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

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You do not instruct me in my duties, Sergeant!” McCandless said angrily.

  “I just knows you will do your duty, sir, like we all does. Except for some as I could mention.” Hakeswill smiled at Sharpe. “Finding the long words difficult, are we, Sharpie?”

  McCandless reached over and took the warrant back from Sharpe, who had, indeed, been finding some of the longer words difficult. The Colonel had expressed his disbelief in the charge, but that was more out of loyalty to Sharpe than from any conviction, though there was still something out of kilter in the warrant. “Is it true, Sharpe?” McCandless now asked.

  “No, sir!” Sharpe said indignantly.

  “He was always a good liar, sir,” Hakeswill said helpfully. “Lies like a rug, sir, he does. Famous for it.” The Sergeant was becoming breathless as he hurried to keep pace with the Scotsman’s horse.

  “So what do you intend to do with Sergeant Sharpe?” McCandless asked.

  “Do, sir? Do my duty, of course, sir. Escort the prisoner back to battalion, sir, as is ordered.” Hakeswill gestured at his six men who marched a few paces behind. “We’ll guard him nice and proper, sir, all the way home and then have him stand trial for his filthy crime.”

  McCandless bit his right thumb and shook his head. He rode in silence for a few paces, and when Sharpe protested he ignored the indignant words. He put the warrant in his right hand again and seemed to read it yet another time. Far off to the east, at least a mile away, there was a sudden flurry of dust and the sparkle of sword blades catching the sun. Some enemy horsemen had been waiting in a grove of trees from where they had been watching the British march, but now they were flushed out by a troop of Mysore horsemen who pursued them northwards. McCandless glanced at the distant action. “So they’ll know we’re here now, more’s the pity. How do you spell your name, Sharpe? With or without an ‘e’?”

  “With, sir.”

  “You will correct me if I’m wrong,” McCandless said, “but it seems to me that this is not your name.” He handed the warrant back to Sharpe who saw that the “e” at the end of his name had been smeared out. There was a smudge of black ink there, and beneath it the impression of the “e” made by the steel nib in the paper, but the ink had been diluted and nearly erased.

  Sharpe hid his astonishment that McCandless, a stickler for honesty and straight-dealing, had resorted to such a subterfuge. “Not my name, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly.

  Hakeswill looked from Sharpe to McCandless, then back to Sharpe and finally at McCandless again. “Sir!” The word exploded from him.

  “You’re out of breath, Sergeant,” McCandless said, taking the warrant back from Sharpe. “But you will see here that you are expressly ordered to arrest a sergeant whose name is Richard Sharp. No ‘e,’ Sergeant. This Sergeant Sharpe uses an ‘e’ on his name so he cannot be the man you want, and I certainly cannot release him to your custody on the authority of this piece of paper. Here.” McCandless held the warrant out, letting it drop a heartbeat before Hakeswill could take it. The paper fluttered down to the dusty road.

  Hakeswill snatched the warrant up and peered at the writing. “Ink’s run, sir!” he protested. “Sir?” He ran after McCandless’s horse, stumbling on the uneven road. “Look, sir! Ink’s run, sir.”

  McCandless ignored the offered warrant. “It is clear, Sergeant Hakeswill, that the spelling of the name has been corrected. In all conscience I cannot act upon that warrant. What you must do, Sergeant, is send a message to Lieutenant Colonel Gore asking him to clear up the confusion. A new warrant, I think, would be best, and until such time as I see such a warrant, legibly written, I cannot release Sergeant Sharpe from his present duties. Good day, Hakeswill.”

  “You can’t do this, sir!” Hakeswill protested.

  McCandless smiled. “You fundamentally misunderstand the hierarchy of the army, Sergeant. It is I, a colonel, who define your duties, not you, a sergeant, who define mine. ‘I say to a man, go, and he goeth.’ It says so in the scriptures. I bid you good day.” And with that the Scotsman touched his spurs to the gelding’s flanks.

  Hakeswill’s face twitched as he turned on Sharpe. “I’ll have you, Sharpie, I will have you. I ain’t forgotten nothing.”

  “You ain’t learned nothing either,” Sharpe said, then spurred after the Colonel. He lifted two fingers as he passed Hakeswill, then left him behind in the dust.

  He was, for the moment, free.

  Simone Joubert placed the eight diamonds on the window ledge of the tiny house where the wives of Scindia’s European officers had been quartered. She was alone for the moment, for the other women had gone to visit the three compoos that were stationed on the Kaitna’s northern bank, but Simone had not wanted their company and so she had pleaded a turbulent stomach, though she supposed she ought to visit Pierre before the battle, if indeed there was to be a fight. Not that Simone cared much. Let them have their battle, she thought, and at the end of it, when the river was dark with British blood, her life would be no better. She gazed at the diamonds again, thinking about the man who had given them to her. Pierre would be angry if he learned she was concealing such wealth, but once his anger had passed he would sell the stones and send the money back to his rapacious family in France.

  “Madame Joubert!” A voice hailed her from outside the window and Simone guiltily swept the diamonds into her small purse, though, because she was on an upper floor, no one could see the gems. She peered down from the window and saw a cheerful Colonel Pohlmann in shirtsleeves and braces standing among the straw in the courtyard of the neighboring house.

  “Colonel,” she responded dutifully.

  “I am hiding my elephants,” the Colonel said, gesturing at the three beasts which were being led into the courtyard. The tallest carried Pohlmann’s howdah, while the other two were burdened with the wooden chests in which the Colonel was reputed to keep his gold. “Might I leave you to guard my menagerie?” the Colonel asked.

  “From what?” Simone asked.

  “From thieves,” the Colonel said happily.

  “Not the British?”

  “They will never reach this far, Madame,” Pohlmann said, “except as prisoners.” And Simone had a sudden vision of Sergeant Richard Sharpe again. She had been raised to believe that the British were a piratical race, a nation without a conscience who mindlessly impeded the spread of French enlightenment, but perhaps, she thought, she liked pirates.

  “I will guard your elephants, Colonel,” she called down.

  “And have some dinner with me?” Pohlmann asked. “I have some cold chicken and warm wine.”

  “I have promised to join Pierre,” Simone said, dreading the two-mile ride across the drab fields to where Dodd’s Cobras waited beside the Kaitna.

  “Then I shall escort you to his side, Madame,” Pohlmann said courteously. Once the battle was over he reckoned he might mount an assault on Madame Joubert’s virtue. It would be an amusing diversion, but not, he thought, an especially difficult campaign. Unhappy women yielded to patience and sympathy, and there would be plenty of time for both once Wellesley and Stevenson had been destroyed. And there would be a pleasure, too, in beating Major Dodd to the prize of Simone’s virtue.

  Pohlmann detailed twenty of his bodyguard to guard the three elephants. He never rode one of the beasts in battle, for an elephant became the target of every enemy gunner, but he looked forward to mounting the howdah for a great victory parade after the campaign. And victory would leave Pohlmann rich, rich enough to start building his great marble palace in which he planned to hang the captured banners of his enemy. From sergeant to princeling in ten years, and the key to that princedom was the gold that he was storing in Assaye. He ordered his bodyguard that no one, not even the Rajah of Berar whose troops were garrisoning the village, should be allowed into the courtyard, then he instructed his servants to detach the golden panels from the howdah and add them to the boxes of treasure. “If the worst should happen,” he told the subadar who was in charg
e of the men guarding the treasure, “I’ll join you here. Not that it will,” he added cheerfully.

  A clatter of hooves in the alley outside the courtyard announced the arrival of a patrol of horsemen returning from a foray south of the Kaitna. For three days Pohlmann had kept his cavalry on a tight rein, not wanting to alarm Wellesley as the British General marched north towards the trap, but that morning he had released a few patrols southwards and one of those now returned with the welcome news that the enemy was only four miles south of the Kaitna. Pohlmann already knew that the second British army, that of Colonel Stevenson, was still ten miles off to the west, and that meant that the British had blundered. Wellesley, in his eagerness to reach Borkardan, had brought his men to the waiting arms of the whole Mahratta army.

  The Colonel thought about waiting for Madame Joubert, then decided he could not afford the time and so he mounted the horse he rode in battle and, with those of his bodyguard not deputed to guard his gold, and with a string of aides surrounding him, he galloped south from Assaye to the Kaitna’s bank where his trap was set. He passed the news to Dupont and Saleur, then rode to prepare his own troops. He spoke with his officers, finishing with Major William Dodd. “I hear the British are making camp in Naulniah,” Pohlmann said, “so what we should do is march south and hammer him. It’s one thing to have Wellesley so close, but it’s quite another to bring him to battle.”

  “So why don’t we march?” Dodd asked.

  “Because Scindia won’t have it, that’s why. Scindia insists we fight on the defensive. He’s nervous.” Dodd spat, but made no other comment on his employer’s timidity. “So there’s a nasty danger,” Pohlmann went on, “that Wellesley won’t attack us at all, but will retreat towards Stevenson.”

  “So we beat them both at once,” Dodd said confidently.

  “As we shall, if we must,” Pohlmann agreed drily, “but I’d rather fight them separately.” He was confident of victory, no soldier could be more confident, but he was no fool and given the chance to defeat two small armies instead of one medium-sized force, he would prefer the former. “If you have a god, Major,” he said, “pray that Wellesley is over-confident. Pray that he attacks us.”

  It was a fervent prayer, for if Wellesley did attack he would be forced to send his men across the Kaitna which was some sixty or seventy paces broad and flowing brown between high banks that were over a hundred paces apart. If the monsoon had come the river would have filled its bed and been twelve or fifteen feet deep, while now it was only six or seven, though that was quite deep enough to stop an army crossing, but right in front of Pohlmann’s position there was a series of fords, and Pohlmann’s prayer was that the British would try to cross the fords and attack straight up the road to Assaye. Wellesley would have no other choice, not if he wanted a battle, for Pohlmann had summoned farmers from every village in the vicinity, from Assaye and Waroor, from Kodully, Taunklee and Peepulgaon, and asked them where a man could drive a herd of cattle through the river. He had used the example of a herd of oxen because where such a herd could go so could oxen drawing guns, and every man had agreed that in this season the only crossing places were the fords between Kodully and Taunklee. A man could drive his herds upriver to Borkardan, they told Pohlmann’s interpreter, and cross there, but that was a half-day’s walk away and why would be a man be that foolish when the river provided eight safe fords between the two villages?

  “Are there any crossing places downstream?” Pohlmann asked.

  A score of dark faces shook in unison. “No, sahib, not in the wet season.”

  “This season isn’t wet.”

  “There are still no fords, sahib.” They were sure, as sure as only local men who had lived all their lives bounded by the same water and trees and soil could be sure.

  Pohlmann had still been unconvinced. “And if a man does not want to drive a herd, but just wants to cross himself, where would he cross?”

  The villagers provided the same answer. “Between Kodully and Taunklee, sahib.”

  “Nowhere else?”

  Nowhere else, they assured him, and that meant Wellesley would be forced to cross the river in the face of Pohlmann’s waiting army. The British infantry and guns would have to slither down the steep southern bank of the Kaitna, cross a wide expanse of mud, wade through the river, then climb the steep northern bank, and all the while they would be under fire from the Mahratta guns until, when they reached the green fields on the northern shore, they would re-form their ranks and march forward into a double storm of musketry and artillery. Wherever the British crossed the Kaitna, anywhere between Kodully and Taunklee, they would find the same murderous reception waiting, for Pohlmann’s three prime compoos were arrayed in one long line that fronted that whole stretch of the river. There were eighty guns in that line, and though some threw nothing but a five- or six-pound ball, at least half were heavy artillery and all were manned by Goanese gunners who knew their business. The cannon were grouped in eight batteries, one for each ford, and there was not an inch of ground between the batteries that could not be flailed by canister or beaten by round shot or scorched by shells. Pohlmann’s well-trained infantry waited to pour a devastating weight of volley fire into red-coated regiments already deafened and demoralized by the cannon fire that would have torn their ranks into shreds as they struggled across the bloody fords. The numberless Mahratta cavalry were off to the west, strung along the bank towards Borkardan, and there it would wait until the British were defeated and Pohlmann released the horsemen to the joys of pursuit and slaughter.

  The Hanoverian reckoned that his battle line waiting at the fords would decimate the enemy and the horsemen would turn the British defeat into a bloody rout, but there was always a small chance that the enemy might survive the river crossing and succeed in gaining the Kaitna’s northern bank in good order. He doubted the British could force his three compoos back, but in case they did Pohlmann planned to retreat two miles to the village of Assaye and invite the British to waste more men in an assault on what was now a miniature fortress. Assaye, like every other village on the plain, lived in fear of bandit raids and so the outermost houses had high, windowless walls made of thick mud, and the houses were joined so that their walls formed a continuous rampart as high as the wall at Ahmednuggur. Pohlmann had blocked the village’s streets with ox carts, he had ordered loopholes hacked in the outer wall, he had placed all his smaller guns, a score of two- and three-pounder cannon, at the foot of the wall and then he had garrisoned the houses with the Rajah of Berar’s twenty thousand infantrymen. Pohlmann doubted that any of those twenty thousand men would need to fight, but he had the luxury of knowing they were in reserve should anything go wrong at the Kaitna.

  He had just one problem left and to solve it he asked Dodd to accompany him eastwards along the river bank. “If you were Wellesley,” he asked Dodd, “how would you attack?”

  Dodd considered the question, then shrugged as if to suggest that the answer was obvious. “Concentrate all my best troops at one end of the line and hammer my way through.”

  “Which end?”

  Dodd thought for a few seconds. He had been tempted to say that Wellesley would attack in the west, at the fords by Kodully, for that would keep him closest to Stevenson’s army, but Stevenson was a long way away and Pohlmann was deliberately riding eastwards. “The eastern end?” Dodd suggested diffidently.

  Pohlmann nodded. “Because if he drives our left flank back he can place his army between us and Assaye. He divides us.”

  “And we surround him,” Dodd observed.

  “I’d rather we weren’t divided,” Pohlmann said, for if Wellesley did succeed in driving back the left flank he might well succeed in capturing Assaye, and while that would still leave Pohlmann’s compoos on the field, it would mean that the Colonel would lose his gold. So the Colonel needed a good hard anchor at the eastern end of his line to prevent his left flank being turned, and of all the regiments under his command he reckoned Dodd’s Cobras
were the best. The left flank was now being held by one of Dupont’s regiments, a good one, but not as good as Dodd’s.

  Pohlmann gestured at the Dutchman’s brown-coated troops who looked across the river towards the small village of Taunklee. “Good men,” he said, “but not as good as yours.”

  “Few of them are.”

  “But we’d best pray those fellows hold,” Pohlmann said, “because if I was Wellesley that’s where I’d put my sharpest attack. Straight up, turn our flank, cut us off from Assaye. It worries me, it does.”

  Dodd could not see that it was overmuch cause for worry, for he doubted that the best troops in the world could survive the river crossing under the massed fire of Pohlmann’s batteries, but he did see the left flank’s importance. “So reinforce Dupont,” he suggested carelessly.

  Pohlmann looked surprised, as though the idea had not already occurred to him. “Reinforce him? Why not? Would you care to hold the left, Major?”

  “The left?” Dodd said suspiciously. Traditionally the right of the line was the station of honor on a battlefield and, while most of Pohlmann’s troops neither cared nor knew about such courtesies, William Dodd certainly knew, which was why Pohlmann had let the Major suggest that the left should be reinforced rather than simply order the touchy Dodd to move his precious Cobras.

  “You would not be under Dupont’s orders, of course not,” Pohlmann reassured Dodd. “You’ll be your own master, Major, answerable to me, only to me.” Pohlmann paused. “Of course, if you’d rather not take post on the left I’d entirely understand, and some other fellows can have the honor of defeating the British right.”

  “My fellows can do it!” Dodd said belligerently.

  “It is a very responsible post,” Pohlmann said diffidently.

  “We can do it, sir!” Dodd insisted.

  Pohlmann smiled his gratitude. “I was hoping you’d say so. Every other regiment is commanded by a Frog or a Dutchman, Major, and I need an Englishman to fight the hardest battle.”