“I go right?” Orrock asked.
“You incline right,” Wellesley said, “then straighten up. Two hundred paces should do it. Incline right, Orrock, give the line two hundred paces more width, then straighten and march straight for the enemy. Swinton will be bringing his men onto your right flank. Don’t wait for him, let him catch you, and don’t hesitate when we attack. Just go straight in with the bayonet.”
Orrock jutted his head, scratched his chin and blinked. “I go rightwards?”
“Then straight ahead,” Wellesley said patiently.
“Yes, sir,” Orrock said, then jerked nervously as one of his small six-pounder cannon, which had been deployed fifty yards in front of his line, fired.
“What the devil?” Wellesley asked, turning to look at the small gun that had leaped back five or six yards. He could not see what the gun had fired at, for the smoke of the discharge made a thick cloud in front of the muzzle, but a second later an enemy round shot screamed through the smoke, twitching it, to bounce between two of Orrock’s half companies. Wellesley cantered to his left to see that the enemy guns had opened fire. For the moment they were merely sending ranging shots, but soon the guns would be pouring their metal at the red ranks.
The General cantered back southwards. It was close to mid afternoon now and the sun was burning the world white. The air was humid, hard to breathe, and every man in the British line was sweating. The enemy round shot bounced on the ground in front of them, and one shot ricocheted up to churn a file of sepoys into blood and bone. The sound of the enemy cannon was harsh, banging over the warm ground in successive punches that came closer and closer together as more guns joined the cannonade. The British guns replied, and the smoke of their discharges betrayed their positions, and the enemy gunners levered their pieces to aim at the British cannon which, hugely outnumbered, were having by far the worst of the exchange. Sharpe saw the earth around one six-pounder struck again and again by enemy round shot, each strike kicking up a barrow-load of soil, and then the small gun seemed to disintegrate as a heavy ball struck it plumb on the front of its carriage. Splinters flew to eviscerate the crew that had been ramming the gun. The barrel reared up, its trunnions tearing out of the carriage, then the heavy metal tube slowly toppled onto a wounded man. Another gunner reeled away, gasping for breath, while a third man lay on the ground looking as though he slept.
A piper began to play as the General neared the kilted 78th. “I thought I ordered all musicians to leave their instruments behind, drummers excepted,” Wellesley said angrily.
“Very hard to go into battle without the pipes, sir,” Campbell said reprovingly.
“Hard to save the wounded without orderlies,” Wellesley complained. In battle the pipers’ job was to save the wounded, but Harness had blithely disobeyed the order and brought his bagpipers. However, it was too late to worry about that disobedience now. Another round shot found its mark in a sepoy battalion, flinging men aside like broken dolls, while a high ball struck a tall tree, shaking its topmost leaves and provoking a small green parrot to squawk as it fled the branches.
Wellesley reined in close to the 78th. He glanced to his right, then looked back to the eight or nine hundred yards of country that separated his small force from the enemy. The sound of the guns was constant now, its thunder deafening, and the smoke of their cannonade was hiding the Mahratta infantry that waited for his assault. If the General was nervous he showed no sign of it, unless the fingers drumming softly against his thigh betrayed some worry. This was his first proper battle in the field, gun against gun and infantry against infantry, yet he seemed entirely cool.
Sharpe licked dry lips. His mare fidgeted and Diomed kept pricking his ears at the gunfire. Another British gun was hit, this time losing a wheel to an enemy round shot. The gunners rolled a new wheel forward, while the officer commanding the small battery ran forward with a handspike. The infantry waited beneath their bright silk colors, their long line of two ranks tipped with shining bayonets.
“Time to go,” Wellesley said very quietly. “Forward, gentlemen,” he said, but still not loudly. He took a breath. “Forward!” he shouted and, at the same time, took off his cocked hat and waved it towards the enemy.
The British drums began their beat. Sergeants shouted. Officers drew swords. The men began to march.
And the battle had begun.
CHAPTER•10
The redcoats advanced in a line of two ranks. The troops spread out as they walked and sergeants shouted at the files to keep closed. The infantry first had to pass the British gun line that was suffering badly in an unequal artillery duel with the Goanese gunners. The enemy was firing shell as well as solid shot, and Sharpe flinched as a shell exploded among a team of oxen that was picketed a hundred yards behind their gun. The wounded beasts bellowed, and one broke from its picket to limp with a bleeding and trailing leg towards the 10th Madras infantry. A British officer ran and put the beast out of its misery with his pistol and the sepoys stepped delicately about the shuddering corpse. Colonel Harness, seeing that his two small battalion guns would inevitably be destroyed if they stayed in action, ordered his gunners to limber up and follow the regiment forward. “Do it fast, you rogues! I want you close behind me.”
The enemy gunners, seeing that they had won the fight between the batteries, turned their pieces on the infantry. They were firing at seven hundred yards now, much too far for canister, but a round shot could whip a file into bloody scraps in the blinking of an eye. The sound of the guns was unending, one shot melding into the next and the whole making a thunderous noise of deafening violence. The enemy line was shrouded in gray-white smoke which was constantly lit by flashes of gunfire deep in the smoke’s heart. Sometimes a Mahratta battery would pause to let the smoke thin and Sharpe, riding twenty paces behind the General who was advancing just to the right of the 78th, could watch the enemy gunners heave at their pieces, see them back away as the gun captain swung the linstock over the barrel, then the gun would disappear again in a cloud of powder smoke and, an instant later, a ball would plunge down in front of the infantry. Sometimes it would bounce clean over the men’s heads, but too often the heavy shots slammed into the files and men would be broken apart in a spray of blood. Sharpe saw the front half of a shattered musket wheel up out of the Highlanders’ ranks. It turned in the air, pursued by its owner’s blood, then fell to impale its bayonet into the turf. A gentle north wind blew a patch of gunsmoke away from the center of the enemy line where the guns were almost axle boss to axle boss. Sharpe watched men ram the barrels, watched them run clear, watched the smoke blossom again and heard the shriek of a round shot just overhead. Sometimes Sharpe could see the tongue of dark-red fire streaking towards him in the cloud’s heart, and then the lead-gray stroke of a ball arcing towards him in the sky, and once he saw the madly spiraling wisp of smoke left by the burning fuse of a shell, but every time the shots went wide or else fell short to churn up a dusty patch of earth.
“Close the files!” the sergeants shouted. “Close up!”
The drummer boys beat the advance. There was low ground ahead, and the sooner the attacking line was in that gentle valley, the sooner they would be out of sight of the gunners. Wellesley looked to his right and saw that Orrock had paused in his advance and that the 74th, who should have been forming to the right of Orrock’s men, had stopped as well. “Tell Orrock to go! Tell him to go!” the General called to Campbell who spurred across the advancing line. His horse galloped through a cloud of shell smoke, leaped a broken limber, then Sharpe lost sight of the aide. Wellesley urged his horse closer to the 78th who were now drawing ahead of the sepoys. The Highlanders were taller than the Madrassi battalions and their stride was longer as they hurried to gain the dead ground where the bombardment could not reach them. A bouncing shell came to rest near the grenadier company that was on the right of the 78th’s line and the kilted soldiers skipped aside, all but for one man who dashed out of the front rank as the missile spun crazi
ly on the ground with its fuse spitting out a tangle of smoke. He rammed his right boot on the shell to make it still, then struck hard down with the brass butt of his musket to knock the fuse free. “Am I spared the punishment now, Sergeant?” he called.
“You get in file, John, get in file,” the sergeant answered.
Wellesley grinned, then shuddered as a ball went perilously close to his hat. He looked around, seeking his aides, and saw Barclay. “The calm before the storm,” the General remarked.
“Some calm, sir.”
“Some storm,” an Indian answered. He was one of the Mahratta chiefs who were allied to the British and whose horsemen were keeping the cavalry busy south of the river. Three such men rode with Wellesley and one had a badly trained horse that kept skittering sideways whenever a shell exploded.
Major Blackiston, the engineer on Wellesley’s staff who had been sent to reconnoiter the land north of the army, now galloped back behind the advancing line. “Broken ground up by the village, sir, cut by gullies,” he reported, “no place to advance.”
Wellesley grunted. He had no intention of sending infantry near the village yet, so Blackiston’s report was not immediately useful. “Did you see Orrock?”
“He was worried about his two guns, sir. Can’t take them forward because the teams have all been killed, but Campbell’s chivvying him on.”
Wellesley stood in his stirrups to look north and saw Orrock’s pickets at last moving smartly away. They were marching obliquely, without their two small guns, making space for the two sepoy battalions to come into the line. The 74th was beyond them, vanishing into a fold of ground. “Not too far, Orrock, not too far,” Wellesley muttered, then he lost sight of Orrock’s men as his horse followed the 78th into the lower ground. “Once we have them pinned against the river,” he asked Blackiston, gesturing to show he meant the River Juah to the north, “can they get away?”
“Eminently fordable, sir, I’m afraid,” Blackiston answered. “I doubt they can move more than a handful of the guns down the bank, but a man can escape easily enough.”
Wellesley grunted an acknowledgment and spurred ahead, leaving the engineer behind. “He didn’t even ask if I was chased!” Blackiston said to Barclay with mock indignation.
“Were you, John?”
“Damned sure I was. Two dozen of the bastards on those wiry little ponies. They look like children riding to hounds.”
“But no bullet holes?” Barclay asked.
“Not a one,” Blackiston said regretfully, then saw Sharpe’s surprised look. “It’s a wager, Sergeant,” the engineer explained. “Whichever of the General’s family ends up with the most bullet holes wins the pot.”
“Do I count, sir?”
“You replace Fletcher, and he didn’t have to pay to get in because he claimed he was penniless. We admitted him from the goodness of our hearts. But no cheating now. We can’t have fellows poking their coats with swords to win points.”
“How many points does Fletcher get, sir?” Sharpe asked. “For having his head blown off?”
“He’s disqualified, of course, on grounds of extreme carelessness.”
Sharpe laughed. Blackiston’s words were not funny, of course, but the laughter burst out of him, causing Wellesley to turn in his saddle and give him a scowl. In truth Sharpe was fighting a growing fear. For the moment he was safe enough, for the left flank of the attack was now in dead ground and the enemy bombardment was concentrating on the sepoy battalions who had still not reached the valley, but Sharpe could hear the whip-fast rumble of the round shots tearing up the air, he could hear the cannon fire, and every few seconds a howitzer shell would fall into the valley and explode in a puff of flaming smoke. So far the howitzers had failed to do any damage, but Sharpe could see the small bushes bend away from their blasts and hear the scraps of shell casing rip through leaves. In places the dry brush had caught fire.
He tried to concentrate on the small things. One of the canteens had a broken strap, so he knotted it. He watched his mare’s ears flicker at every shell burst and he wondered if horses felt fear. Did they understand this kind of danger? He watched the Scots, stolidly advancing through the shrubs and trees, magnificent in their feathered bearskin hats and their pleated kilts. They were a long way from bloody home, he thought, and was surprised that he did not really feel that for himself, but he did not know where home was. Not London, for sure, though he had grown up there. England? He supposed so, but what was England to him? Not what it was to Major Blackiston, he guessed. He wondered again about Pohlmann’s offer, and thought what it would be like to be standing in sash and sword behind that line of Mahratta guns. Safe as houses, he reckoned, just standing there and watching through the smoke as a thin line of redcoat enemies marched into horror. So why had he not accepted? And he knew the real reason was not some half-felt love of country, nor an aversion to Dodd, but because the only sash and sword he wanted were the ones that would let him go back to England and spit on the men who had made his life miserable. Except there would be no sash and sword. Sergeants did not get made into officers, not often, and he was suddenly ashamed of ever having quizzed McCandless about the matter. But at least the Colonel had not laughed at him.
Wellesley had turned to speak to Colonel Harness. “We’ll give the guns a volley of musketry, Harness, at your discretion. That should give us time to reload, but save the second volley for their infantry.”
“I’d already worked out the same for myself,” Harness answered with a scowl. “And I’ll not use skirmishers, not on a Sunday.” Usually the light company went ahead of the rest of the battalion and scattered into a loose line that would fire at the enemy before the main attack arrived, but Harness must have decided that he would rather reserve the light company’s fire for the one volley he planned to unload on the gunners.
“Soon be over,” Wellesley said, not contesting Harness’s decision to keep his light company in line, and Sharpe decided the General must be nervous for those last three words were unusually loquacious. Wellesley himself must have decided he had betrayed his feelings, for he looked blacker than ever. His high spirits had vanished ever since the enemy artillery had started firing.
The Scots were climbing now. They were tramping through stubble and at any minute they would cross the brow of the gentle hill and find themselves back in the gunners’ sights. The first the gunners would see would be the two regimental standards, then the officers on horseback, then the line of bearskins, and after that the whole red, white and black array of a battalion in line with the glint of their fixed bayonets showing in the sun. And God help us then, Sharpe thought, because every buggering gun straight ahead must be reloaded by now and just waiting for its target, and suddenly the first round shot banged on the crest just a few paces ahead and ricocheted harmlessly overhead. “That man fired early,” Barclay said. “Take his name.”
Sharpe looked to his right. The next four battalions, all sepoys, were safe in the dead ground now, while Orrock’s pickets and the 74th had vanished among the trees north of the valley. Harness’s Scots would climb into view first and, for a moment or two, would have the gunners’ undivided attention. Some of the Highlanders were hurrying, as if to get the ordeal over. “Hold your dressing!” Harness bellowed at them. “This ain’t a race to the tavern! Damn you!”
Elsie. Sharpe suddenly remembered the name of a girl who had worked in the tavern near Wetherby where he had fled after running away from Brewhouse Lane. Why had he thought of her, he wondered, and he had a sudden vision of the taproom, all steaming on a winter night from men’s wet coats, and Elsie and the other girls carrying the ale on trays and the fire sputtering in the hearth and the blind shepherd getting drunk and the dogs sleeping under the tables, and he imagined walking back into that smoke-blackened room with his officer’s sash and sword, and then he forgot all about Yorkshire as the 78th, with Wellesley’s family on its right, emerged onto the flat land in front of the enemy guns.
Sharpe’s firs
t surprised reaction was how close they were. The low ground had brought them within a hundred and fifty paces of the enemy guns, and his second reaction was how splendid the enemy looked, for their guns were lined up as though for inspection, while behind them the Mahratta battalions stood in four closely dressed ranks beneath their flags, and then he thought that this was what death must look like, and just as he thought that, so the whole gorgeous array of the enemy army vanished behind a vast bank of smoke, a roiling bank in which the smoke twisted as though it was tortured, and every few yards there was a spear of flame in the whiteness, while in front of the cloud the crops flattened away from the blast of the exploding powder as the heavy round shots tore through the Highlanders’ files.
There seemed to be blood everywhere, and broken men falling or sliding in the carnage. Somewhere a man gasped, but no one was screaming. A piper dropped his instrument and ran to a fallen man whose leg had been torn away. Every few yards there was a tangle of dead and dying men, showing where the round shot had snatched files from the regiment. A young officer tried to calm his horse which was edging sideways in fright, its eyes white and head tossing. Colonel Harness guided his own horse around a disemboweled man without giving the dead man a glance. Sergeants shouted angrily for the files to close up, as though it was the Highlanders’ fault that there were gaps in the line. Then everything seemed oddly silent. Wellesley turned and spoke to Barclay, but Sharpe did not hear a thing, then he realized that his ears were ringing from the terrible sound of that discharge of gunnery. Diomed pulled away from him and he tugged the gray horse back. Fletcher’s blood had dried to a crust on Diomed’s flank. Flies crawled all over the blood. A Highlander was swearing terribly as his comrades marched away from him. He was on his hands and knees, with no obvious wound, but then he looked up at Sharpe, spoke one last obscenity and collapsed forward. More flies congregated on the shining blue spill of the disemboweled man’s guts. Another man crawled through stubble, dragging his musket by its whitened sling.
Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803 Page 29
