Sharpe's Triumph s-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  "No, sir."

  "A pernicious thing. Taking from a man what he has honestly earned! It's thievery, Sharpe, disguised as government." The Colonel scowled. "So an ensign is lucky to see seventy pounds out of his salary, and even if he lives frugal that won't cover his mess bills. Most regiments charge an officer two shillings for dinner every day, a shilling for wine, though of course you could go without wine well enough and water's free, but there's sixpence a day for the mess servant, another sixpence for breakfast and sixpence for washing and mending. You can't live as an officer without at least a hundred pounds a year on top of your salary. Have you got the money?"

  "No, sir," Sharpe lied. In truth he had enough jewels sewn into his red coat to buy himself a majority, but he did not want McCandless to know that.

  "Good," McCandless said, "because that isn't the best way. Most regiments won't look at a man buying himself out of the ranks. Why should they? They've got plenty of young hopefuls coming from the shires with their parents' cash hot in their purses, so the last thing they need is some half-educated ranker who can't meet his mess bills. I'm not saying it's impossible. Any regiment posted to the West Indies will sell you an ensign's post cheap, but that's because they can't get anyone else on account of the yellow fever. A posting to the West Indies is a death sentence. But if a man wants to get into anything other than a West Indies-bound regiment, Sharpe, then he must hope for the second route. He must be a sergeant and he must be able to read and write, but there's a third requirement too. The fellow must perform a quite impossibly gallant act. Leading a Forlorn Hope will do the trick, but any act, so long as it's suicidal, will serve, though of course he must do it under the General's eye or else it's all a waste of time."

  Sharpe sat in silence for a while, daunted by the obstacles that lay in the way of his daydream's fulfilment.

  "Do they give him a test, sir?" he asked. "In reading?" That thought worried him for, although his reading was improving night by night, he still stumbled over quite simple words. He claimed that the Bible's print was too small, and McCandless was kind enough to believe the excuse.

  "A test in reading? Good Lord, no! For an officer!" McCandless smiled tiredly. "They take his word, of course." The Colonel paused for a second. "But I've often wondered, Sharpe," he went on, "why a man from the ranks would want to be an officer?"

  So he could go back to Brewhouse Lane, Sharpe thought, and kick some teeth in.

  "I was just wondering about it, sir," he said instead. "Just thinking, sir."

  "Because in many ways," McCandless said, "sergeants have more influence with the men. Less formal prestige, perhaps, but certainly more influence than any junior officer. Ensigns and lieutenants, Sharpe, are very insignificant creatures. They're really of very little use most of the time. It's not till a man reaches his captaincy that he begins to be valuable."

  "I'm sure you're right, sir," Sharpe said lamely. "I was just thinking."

  That night the Colonel relapsed into fever, and Sharpe sat in the hut doorway and listened to the rain beat on the land. He could not shake the daydream, could not drive away the picture of him ducking through the gate in Brewhouse Lane and seeing the faces he hated. He wanted it, he wanted it terribly, and so he dreamed on, dreaming the impossible, but unable to check the dream. He did not know how, but he would somehow make the leap. Or else die in the attempt.

  Chapter 7

  Dodd called his new gelding Peter.

  "Because it's got no balls, Monsewer," he informed Pierre Joubert, and he repeated the poor joke a dozen times in the next two days just to make certain that its insult was understood. Joubert smiled and said nothing, and the Major would launch himself into a panegyric on Peter's merits. His old horse had whistling lungs, while this one could be ridden all day and still had its head up and a spring in its long stride. "A thoroughbred, Captain," he told Joubert, "an English thoroughbred. Not some screw-backed old French nag, but a proper horse."

  The men in Dodd's Cobras liked to see their Major on his fine big horse. It was true that one man had died in the beast's acquisition, yet the theft had still been a fine piece of banditry, and the men had laughed to see the English Sergeant searching the camp while all the while Major Dodd's jemadar, Gopal, was hiding the horses a long way to the north.

  Colonel Pohlmann was less amused.

  "I promised McCandless safe conduct, Major," he growled at Dodd the first time he saw the Englishman on his new gelding.

  "Quite right, sir."

  "And you've added horse-thieving to your catalogue of crimes?"

  "I can't think what you mean, sir," Dodd protested in mock innocence. "I purchased this beast off a horse trader yesterday, sir. Gypsy-looking fellow from Korpalgaon. Took the last of my savings."

  "And your jemadar's new horse?" Pohlmann asked, pointing to Gopal who was riding Colonel McCandless's mare.

  "He bought her from the same fellow," Dodd said.

  "Of course he did, Major," Pohlmann said wearily. The Colonel knew it was pointless to chide a man for theft in an army that was encouraged to steal for its very existence, yet he was offended by Dodd's abuse of the hospitality that had been extended to McCandless.

  The Scotsman was right, Pohlmann thought, Dodd was a man without honour, yet the Hanoverian knew that if Scindia employed none but saints then he would have no European officers.

  The theft of McCandless's horses only added more reason for Pohlmann to dislike William Dodd. He found the Englishman too dour, too jealous and too humourless, yet still, despite his dislike, he recognized that the Major was a fine soldier. His rescue of his regiment from Ahmednuggur had been an inglorious operation executed superbly, and Pohlmann, at least, understood the achievement, just as he appreciated that Dodd's men liked their new commanding officer. The Hanoverian was not certain why Dodd was popular, for he was not an easy man; he had no small talk, he smiled rarely, and he was punctilious about details that other officers might let pass, yet still the men liked him. Maybe they sensed that he was on their side, wholly on their side, recognizing that nothing is achieved in war by officers without men, and a good deal by men without officers, and for that reason, if no other, they were glad he was their commanding officer. And men who like their commanding officer are more likely to fight well than men who do not, and so Pohlmann was glad that he had William Dodd as a regimental commander even if he did disdain him as little better than a common thief.

  Pohlmann's compoo had now joined the rest of Scindia's army, which had already been swollen by the troops of the Rajah of Berar, so that over a hundred thousand men and all their animals now wandered the Deccan Plain in search of grazing, forage and grain. The vast army hugely outnumbered its enemy, but Scindia made no attempt to bring Wellesley to battle. Instead he led his horde in an apparently aimless fashion.

  They went south towards the enemy, then withdrew north, they made a lumbering surge to the east and then retraced their steps to the west, and everywhere they marched they stripped the farms, slashed down crops, broke into granaries, slaughtered livestock and rifled humble homes in search of rice, wheat or lentils. Every day a score of cavalry patrols rode south to find the enemy armies, but the Mahratta horsemen rarely came close to the redcoats for the British cavalry counter-patrolled aggressively and each day left dead horses on the plain while Scindia's great host wandered mindlessly on.

  "Now that you have such a fine horse," Pohlmann said to Dodd a week after the Major's theft, "perhaps you can lead a cavalry patrol?"

  "Gladly, sir."

  "Someone has to find out what the British are doing," Pohlmann grumbled.

  Dodd rode south with some of Pohlmann's own cavalry and his patrol succeeded where so many others had failed, but only because the Major donned his old red coat so that it would appear as if his score of horsemen were under the command of a British officer, and the ruse worked for Dodd came across a much smaller force of Mysore cavalry who rode unsuspecting into the trap. Six enemy escaped, eight died, and their
leader yielded a mass of information before Dodd shot him through the head.

  "You might have brought him back to us," Pohlmann remonstrated gently when Dodd returned.

  "I could have talked with him myself," the Colonel added, peering down from his green-curtained howdah. The elephant plodded behind a purple-coated horseman who carried Pohlmann's red flag emblazoned with the white horse of Hanover.

  There was a girl with Pohlmann, but all Dodd could see of her was a dark languid hand bright with gems hanging over the howdatfs edge.

  "So tell me what you learned, Major," Pohlmann ordered.

  "The British are back close to the Godavery, sir, but they're still split into two forces and neither has more than six thousand infantry. Wellesley's nearest to us while Stevenson's moving off to the west. I've made a map, sir, with their dispositions." Dodd held the paper up towards the swaying howdah.

  "Hoping to pincer us, are they?" Pohlmann asked, reaching down to pluck the map from the Major's hand. "Not now, Liebchen," he added, though not to Dodd.

  "I imagine they're staying divided because of the roads, sir," Dodd said.

  "Of course," Pohlmann said, wondering why Dodd was teaching him to suck eggs. The British need for decent roads was much greater than the Mahrattas', for the British carried all their foodstuffs in ox wagons and the cumbersome vehicles could not manage any country other than the smoothest grass plains. Which meant that the two enemy armies could only advance where the ground was smooth or the roads adequate. It made their movements clumsy, and it made any attempt to pincer Scindia's army doubly difficult, though by now, Pohlmann reflected, the British commander must be thoroughly confused about Scindia's intentions. So was Scindia, for that matter, for the Maharajah was taking his tactical advice from astrologers rather than from his European officers which meant that the great horde was impelled to its wanderings by the glimmer of stars, the import of dreams and the entrails of goats.

  "If we marched south now," Dodd urged Pohlmann, "we could trap Wellesley's men south of Aurungabad. Stevenson's too far away to support him."

  "It does sound a good idea," Pohlmann agreed genially, pocketing Dodd's map.

  "There must be some plan," Dodd suggested irritably.

  "Must there?" Pohlmann asked airily.

  "Higher up, Liebchen, just there! That's good!" The bejewelled hand had vanished inside the howdah. Pohlmann closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them and smiled down on Dodd. "The plan," the Hanoverian said grandly, "is to wait and see whether Holkar will join us." Holkar was the most powerful of all the Mahratta chieftains, but he was biding his time, uncertain whether to join Scindia and the Rajah of Berar or whether to sit out the war with his huge forces intact. "And the next part of the plan," Pohlmann went on, "is to hold a durbar. Have you ever attended a durbar, Dodd?"

  "No, sir."

  "It is a council, a committee of the old and the wise, or rather of the senile and the talkative. The war will be discussed, as will the position of the stars and the mood of the gods and the failure of the monsoon and, once the durbar is over, if indeed it ever ends, we shall commence our wandering once again, but perhaps a decision of sorts will have been made, though whether that decision will be to retire on Nagpoor, or to advance on Hyderabad, or to choose a battlefield and allow the British to attack us, or simply to march from now until the Day of Judgment, I cannot yet tell you. I shall offer advice, of course, but if Scindia dreams of monkeys on the night before the durbar then not even Alexander the Great could persuade him to fight."

  "But Scindia must know better than to let the two British forces unite, sir?" Dodd said.

  "He does, he does, indeed he does. Our lord and master is no fool, but he is inscrutable. We are waiting for the omens to be propitious."

  "They're propitious now," Dodd protested.

  "That is not for you or me to decide. We Europeans can be relied upon to fight, but not to read the messages of the stars or to understand the meaning of dreams. But when it comes to the battle, Major, you can be sure that the stars and the dreams will be ignored and that Scindia will leave all the decisions to me."

  Pohlmann smiled benignly at Dodd, then gazed out at the horde of cavalry that covered the plain. There must have been fifty thousand horsemen in view, but Pohlmann would happily have marched with only a thousand. Most of the Mahratta horsemen were only present for the loot they hoped to steal after victory and, though they were all fine riders and brave fighters, they had no conception of picquet duty and none was willing to charge into the face of an infantry unit. They did not understand that a cavalry troop needed to take horrific casualties if it was to break infantry; instead they reckoned Scindia's great guns and his mercenary infantry would do the shattering and they would then pursue the broken enemy like hornets, and until that happy moment they were just so many useless mouths to feed. If they all went away tomorrow it would make no difference to the war's outcome for the victory would still be won by the artillery and the infantry. Pohlmann knew that and he imagined lining his guns wheel to wheel in batteries, with his infantry formed just behind and then watching the redcoats walk into a tumult of fire and iron and death. A flail of fire! A storm of metal whipping the air into a gale of bloody ruin amongst which the British would be chopped into butcher's scraps.

  "You're hurting me," the girl said.

  "Liebchen, I'm so sorry," Pohlmann said, releasing his grip. "I was thinking."

  "Sir?" Dodd asked, thinking the Hanoverian was speaking to him.

  "I was thinking, Dodd, that it is no bad thing that we wander so aimlessly."

  "It isn't?" Dodd retorted with astonishment.

  "Because if we do not know where we are going, then nor will the British, so one day they will march a few miles too far and then we shall pounce on them. Someone will blunder, Dodd, because in war someone always does blunder. It is an immutable rule of war; someone will blunder. We must just have patience."

  In truth Pohlmann was just as impatient as Dodd, but the Colonel knew it would not serve any purpose to betray that impatience. In India, he had learned, matters moved at their own pace, as imponderable and unstoppable as an elephant. But soon, Pohlmann reckoned, one of the British forces would make a march too far and find itself so close to the vast Mahratta army that even Scindia could not refuse battle. And even if the two enemy armies joined, what did that matter? Their combined forces were small, the Mahratta horde was vast, and the outcome of their meeting as certain as anything could be in war. And Pohlmann was confident that Scindia would eventually give him command of the army, and Pohlmann would then roll over the enemy like the great Juggernaut of Hindu legend and with that happy prospect he was content.

  Dodd looked up to say something more, but the howdah's green curtains had been drawn shut. The girl giggled, while the mahout, seated just in front of the closed howdah, stared impassively ahead. The Mahrattas were on the march, covering the earth like a swarm, just waiting for their enemies to blunder.

  * * *

  Sharpe was tired of being hungry so one day he took his musket and walked in search of game. He reckoned anything would do, even a tiger, but he hoped to find beef. India seemed full of beeves, but that day he saw none, though after four miles he found a herd of goats grazing in a small wood. He drew his bayonet, reckoning it would be easier to cut one of the beast's throats than shoot it and so attract the attention of the herd's vengeful owner, but when he came close to the animals a dog burst out of the trees and attacked him.

  He clubbed the dog down with his musket butt, and the brief commotion put the goats to flight and it took him the best part of an hour to find the animals again and by then he could not have cared if he attracted half the population of India and so he aimed and fired, and all he succeeded in doing was wounding one poor beast that started bleating pitifully. He ran to it, cut its throat, which was harder than he had thought, then hoisted the carcass onto his shoulder.

  The widow boiled the stringy flesh which tasted foul, but it
was still meat and Sharpe wolfed it down as though he had not eaten in months.

  The smell of the meat roused Colonel McCandless who sat up in his bed and frowned at the pot.

  "I could almost eat that," he said.

  "You want some, sir?"

  "I haven't eaten meat in eighteen years, Sharpe, I won't start now."

  He ran a hand through his lank white hair.

  "I do declare I'm feeling better, God be praised."

  The Colonel swung his feet onto the floor and tried to stand.

  "But I'm weak as a kitten," he said.

  "Plate of meat will put some strength in you, sir."

  "Get thee behind me, Satan," the Colonel said, then put a hand on one of the posts which held up the roof and hauled himself to his feet. "I might take a walk tomorrow."

  "How's the leg, sir?"

  "Mending, Sharpe, mending." The Colonel put some weight on his left leg and seemed pleasantly surprised that it did not buckle. "God has preserved me again."

  "Thank God for that, sir."

  "I do, Sharpe, I do."

  Next morning the Colonel felt better still. He ducked out of the hut and blinked in the bright sunlight.

  "Have you seen any soldiers these last two weeks?"

  "Not a one, sir. Nothing but farmers."

  The Colonel scraped a hand across the white bristles on his chin.

  "A shave, I think. Would you be so kind as to fetch my box of razors? And perhaps you could heat some water?"

  Sharpe dutifully put a pot of water on the fire, then stropped one of the Colonel's razors on a saddle's girth strap. He was just perfecting the edge when McCandless called him from outside the house.

  "Sharpe!"

  Something in McCandless's voice made Sharpe snatch up his musket, then he heard the beat of hooves as he ducked under the low doorway and he hauled back the musket's cock in expectation of enemies, but McCandless waved the weapon down.