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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Dodd’s Cobras, together with the battalion from Dupont’s compoo, began to curl about the southern flank of the trapped regiment. It should take only three or four volleys, Dodd thought, to end the business, after which his men could go in with the bayonet. Not that his men were firing volleys any longer; instead they were firing as soon as their muskets were charged and Dodd felt their excitement and sought to curb it. “Don’t waste your fire!” he shouted. “Aim low!” William Dodd had no desire to lead a charge through the stinking smoke to find an unbroken formation of vengeful Highlanders waiting with bayonets. Dodd might dislike the Scots, but he had a healthy fear of fighting them with cold steel. Thin the bastards first, he thought, batter them, bleed them, then massacre them, but his men were too excited at the prospect of imminent victory and far too much of their fire was either going high or else being wasted on the barricade of the dead. “Aim low!” he shouted again. “Aim low!”

  “They won’t last,” Joubert said. Indeed the Frenchman was amazed that the Scots still survived.

  “Awkward things to kill, Scotsmen,” Dodd said. He took a drink from his canteen. “I do hate the bastards. All preachers or thieves. Stealing Englishmen’s jobs. Aim low!” A man was thrown back near Dodd, blood bright on his white coat. “Joubert?” Dodd called back to the Frenchman.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Bring up two of the regiment’s guns. Load with canister.” That would end the bastards. Two gouts of canister from the four-pounders would blow great gaps in the Scottish square and Dodd could then lead his men into those gaps and fillet the dying regiment from its inside out. He would be damned if the cavalry would take the flags. They were his! It was Dodd who had fought these Highlanders to a standstill and Dodd who planned to carry the silk banners to Scindia’s tent and there fetch his proper reward. “Hurry, Joubert!” he called.

  Dodd drew his pistol and fired over his men’s ranks into the smoke that hid the dying square. “Aim low!” he shouted. “Don’t waste your fire!” But it would not be long now. Two blasts of canister, he reckoned, and then the bayonets would bring him victory.

  Major Samuel Swinton stood just behind the western face of the square which looked towards the white-coated infantry. He could hear an English voice shouting orders and encouragement in the enemy lines and, though Swinton himself was an Englishman, the accent angered him. No English bastard was going to destroy the 74th, not while Major Swinton commanded, and he told his men that a Sassenach was their enemy and that seemed to add zest to their efforts. “Keep low!” he told them. “Keep firing!” By staying low the Scots kept behind the protection of their makeshift barricade, but it also made their muskets much more difficult to reload and some men took the risk of standing after each shot. Their only protection then was the mask of smoke that hid the regiment from its enemies. And thank God, Swinton thought, that the enemy had brought no artillery forward.

  The square was swept by musket fire. Much of it, especially from the north, flew high, but the white-coated regiment was better trained and their musketry was having an effect, so much so that Swinton took the inside rank of the eastern face and added it to the west. The sergeants and corporals closed the ranks as the enemy bullets hurled men back into the bloody interior of the shrinking square where the Major stepped among the Scottish dead and wounded. Swinton’s horse had died, struck by three musket balls and put out of its misery by the Major’s own pistol. Colonel Orrock, who had first led the pickets to disaster, had also lost his horse. “It wasn’t my fault,” he kept telling Swinton, and Swinton wanted to hit the bastard every time he spoke. “I obeyed Wellesley’s orders!” Orrock insisted.

  Swinton ignored the fool. Right from the beginning of the advance Swinton had sensed that the pickets were going too far to the right. Orrock’s orders had been clear enough. He was to incline right, thus making space for the two sepoy battalions to come into the line, then attack straight ahead, but the fool had led his men ever more northwards and Swinton, who had been trying to loop about the pickets to come up on their right, never had a chance to get into position. He had sent the 74th’s adjutant to speak to Orrock, pleading with the East India Company Colonel to turn ahead, but Orrock had arrogantly brushed the man off and kept marching towards Assaye.

  Swinton had a choice then. He could have ignored Orrock and straightened his own attack to form the right of the line that Wellesley had taken forward, but the leading half company of Orrock’s pickets were fifty men from Swinton’s own regiment and the Major was not willing to see those fifty men sacrificed by a fool and so he had followed the pickets on their errant course in the hope that his men’s fire could rescue Orrock. It had failed. Only four of the fifty men of the half company had rejoined the regiment, the rest were dead and dying, and now the whole 74th seemed to be doomed. They were encompassed by noise and smoke, surrounded by enemies, dying in their square, but the piper was still playing and the men were still fighting and the regiment still lived, and the two flags were still lifted high though by now the fringed squares of silk were ripped and tattered by the blast of bullets.

  An ensign in the color party took a musket ball in his left eye and fell backwards without a sound. A sergeant gripped the staff in one hand and in his other was a halberd with a wicked blade. In a moment, the sergeant knew, he might have to fight with the halberd. The square would end with a huddle of bloodied men around the colors and the enemy would fall on them and for a few moments it would be steel against steel, and the sergeant reckoned he would give the flag to a wounded man and do what harm he could with the heavy, long-shafted axe. It was a pity to die, but he was a soldier, and no one had yet devised a way a man could live for ever, not even those clever bastards in Edinburgh. He thought of his wife in Dundee, and of his woman in the camp at Naulniah, and he regretted his many sins for it was not good for a man to go to his God with a bad conscience, but it was too late now and so he gripped the halberd and hid his fear and determined he would die like a man and take a few other men with him.

  The muskets banged into Highlanders’ shoulders. They bit the tips from new cartridges and every bite added salty gunpowder to their mouths so that they had no spittle, only bone-dry throats that breathed filthy smoke, and the regiment’s puckalees were far away, lost somewhere in the country behind. The Scots went on firing, and the powder sparks from the pan burned their cheeks, and they loaded and rammed and knelt and fired again, and somewhere beyond the smoke the enemy’s fire came flashing in to shudder the corpses of the barricade or else to snatch a man back in a spray of blood. Wounded men fought alongside the living, their faces blackened by powder, their mouths parched, their shoulders bruised, and the white facings and cuffs of their red coats were spattered with the blood of men now dead or dying.

  “Close up!” the sergeants shouted and the square shrank another few feet as dying men were hauled back to the square’s center and the living closed the files. Men who had started the day five or six files apart were neighbors now.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Orrock insisted.

  Swinton had nothing to say. There was nothing to say, and nothing more to do except die, and so he picked up the musket of a dead man, took the cartridge box from the corpse’s pouch, and pushed into the square’s western face. The man to his right was drunk, but Swinton did not care, for the man was fighting. “Come to do some proper work, Major?” the drunken man greeted Swinton, with a toothless grin.

  “Come to do some proper work, Tam,” Swinton agreed. He bit the end from a cartridge, charged the musket, primed the lock and fired into the smoke. He reloaded, fired again, and prayed he would die bravely.

  Fifty yards away William Dodd watched the cloud of smoke made by the Scottish muskets. The cloud was getting smaller, he thought. Men were dying there and the square was shrinking, but it was still spitting flame and lead. Then he heard the jingle of chains and turned to see the two four-pounder guns being hauled towards him. He would let the guns fire one blast of canister each, then he wo
uld have his men fix bayonets and he would lead them across the rampart of corpses into the heart of the smoke.

  And then the trumpet called.

  CHAPTER•11

  Colonel McCandless had stayed close to his friend Colonel Wallace, the commander of the brigade which formed the right of Wellesley’s line. Wallace had seen the pickets and his own regiment, the 74th, vanish somewhere to the north, but he had been too busy bringing his two sepoy battalions into the attacking line to worry about Orrock or Swinton. He did charge an aide to keep watching for Orrock’s men, expecting to see them veering back towards him at any moment, then he forgot the errant pickets as his men climbed from the low ground into the fire of the Mahratta gun line. Canister shredded Wallace’s ranks, it beat like hail on his men’s muskets and it swept the leaves from the scattered trees through which the Madrassi battalions marched, but, just like the 78th, the sepoys did not turn. They walked doggedly on like men pushing into a storm, and at sixty paces Wallace halted them to pour a vengeful volley into the gunners and McCandless could hear the musket balls clanging off the painted gun barrels. Sevajee was with McCandless and he stared in awe as the sepoys reloaded and went forward again, this time carrying their bayonets to the gunners. For a moment there was chaotic slaughter as Madrassi sepoys chased Goanese gunners around limbers and guns, but Wallace was already looking ahead and could see that the vaunted enemy infantry was wavering, evidently shaken by the easy victory of the 78th, and so the Colonel shouted at his sepoys to ignore the gunners and re-form and push on to attack the infantry. It took a moment to re-form the line, then it advanced from the guns. Wallace gave the enemy infantry one volley, then charged, and all along the line the vaunted Mahratta foot fled from the sepoy attack.

  McCandless was busy for the next few moments. He knew that the assault had gone nowhere near Dodd’s regiment, but nor had he expected it to, and he was anticipating riding northwards with Wallace to find the 74th, the regiment McCandless knew was nearest to his prey, but when the sepoys lost their self-control and broke ranks to pursue the beaten enemy infantry, McCandless helped the other officers round them up and herd them back. Sevajee and his horsemen stayed behind, for there was a possibility that they would be mistaken for enemy cavalry. For a moment or two there was a real danger that the scattered sepoys would be charged and slaughtered by the mass of enemy cavalry to the west, but its own fleeing infantry was in the cavalry’s way, the 78th stood like a fortress on the left flank, and the Scottish guns were skipping balls along the cavalry’s face, and the Mahratta horsemen, after a tentative move forward, thought better of the charge. The sepoys took their ranks again, grinning because of their victory. McCandless, his small chore done, rejoined Sevajee. “So that’s how Mahrattas fight.” The Colonel could not resist the provocation.

  “Mercenaries, Colonel, mercenaries,” Sevajee said, “not Mahrattas.”

  Five victorious redcoat regiments now stood in ranks on the southern half of the battlefield. To the west the enemy infantry was still disordered, though officers were trying to re-form them, while to the east there was a horror of bodies and blood left on the ground across which the redcoats had advanced. The five regiments had swept through the gun line and chased away the infantry and now formed their ranks some two hundred paces west of where the Mahratta infantry had made their line so that they could look back on the trail of carnage they had caused. Riderless horses galloped through the thinning skeins of powder smoke where dogs were already gnawing at the dead and birds with monstrous black wings were flapping down to feast on corpses. Beyond the corpses, on the distant ground where the Scots and sepoys had started their advance, there were now Mahratta cavalrymen, and McCandless, gazing through his telescope, saw some of those cavalrymen harnessing British artillery that had been abandoned when its ox teams had been killed by the bombardment that had opened the battle.

  “Where’s Wellesley?” Colonel Wallace asked McCandless.

  “He went northwards.” McCandless was now staring towards the village where a dreadful battle was being fought, but he could see no details for there were just enough trees to obscure the fight, though the mass of powder smoke rising above the leaves was as eloquent as the unending crackle of musketry. McCandless knew his business was to be where that battle was being fought, for Dodd was surely close to the fight if not involved, but in McCandless’s path was the stub of the Mahratta defense line, that part of the line which had not been attacked by the Scots or the sepoys, and those men were turning to face southwards. To reach that southern battle McCandless would have to loop wide to the east, but that stretch of country was full of marauding bands of enemy cavalry. “I should have advanced with Swinton,” he said ruefully.

  “We’ll catch up with him soon enough,” Wallace said, though without conviction. It was clear to both men that Wallace’s regiment, the 74th, had marched too far to the north and had become entangled in the thicket of Mahratta defenses about Assaye and their commanding officer, removed from them to lead the brigade, was plainly worried. “Time to turn north, I think,” Wallace said, and he shouted at his two sepoy battalions to wheel right. He had no authority over the remaining two sepoy battalions, nor over the 78th, for those were in Harness’s brigade, but he was ready to march his two remaining battalions towards the distant village in the hope of rescuing his own regiment.

  McCandless watched as Wallace organized the two battalions. This part of the battlefield, which minutes before had been so loud with screaming canister and the hammer of volleys, was now strangely quiet. Wellesley’s attack had been astonishingly successful, and the enemy was regrouping while the attackers, left victorious on the Kaitna’s northern bank, drew their breath and looked for the next target. McCandless thought of using Sevajee’s handful of horsemen as an escort to take him safely towards the village, but another rush of Mahratta cavalry galloped up from the low ground. Wellesley and his aides had ridden northwards and they seemed to have survived the milling enemy horsemen, but the General’s passing had attracted more horsemen to the area and McCandless had no mind to run the gauntlet of their venom and so he abandoned the idea of a galloping dash northwards. It was just then that he noticed Sergeant Hakeswill, crouching by a dead enemy with the reins of a riderless horse in one hand. A group of redcoats was with him, all from his own regiment, the 33rd. And just as McCandless saw the Sergeant, so Hakeswill looked up and offered the Scotsman a glance of such malevolence that McCandless almost turned away in horror. Instead he spurred his horse across the few yards that separated them. “What are you doing here, Sergeant?” he asked harshly.

  “My duty, sir, as is incumbent on me,” Hakeswill said. As ever, when addressed by an officer, he had straightened to attention, his right foot tucked behind his left, his elbows back and his chest thrust out.

  “And what are your duties?” McCandless asked.

  “Puckalees, sir. In charge of puckalees, sir, making sure the scavenging little brutes does their duty, sir, and nothing else, sir. Which they does, sir, on account of me looking after them like a father.” He unbent sufficiently to give a swift nod in the direction of the 78th where, sure enough, a group of puckalees was distributing heavy skins of water they had brought from the river.

  “Have you written to Colonel Gore yet?” McCandless asked.

  “Have I written to Colonel Gore yet, sir?” Hakeswill repeated the question, his face twitching horribly under the shako’s peak. He had forgotten that he was supposed to have the warrant reissued, for he was relying instead on McCandless’s death to clear the way to Sharpe’s arrest. Not that this was the place to murder McCandless, for there were a thousand witnesses within view. “I’ve done everything what ought to be done, sir, like a soldier should,” Hakeswill answered evasively.

  “I shall write to Colonel Gore myself,” McCandless now told Hakeswill, “because I’ve been thinking about that warrant. You have it?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Then let me see it again,” the Colonel demand
ed.

  Hakeswill unwillingly pulled the grubby paper from his pouch and offered it to the Colonel. McCandless unfolded the warrant, quickly scanned the lines, and suddenly the falsity in the words leaped out at him. “It says here that Captain Morris was assaulted on the night of August the fifth.”

  “So he was, sir. Foully assaulted, sir.”

  “Then it could not have been Sharpe who committed the assault, Sergeant, for on the night of the fifth he was with me. That was the day I collected Sergeant Sharpe from Seringapatam’s armory.” McCandless’s face twisted with distaste as he looked down at the Sergeant. “You say you were a witness to the assault?” he asked Hakeswill.

  Hakeswill knew when he was beaten. “Dark night, sir,” the Sergeant said woodenly.

  “You’re lying, Sergeant,” McCandless said icily, “and I know you are lying, and my letter to Colonel Gore will attest to your lying. You have no business here, and I shall so inform Major General Wellesley. If it was up to me then your punishment would take place here, but that is for the General to decide. You will give me that horse.”

  “This horse, sir? I found it, sir. Wandering, sir.”

  “Give it here!” McCandless snapped. Sergeants had no business having horses without permission. He snatched the reins from Hakeswill. “And if you do have duties with the puckalees, Sergeant, I suggest you attend to them rather than plunder the dead. As for this warrant . . .” The Colonel, before Hakeswill’s appalled gaze, tore the paper in two. “Good day, Sergeant,” McCandless said and, his small victory complete, turned his horse and spurred away.

  Hakeswill watched the Colonel ride away, then stooped and picked up the two halves of the warrant which he carefully stowed in his pouch. “Scotchman,” he spat.

  Private Lowry shifted uncomfortably. “If he’s right, Sergeant, and Sharpie wasn’t there, then we shouldn’t be here.”