe was playing and the savage music made a fine accompaniment to the gun’s wild charge. “Keep firing,” Wallace shouted at his infantry, “keep firing!” His men’s musket balls struck tiny puffs of dust and flakes of stone from the gate that was wreathed in smoke, smoke so thick that the gun seemed to disappear in fog as it rolled the last few yards, but then Sharpe heard the resounding thump as the gun’s muzzle was rammed hard against the big wooden gate. “Get back,” the gun commander shouted, “get back!” and the men who had hauled the gun scrambled clear.

  “Make ready!” Wallace shouted, and his men stopped their firing and dragged out bayonets that they slotted over their blackened musket muzzles. “Fire the gun!” Wallace shouted. “Fire it! For God’s sake, fire!” A rocket seethed out of the smoke, trailing sparks, and for a second Sharpe thought it would plunge into the heart of Wallace’s waiting men, but then it arced up into the clear blue sky and blazed safely away.

  Inside the city the Arabs who had tried to defend the bastion now retreated in front of the battle-maddened Scots who swarmed out of the bastion’s inner door. The Arabs might come from a hard, warlike country, but so did the kilted men who came snarling into the city. Sepoys were climbing the ladders now and they joined the Highlanders. Their instinct was to charge across the cleared space inside the wall and so reach the cover of the city’s alleyways, but the young officer who led the attack knew that the defenders could still rally if he did not open the gate and so let in a flood of attackers. “To the gate!” he shouted, and led his men along the inner face of the wall to reach the south gate. The Arabs waiting just inside the arch turned and fired as the Scots approached, but the young officer seemed invincible. He screamed as he charged, then his reddened claymore slashed down, and his men’s bayonets lunged forward. Two sepoys joined them, stabbing and screaming, and the outnumbered Arabs died or fled. “Open the gate!” the young officer shouted, and one of the sepoys ran forward to lift the heavy locking bar out of its iron brackets.

  “Fire!” Colonel Wallace shouted on the gate’s far side.

  The gun captain touched his portfire to the priming reed. There was a fizz of spark, a wisp of smoke and then the double-charged gun leaped back and the sound of its massive discharge was magnified by the echo that bounced deafeningly off the gate’s high archway. The doors splintered, and the sepoy who had been lifting the bar was cut in two by the six-pound ball and by the wicked-edged scraps of shattered timber that exploded into the city. The other attackers on the inner side of the gate reeled away from the smoke and flame of the blast, but the bar was lifted and the cannon’s discharge swung the gates open.

  “Charge!” Wallace shouted, and his men screamed as they ran into the smoke-shrouded arch and pushed past the gun and trampled over the bloody halves of the slaught
ered sepoy.

  “Come on, Sharpe, come on!” McCandless had his own claymore drawn and the old man’s face was alight with excitement as he spurred his horse towards the doomed city. The assault troops who had been waiting to climb the ladders now joined the surge of men running towards the broken gates.

  For Ahmednuggur had fallen, and from the first shot until the opening of the gate it had taken just twenty minutes. And now the redcoats went for their reward and the suffering inside the city could begin.

  Major William Dodd had never reached his breakfast. Instead he had hurried back to the walls the moment he heard the first muskets fire and, once on the firestep, he had stared appalled at the ladder parties for he had never once anticipated that the British would attempt an escalade. Of all the methods of taking a city, an escalade was the riskiest, but Dodd realized he should have foreseen it. Ahmednuggur had no ditch, nor any glacis, indeed the city had no obstacle outside its ramparts and that made it a prime candidate for escalade, though Dodd had never believed that Boy Wellesley would dare try such a stratagem. He thought Wellesley too cautious.

  None of the assaults was aimed at the stretch of wall where Dodd’s men were positioned, so all they could do was fire their muskets obliquely at the advancing British, but the distance was too great for their fire to be effective and the thick powder smoke of their muskets soon obscured their aim and so Dodd ordered them to cease fire. “I can only see four ladders,” his interpreter said.

  “Must have more than four,” Dodd remarked. “Can’t do it with just four.”

  For a time it seemed the Major must be right for the defense was making a mockery of the attack, while Dodd’s men were troubled by nothing more threatening than a scatter of sepoy skirmishers who fired ineffectually at his stretch of the wall. He showed his derision of the skirmishers’ fire by standing openly in an embrasure from where he could watch the enemy’s cavalry ride about the city’s flank to cut off any escape from the northern gate. He could deal with a few cavalrymen, he decided. A scrap of stone was driven from the coping beside him by a musket ball. The stone flake rapped against the leather swordbelt that was buckled around Dodd’s new white coat. He did not like wearing white. It showed the dirt, but worse, it made any wound look much worse than it really was. Blood on a red coat hardly showed, but even a small amount of blood on a white coat could make a nervous man terrified. He wondered if Pohlmann or Scindia would agree to the cost of new jackets. Brown, maybe, or dark blue.

  The interpreter came to where the Major stood in the embrasure. “The killadar requests that we form up behind the gate, sir.”

  “Noted,” Dodd said curtly.

  “He says the enemy are approaching the gate with a gun, sahib.”

  “Sensible of them,” Dodd said, but otherwise ignored the request. Instead he stared eastwards and saw a Scottish officer suddenly appear at the summit of a bastion. Kill him, he silently urged the Arabs in the bastion, but the young officer jumped down and began laying about him with his claymore, and suddenly there were more kilted Scotsmen crossing the wall. “I do hate the bloody Scots,” he said.

  “Sahib?” The interpreter asked.

  “Priggish bastards, they are,” Dodd said, but the priggish bastards looked as if they had just captured the city and Dodd knew it would be madness to get involved in a doomed fight to save it. That way he would lose his regiment.

  “Sahib?” the interpreter interrupted Dodd nervously. “The killadar was insistent, sir.”

  “Bugger the killadar,” Dodd said, jumping down from the embrasure. “I want the men off the wall,” he ordered, “and formed in companies on the inner esplanade.” He pointed down to the wide space just inside the wall. “Now,” he added and, with one last glance at the attackers, he ran down the steps. “Femadar!” he shouted to Gopal, whom he had promoted as a reward for loyalty.

  “Sahib!”

  “Form up! March by companies to the north gate! If any civilians block your path, open fire!”

  “Kill them?” the Femadar asked.

  “I don’t want you to bloody tickle them, Gopal. Slaughter them!”

  The interpreter had listened to this exchange and stared appalled at the tall Englishman. “But, sir . . .” he began to plead.

  “The city’s lost,” Dodd growled, “and the second rule of war is not to reinforce failure.”

  The interpreter wondered what the first rule was, but knew this was not the time to ask. “But the killadar, sir . . .”

  “Is a lily-livered mouse and we are men. Our orders are to save the regiment so it can fight again. Now, go!”

  Dodd saw the first redcoats burst out of the inner door of the bastion, heard the Arab volley that threw some of the attackers down into the bloodied dust, but then he turned away from the fight and followed his men into the city’s streets. It went against the grain to abandon a fight, but Dodd knew his duty. The city might die, but the regiment must live. Captain Joubert should be holding the north gate safe where Dodd’s guns waited, and where his own saddle horses and pack mule were ready, and so he called for his other French officer, the young Lieutenant Sillière, and told him to take a dozen men to rescue Simone Joubert from the panic that he knew was about to engulf the city. Dodd had rather hoped he could fetch Simone himself, posing as her protector, but he knew that the fall of the city was imminent and there would be no time for such gallantries. “Bring her safe, Lieutenant.”

  “Of course, sir,” Sillière said and, glad to be given such a duty, he ordered a dozen men to follow him into the alleys.

  Dodd gave one backward glance towards the south, then marched away from the fight. There was nothing for him here but failure. It was time to go north, for it was there, Dodd knew, beyond the wide rivers and among the far hills and a long way from their supplies, that the British would be lured to their deaths.

  But Ahmednuggur, and everything inside it, was doomed.

  CHAPTER•4

  Sharpe followed McCandless into the gatehouse’s high archway, using the weight of his mare to push through the sepoys and Highlanders who jostled in the narrow roadway that was still half blocked by the six-pounder cannon. The mare shied from the thick powder smoke that hung in the air between the scorched and smoking remnants of the two gates and Sharpe, gripping the mane to keep in the saddle, kicked his heels back so that the horse shot forward and trampled through the fly-blown intestines of the sepoy who had been struck in the belly by the six-pound shot. He hauled on the reins, checking the mare’s fright among the sprawled bodies of the Arabs who had died trying to defend the gate. The fight here had been short and brutal, but there was no resistance left in the city by the time Sharpe caught up with McCandless who was staring in disapproval at the victorious redcoats who hurried into Ahmednuggur’s alleyways. The first screams were sounding. “Women and drink,” McCandless said disapprovingly. “That’s all they’ll be thinking of, women and drink.”

  “Loot, too, sir,” Sharpe corrected the Scotsman. “It’s a wicked world, sir,” he added hastily, wishing he could be let off the leash himself to join the plunderers. Sevajee and his men were through the gate now, wheeling their horses behind Sharpe, who glanced up at the walls to see, with some surprise, that many of the city’s defenders were still on the firestep, though they were making no effort to fire at the red-coated enemy who flooded through the broken gate. “So what do we do, sir?” he asked.

  McCandless, usually so sure of himself, seemed at a momentary loss, but then he saw a wounded Mahratta crawling across the cleared space inside the wall and, throwing his reins to Sharpe, he dismounted and crossed to the casualty. He helped the wounded man into the shelter of a doorway and there propped him against a wall and gave him a drink from his canteen. He spoke to the wounded man for a few seconds. Sevajee, his tulwar still drawn, came alongside Sharpe. “First we kill them, then we give them water,” the Indian said.

  “Funny business, war, sir,” Sharpe said.

  “Do you enjoy it?” Sevajee ask
ed.

  “Don’t rightly know, sir. Haven’t seen much.” A short skirmish in Flanders, the swift victory of Malavelly, the chaos at the fall of Seringapatam, the horror of Chasalgaon and today’s fierce escalade; that was Sharpe’s full experience of war and he harbored all the memories and tried to work out from them some pattern that would tell him how he would react when the next violence erupted in his life. He thought he enjoyed it, but he was dimly aware that perhaps he ought not to enjoy it. “You, sir?” he asked Sevajee.

  “I love it, Sergeant,” the Indian said simply.

  “You’ve never been wounded?” Sharpe guessed.

  “Twice. But a gambler does not stop throwing dice because he loses.”

  McCandless came running back from the wounded man. “Dodd’s heading for the north gate!”

  “This way,” Sevajee said, sawing his reins and leading his cut-throats off to the right where he reckoned they would avoid the press of panicked people crowding the center of the city.

  “That wounded man was the killadar,” McCandless said as he fiddled his left boot into the stirrup, then hauled himself into the saddle. “Dying, poor fellow. Took a bullet in the stomach.”

  “Their chief man, eh?” Sharpe said, looking up at the gatehouse where a Highlander was ripping down Scindia’s flags.

  “And he was bitterly unhappy with our Lieutenant Dodd,” McCandless said as he spurred his horse after Sevajee. “It seems he deserted the defenses.”

  “He’s in a hurry to get away, sir,” Sharpe suggested.

  “Then let us hurry to stop him,” McCandless said, quickening his horse so that he could push through Sevajee’s men to reach the front ranks of the pursuers. Sevajee was using the alleyways beneath the eastern walls and for a time the narrow streets were comparatively empty, but then the crowds increased and their troubles began. A dog yapped at the heels of McCandless’s horse, making it rear, then a holy cow with blue painted horns wandered into their path and Sevajee insisted they wait for the beast, but McCandless angrily banged the cow’s bony rump with the flat of his claymore to drive it aside, then his horse shied again as a blast of musketry sounded just around the corner. A group of sepoys were shooting open a locked door, but McCandless could not spare the time to stop their depredations. “Wellesley will have to hang some of them,” he said, spurring on. Refugees were fleeing into the alleys, hammering on locked doors or scaling mud walls to find safety. A woman, carrying a vast bundle on her head, was knocked to the ground by a sepoy who began slashing at the bundle’s ropes with his bayonet. Two Arabs, both armed with massive matchlock guns with pearl-studded stocks, appeared ahead of them and Sharpe unslung his musket, but the two men were not disposed to continue a lost fight and so vanished into a gateway. The street was littered with discarded uniform jackets, some green, some blue, some brown, all thrown off by panicking defenders who now tried to pass themselves off as civilians. The crowds thickened as they neared the city’s northern edge and the air of panic here was palpable. Muskets sounded constantly in the city and every shot, like every scream, sent a shudder through the crowds that eddied in hopeless search of an escape.