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

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Steady now!” Harness shouted. “Damn your haste! Ain’t running a race! Think of your mothers!”

  “Mothers?” Blackiston asked.

  “Close up!” a sergeant shouted. “Close up!”

  The Mahratta gunners would be frantically reloading, but this time with canister. The gunsmoke was dissipating, twisting as the small breeze carried it away, and Sharpe could see the misty shapes of men ramming barrels and carrying charges to muzzles. Other men hand spiked gun trails to line the recoiled weapons on the Scots. Wellesley was curbing his stallion lest it get too far ahead of the Highlanders. Nothing showed on the right. The sepoys were still in dead ground and the right flank was lost among the scatter of trees and broken ground to the north, so that for the moment it seemed as if Harness’s Highlanders were fighting the battle all on their own, six hundred men against a hundred thousand, but the Scotsmen did not falter. They just left their wounded and dead behind and crossed the open land towards the guns that were loaded with their deaths. The piper began playing again, and the wild music seemed to put a new spring in the Highlanders’ steps. They were walking to death, but they went in perfect order and in seeming calm. No wonder men made songs about the Scots, Sharpe thought, then turned as hooves sounded behind and he saw it was Captain Campbell returning from his errand. The Captain grinned at Sharpe. “I thought I’d be too late.”

  “You’re in time, sir. Just in time, sir,” Sharpe said, but for what? he wondered.

  Campbell rode on to Wellesley to make his report. The General listened, nodded, then the guns straight ahead started firing again, only raggedly this time as each enemy gun fired as soon as it was loaded. The sound of each gun was a terrible bang, as deafening as a thump on the ear, and the canister flecked the field in front of the Scots with a myriad puffs of dust before bouncing up to snatch men backwards. Each round was a metal canister, crammed with musket balls or shards of metal and scraps of stone, and as it left the barrel the canister was ripped apart to spread its missiles like a giant blast of duckshot.

  Another cannon fired, then another, each gunshot pummeling the land and each taking its share of Scotsmen to eternity, or else making another cripple for the parish or a sufferer for the surgeon. The drummer boys were still playing, though one was limping and another was dripping blood onto his drum skin. The piper began playing a jauntier tune, as though this walk into an enemy horde was something to celebrate, and some of the Highlanders quickened their pace. “Not so eager!” Harness shouted. “Not so eager!” His basket-hilted claymore was in his hand and he was close behind his men’s two ranks as though he wanted to spur through and carry the dreadful blade against the gunners who were flaying his regiment. A bearskin was blown apart by canister, leaving the man beneath untouched.

  “Steady now!” a major called.

  “Close up! Close up!” the sergeants shouted. “Close the files!” Corporals, designated as file-closers, hurried behind the ranks and dragged men left and right to seal the gaps blown by the guns. The gaps were bigger now, for a well-aimed barrel of canister could take four or five files down, while a round shot could only blast away a single file at a time.

  Four guns fired, a fifth, then a whole succession of guns exploded together and the air around Sharpe seemed to be filled with a rushing, shrieking wind, and the Highlanders’ line seemed to twist in that violent gale, but though it left men behind, men who were bleeding and vomiting and crying and calling for their comrades or their mothers, the others closed their ranks and marched stolidly on. More guns fired, blanketing the enemy with smoke, and Sharpe could hear the canister hitting the regiment. Each blast brought a rattling sound as bullets struck muskets, while the Highlanders, like infantry everywhere, made sure their guns’ wide stocks covered their groins. The line was shorter now, much shorter, and it had almost reached the lingering edge of the great bank of smoke pumped out by the enemy’s guns.

  “78th,” Harness shouted in a huge voice, “halt!”

  Wellesley curbed his horse. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the sepoys coming out of the valley in one long red line, a broken line, for there were gaps between the battalions and the passage through the shrub-choked valley had skewed the sepoys’ dressing, and then the guns in the northern part of the Mahratta line opened fire and the line of sepoys became even more ragged. Yet still, like the Scots to their left, they pressed on into the gunfire.

  “Present!” Harness shouted, a note of anticipation in his voice.

  The Scotsmen brought their fire locks to their shoulders. They were only sixty yards from the guns and even a smoothbore musket was accurate enough at that range. “Don’t fire high, you dogs!” Harness warned them. “I’ll flog every man who fires high. Fire!”

  The volley sounded feeble compared to the thunder of the big guns, but it was a comfort all the same and Sharpe almost cheered as the Highlanders fired and their crackling volley whipped away across the stubble. The gunners were vanishing. Some must have been killed, but others were merely sheltering behind the big trails of their cannon.

  “Reload!” Harness shouted. “No dallying! Reload!”

  This was where the Highlanders’ training paid its dividends, for a musket was an awkward brute to reload, and made more cumbersome still by the seventeen-inch bayonet fixed to its muzzle. The triangular blade made it difficult to ram the gun properly, and some of the Highlanders twisted the blades off to make their job easier, but all reloaded swiftly, just as they had been trained to do in hard long weeks at home. They loaded, rammed, primed, then slotted the ramrods back into the barrel hoops. Those who had removed their bayonets refastened them to the lugs, then brought the guns back to the ready.

  “You save that volley for the infantry!” Harness warned them. “Now, boys, forward, and give the heathen bastards a proper Sabbath killing!”

  This was revenge. This was anger let loose. The enemy guns were still not loaded and their crews had been hard hit by the volley, and most of the guns would not have time to charge their barrels before the Scots were on them. Some of the gunners fled. Sharpe saw a mounted Mahratta officer rounding them up and driving them back to their pieces with the flat of his sword, but he also saw one gun, a painted monster directly to his front, being rammed hard by two men who heaved on the rammer, plucked it free then ran aside.

  “For what we are about to receive,” Blackiston murmured. The engineer had also seen the gunners charge their barrel.

  The gun fired, and its jet of smoke almost engulfed the General’s family. For an instant Sharpe saw Wellesley’s tall figure outlined against the pale smoke, then he could see nothing but blood and the General falling. The heat and discharge of the gun’s gasses rushed past Sharpe just a heartbeat after the scraps of canister had filled the air about him, but he had been directly behind the General and was in his shadow, and it was Wellesley who had taken the gun’s blast.

  Or rather it was his horse. The stallion had been struck a dozen times while Wellesley, charmed, had not taken a scratch. The big horse toppled, dead before he struck the ground, and Sharpe saw the General kick his feet out from the stirrups and use his hands to push himself up from the saddle as the horse collapsed. Wellesley’s right foot touched the ground first and, before the stallion’s weight could roll onto his leg, he jumped away, staggering slightly in his hurry. Campbell turned towards him, but the General waved him away. Sharpe kicked the mare on and untied Diomed’s reins from his belt. Was he supposed to get the saddle off the dead horse? He supposed so, and thus slid out of his own saddle. But what the hell was he to do with the mare and Diomed while he untangled the saddle from the dead stallion? Then he thought to tie both to the dead horse’s bridle.

  “Four hundred guineas gone to a penny bullet,” Wellesley said sarcastically, watching as Sharpe unbuckled the girth from the dead stallion. Or near dead, for the beast still twitched and kicked as the flies came to feast on its new blood. “I’ll take Diomed,” Wellesley told Sharpe, then stooped to help, tugging the sadd
le with its attached bags and holsters free of the dying horse, but then a feral scream made the General turn back to watch as Harness’s men charged into the gun line. The scream was the noise they made as they struck home, a scream that was the release of all their fears and a terrible noise presaging their enemies’ death. And how they gave it. The Scotsmen found the gunners who had stayed at their posts crouching under the trails and they dragged them out and bayoneted them again and again. “Bastard,” one man screamed, plunging his blade repeatedly into a dead gunner’s belly. “Heathen black bastard!” He kicked the man’s head, then stabbed down with his bayonet again. Colonel Harness back swung his sword to kill a man, then casually wiped the blood off the blade onto his horse’s black mane. “Form line!” he shouted. “Form line! Hurry, you rogues!”

  A scatter of gunners had fled back from the Scots to the safety of the Mahratta infantry who were now little more than a hundred paces away. They should have charged, Sharpe thought. While the Scots were blindly hacking away at the gunners, the infantry should have advanced, but instead they waited for the next stage of the Scots attack. To his right there were still guns firing at the sepoys, but that was a separate battle, unrelated to the scramble as sergeants dragged Highlanders away from the dead and dying gunners and pushed them into their ranks.

  “There are still gunners alive, sir!” a lieutenant shouted at Harness.

  “Form up!” Harness shouted, ignoring the lieutenant. Sergeants and corporals shoved men into line. “Forward!” Harness shouted.

  “Hurry, man,” Wellesley said to Sharpe, but not angrily. Sharpe had heaved the saddle over Diomed’s back and now stooped under the gray horse’s belly to gather the girth. “He doesn’t like it too tight,” the General said.

  Sharpe buckled the strap and Wellesley took Diomed’s reins from him and heaved himself up into the saddle without another word. The General’s coat was smeared with blood, but it was horse blood, not his own. “Well done, Harness!” he called ahead to the Scotsman, then rode away and Sharpe unhitched the mare from the dead horse’s bridle, clambered onto her back and followed.

  Three pipers played for the 78th now. They were far from home, under a furnace sun in a blinding sky, and they brought the mad music of Scotland’s wars to India. And it was madness. The 78th had suffered hard from the gunfire and the line of their advance was littered with dead, dying and broken men, yet the survivors now re-formed to attack the main Mahratta battle line. They were back in two ranks, they held their bloody bayonets in front, and they advanced against Pohlmann’s own compoo on the right of the enemy line. The Highlanders looked huge, made into giants by their tall bearskin hats with their feather plumes, and they looked terrible, for they were. These were northern warriors from a hard country and not a man spoke as they advanced. To the waiting Mahrattas they must have seemed like creatures from nightmare, as terrible as the gods who writhed on their temple walls. Yet the Mahratta infantry in their blue and yellow coats were just as proud. They were warriors recruited from the martial tribes of northern India, and now they leveled their muskets as the two Scottish ranks approached.

  The Scots were terribly outnumbered and it seemed to Sharpe that they must all die in the coming volley. Sharpe himself was in a half-daze, stunned by the noise yet aware that his mood was swinging between elation at the Scottish bravery and the pure terror of battle. He heard a cheer and looked right to see the sepoys charging into the guns. He watched gunners flee, then saw the Madrassi sepoys tear into the laggards with their bayonets.

  “Now we’ll see how their infantry fights,” Wellesley said savagely to Campbell, and Sharpe understood that this was the real testing point, for infantry was everything. The infantry was despised for it did not have the cavalry’s glamour, nor the killing capacity of the gunners, but it was still the infantry that won battles. Defeat the enemy’s infantry and the cavalry and gunners had nowhere to hide.

  The Mahrattas waited with leveled muskets. The Highlanders, silent again, marched on. Ninety paces to go, eighty, and then an officer’s sword swung down in the Mahratta ranks and the volley came. It seemed ragged to Sharpe, maybe because most men did not fire on the word of command, but instead fired after they heard their neighbor’s discharge, and he was not even aware of a bullet going close past his head because he was watching the Scots, terrified for them, but it seemed to him that not a man fell. Some men must have been hit, for he saw ripples where the files opened to step past the fallen, but the 78th, or what was left of the 78th, was intact still and still Harness did not fire, but just kept marching them onward.

  “They fired high!” Campbell exulted.

  “They drill well, fire badly,” Barclay observed happily.

  Seventy paces to go, then sixty. A Highlander staggered from the line and collapsed. Two other men who had been wounded by the canister, but were now recovered, hurried from the rear and pushed their way into the ranks. “Halt!” Harness suddenly called. “Present!”

  The guns, tipped by their bloodstained steel blades, came up into the Highlanders’ shoulders so that the whole line seemed to take a quarter-turn to the right. The Mahratta gunsmoke was clearing and the enemy soldiers could see the Scots’ heavy muskets, with hate behind them, and the Highlanders waited a heartbeat so the enemy could also see their death in the leveled muskets.

  “You’ll fire low, you bastards, or I’ll want to know why,” Harness growled, then took a deep breath. “Fire!” he shouted, and his Highlanders did not fire high. They fired low and their heavy balls ripped into bellies and thighs and groins.

  “Now go for them!” Harness shouted. “Just go for the bastards!” And the Highlanders, unleashed, ran forward with their bayonets and began to utter their shrill war cries, as discordant as the music of the pipes that flayed them onwards. They were killers loosed to the joys of slaughter and the enemy did not wait for its coming, but just turned and fled.

  The enemy in the rearward ranks of the compoo had room to run, but those in front were impeded by those behind and could not escape. A terrible despairing wail sounded as the 78th struck home and as their bayonets rose and fell in an orgy of killing. An officer led an attack on a knot of standard-bearers who tried desperately to save their flags, but the Scots would not be denied and Sharpe watched as the kilted men stepped over the dead to lunge their blades at the living. The flags fell, then were raised again in Scottish hands. A cheer went up, and just then Sharpe heard another cheer and saw the sepoys charging home at the next section of the enemy line and, just as the first Mahratta troops had run from the Scots, so now the neighboring battalions fled from the sepoys. The enemy’s vaunted infantry had crumpled at the first contact. They had watched the thin line come towards them, and they must have assumed that the red coats would be turned even redder by the heavy fire of the artillery, but the line had taken the guns’ punishment and just kept coming, battered and bleeding, and it must have seemed to the Mahrattas that such men were invincible. The huge Scots in their strange kilts had started the rout, but the sepoy battalions from Madras now set about the destruction of all the enemy’s center and right. Only his left still stood its ground.

  The sepoys killed, then pursued the fugitives who streamed westwards. “Hold them!” Wellesley shouted at the nearest battalion commanders. “Hold them!” But the sepoys would not be held. They wanted to pursue a beaten enemy and they streamed raggedly in his wake, killing as they went. Wellesley wheeled Diomed. “Colonel Harness!”

  “You’ll want me to form post here?” the Scotsman asked. Blood dripped from his sword.

  “Here,” Wellesley agreed. The enemy infantry might have fled, but there was a maelstrom of cavalry a half-mile away and those horsemen were cantering forward to attack the disordered British pursuers. “Deploy your guns, Harness.”

  “I’ve given the order already,” Harness said, gesturing towards his two small gun teams that were hurrying six-pounders into position. “Column of full companies!” Harness shouted. “Quarter distance
!”

  The Scots, one minute so savage, now ran back into their ranks and files. The battalion faced no immediate enemy, for there was neither infantry nor artillery within range, but the distant cavalry was a threat and so Harness arranged them in their ten companies, close together, so that they resembled a square. The close formation could defend itself against any cavalry attack, and just as easily shake itself into a line or into a column of assault. Harness’s twin six-pounders were unlimbered and now began firing towards the horsemen who, appalled by the wreckage of their infantry, paused rather than attack the redcoats. British and Indian officers were galloping among the pursuing sepoys, ordering them back to their ranks, while Harness’s 78th stood like a fortress to which the sepoys could retreat. “So sanity is not a requisite of soldiering,” Wellesley said quietly.

  “Sir?” Sharpe was the only man close enough to hear the General and assumed that the words were addressed to him.

  “None of your business, Sharpe, none of your business,” Wellesley said, startled that he had been overheard. “A canteen, if you please.”

  It had been a good start, the General decided, for the right of Pohlmann’s army had been destroyed and that destruction had taken only minutes. He watched as the sepoys hurried back to their ranks and as the first puckalees appeared from the nearby Kaitna with their huge loads of canteens and water skins. He would let the men have their drink of water, then the line would be turned to face north and he could finish the job by assaulting Assaye. The General kicked Diomed around to examine the ground over which his infantry must advance and, just as he turned, so all hell erupted at the village.

  Wellesley frowned at the dense cloud of gunsmoke that had suddenly appeared close to the mud walls. He heard volley fire, and he could see that it was the surviving Mahratta left wing that did the firing, not his redcoats, and, more ominously, a surge of Mahratta cavalry had broken through on the northern flank and was now riding free in the country behind Wellesley’s small army.