Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803

‘The guns are placed where they will prove most useful, sahib,’ the interpreter assured the Killadar with a dazzling smile, and the Killadar, who knew that the five small guns were at the north gate where they were pointing in towards the city rather than out towards the plain, sighed in frustration. Europeans could be so very difficult.

‘And the three hundred men the Major has placed at the north gate?’ Sanjit Pandee said. ‘Is it because he expects an attack there?’

‘Ask the idiot why else they would be there,’ Dodd instructed the interpreter, but there was no time to tell the Killadar anything further because shouts from the ramparts announced the approach of three enemy horsemen. The emissaries rode beneath a white flag, but some of the Arabs were aiming their long-barrelled matchlocks at the approaching horsemen and the Killadar quickly sent some aides to tell the mercenaries to hold their fire. ‘They’ve come to offer us cowle,’ the Killadar said as he hurried towards the south gate. Cowle was an offer of terms, a chance for the defenders to surrender rather than face the horrors of assault, and the Killadar hoped he could prolong the negotiations long enough to persuade Major Dodd to bring the three hundred men back from the north gate.

The Killadar could see that the three horsemen were riding towards the south gate which was topped by a squat tower from which flew Scindia’s gaudy green and scarlet flag. To reach the tower the Killadar had to run down some stone steps because the stretch of wall just west of the gate possessed no firestep, but was simply a high, blank wall of red stone. He hurried along the foot of the wall, then climbed more steps to reach the gate tower just as the three horsemen reined in beneath.

Two of the horsemen were Indians while the third was a British officer, and the three men had indeed come to offer the city cowle. If the Killadar surrendered, one of the Indians shouted, the city’s defenders would be permitted to march from Ahmednuggur with all their hand weapons and whatever personal belongings they could carry. General Wellesley would guarantee the garrison safe passage as far as the River Godavery, beyond which Pohlmann’s compoo had withdrawn. The officer finished by demanding an immediate answer.

Sanjit Pandee hesitated. The cowle was generous, surprisingly generous, and he was tempted to accept because no man would die if he took the terms. He could see the approaching column clearly now, and it looked to him like a red stain smothering the plain. There would be guns there, and the gods alone knew how many muskets. Then he glanced to his left and right and he saw the reassuring height of his walls, and he saw the white robes of his fearsome Arabs, and he contemplated what Dowlut Rao Scindia would say if he meekly surrendered Ahmednuggur. Scindia would be angry, and an angry Scindia was liable to put whoever had angered him beneath the elephant’s foot. The Killadar’s task was to delay the British in front of Ahmednuggur while Scindia gathered his allies and so prepared the vast army that would crush the invader. Sanjit Pandee sighed. ‘There can be no cowle,’ he called down to Wellesley’s three messengers, and the horsemen did not try to change his mind. They just tugged on their reins, spurred their horses and rode away. ‘They want battle,’ the Killadar said sadly, ‘they want loot.’

‘That’s why they come here,’ an aide replied. ‘Their own land is barren.’

‘I hear it is green,’ Sanjit Pandee said.

‘No, sahib, barren and dry. Why else would they be here?’

News spread along the walls that cowle had been refused. No one had expected otherwise, but the Killadar’s reluctant defiance cheered the defenders whose ranks thickened as townsfolk climbed to the firestep to see the approaching enemy.

Dodd scowled when he saw that women and children were thronging the ramparts to view the enemy. ‘Clear them away!’ he ordered his interpreter. ‘I want only the duty companies up here.’ He watched as his orders were obeyed. ‘Nothing’s going to happen for three days now,’ he assured his officers. ‘They’ll send skirmishers to harass us, but skirmishers can’t hurt us if we don’t show our heads above the wall. So tell the men to keep their heads down. And no one’s to fire at the skirmishers, you understand? No point in wasting good balls on skirmishers. We’ll open fire after three days.’

‘In three days, sahib?’ a young Indian officer asked.

‘It will take the bastards one day to establish batteries and two to make a breach,’ Dodd forecast confidently. ‘And on the fourth day the buggers will come, so there’s nothing to get excited about now.’ The Major decided to set an example of insouciance in the face of the enemy. ‘I’m going for breakfast,’ he told his officers. ‘I’ll be back when the bastards start digging their breaching batteries.’

The tall Major ran down the steps and disappeared into the city’s alleys. The interpreter looked back at the approaching column, then put his eye to the telescope. He was looking for guns, but at first he could see only a mass of men in red coats with the odd horseman among their ranks, and then he saw something odd. Something he did not comprehend.

Some of the men in the front ranks were carrying ladders. He frowned, then saw something more familiar beyond the red ranks and tilted the glass so that he could see the enemy’s cannon. There were only five guns, one being hauled by men and the four larger by elephants, and behind the artillery were more redcoats. Those redcoats wore patterned skirts and had high black hats, and the interpreter was glad that he was behind the wall, for somehow the men in skirts looked fearsome.

He looked back at the ladders and did not really understand what he saw. There were only four ladders, so plainly they did not mean to lean them against the wall. Maybe, he thought, the British planned to make an observation tower so that they could see over the defences, and that explanation made sense and so he did not comprehend that there was to be no siege at all, but an escalade. The enemy was not planning to knock a hole in the wall, but to swarm straight over it. There would be no waiting, no digging, no saps, no batteries and no breach. There would just be a charge, a scream, a torrent of fire, and then death in the morning sun.

‘The thing is, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, ‘not to get yourself killed.’

‘Wasn’t planning on it, sir.’

‘No heroics, Sharpe. It’s not your job. We just follow the heroes into the city, look for Mister Dodd, then go back home.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So stay close to me, and I’m staying close to Colonel Wallace’s party, so if you lose me, look for him. That’s Wallace there, see him?’ McCandless indicated a tall, bare-headed officer riding at the front of the 74th.

‘I see him, sir,’ Sharpe said. He was mounted on McCandless’s spare horse and the extra height allowed him to see over the heads of the King’s 74th who marched in front of him. Beyond the Highlanders the city wall looked dark red in the early sun, and on its summit he could see the occasional glint of a musket showing between the dome-shaped merlons that topped the wall. Big round bastions stood every hundred yards and those bastions had black embrasures which Sharpe assumed hid the defenders’ cannon. The brightly coloured statues of a temple’s tower showed above the rampart while a slew of flags drooped over the gate. No one fired yet. The British were within cannon range, but the defenders were keeping their guns quiet.

Most of the British force now checked a half-mile from the walls while the three assault parties organized themselves. Two of the attacking groups would escalade the wall, one to the left of the gate and the other to the right, and both would be led by Scottish soldiers with sepoys in support. The King’s 78th, the kilted regiment, would attack the wall to the left while their fellow Highlanders of the 74th would assault to the right. The third attack was in the centre and would be led by the 74th’s Colonel, William Wallace, who was also commander of one of the two infantry brigades and evidently an old friend of McCandless for, seeing his fellow Scot, Wallace rode back through his regiment’s ranks to greet him with a warm familiarity. Wallace would be leading men of the 74th in an assault against the gate itself and his plan was to run a six-pounder cannon hard up against the big timber gates then fire the gun to blast the entrance open. ‘None of our gunners have ever done it before,’ Wallace told McCandless, ‘and they’ve insisted on putting a round shot down the gun, but I swear my mother told me you should never load shot to open gates. A double powder charge, she instructed me, and nothing else.’

‘Your mother told you that, Wallace?’ McCandless asked.

‘Her father was an artilleryman, you see, and he brought her up properly. But I can’t persuade our gunners to leave out the ball. Stubborn fellows, they are. English to a man, of course. Can’t teach them anything.’ Wallace offered McCandless his canteen. ‘It’s cold tea, McCandless, nothing that will send your soul to perdition.’

McCandless took a swig of the tea, then introduced Sharpe. ‘He was the fellow who blew the Tippoo’s mine in Seringapatam,’ he told Wallace.

‘I heard about you, Sharpe!’ Wallace said. ‘A damn fine day’s work, Sergeant, well done.’ And the Scotsman leaned across to give Sharpe his hand. He was a middle-aged man, balding, with a pleasant face and a quick smile. ‘I can tempt you to some cold tea, Sharpe?’

‘I’ve got water, sir, thank you,’ Sharpe said, patting his canteen which was filled with rum, a gift from Daniel Fletcher, the General’s orderly.

‘You’ll forgive me if I’m about my business,’ Wallace said to McCandless, retrieving his canteen. ‘I’ll see you inside the city, McCandless. Joy of the day to you both.’ Wallace spurred back to the head of his column.

‘A very good man,’ McCandless said warmly, ‘a very good man indeed.’

Sevajee and his dozen men cantered up to join McCandless. They all wore red jackets, for they planned to ride into the city with McCandless and none wanted to be mistaken for the enemy, yet somehow the unbuttoned jackets, which had been borrowed from a sepoy battalion, made them look more piratical than ever. They all carried naked tulwars, curved sabres that they had honed to a razor’s edge at dawn. Sevajee reckoned there would be no time for aiming firelocks once they were inside Ahmednuggur. Ride in, charge whoever still put up a fight and cut down hard.

The two escalade parties started forward. Each had a pair of ladders, and each party was led by those men who had volunteered to be first up the rungs. The sun was fully above the horizon now and Sharpe could see the wall more plainly. He reckoned it was twenty foot high, give or take a few inches, and the glint of guns in every embrasure and loophole showed that it would be heavily defended. ‘Ever seen an escalade, Sharpe?’ McCandless asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘Risky business. Frail things, ladders. Nasty being first up.’

‘Very nasty, sir.’

‘And if it fails it gives the enemy confidence.’

‘So why do it, sir?’

‘Because if it succeeds, Sharpe, it lowers the enemy’s spirits. It will make us seem invincible. Veni, vidi, vici.’

‘I don’t speak any Indian, sir, not proper.’

‘Latin, Sharpe, Latin. I came, I saw, I conquered. How’s your reading these days?’

‘It’s good, sir, very good,’ Sharpe answered enthusiastically, though in truth he had not read very much in the last four years other than lists of stores and duty rosters and Major Stokes’s repair orders. But it had been Colonel McCandless and his nephew, Lieutenant Lawford, who had first taught Sharpe to read when they shared a cell in the Tippoo Sultan’s prison. That was four years ago now.

‘I shall give you a Bible, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, watching the escalade parties march steadily forward. ‘It’s the one book worth reading.’

‘I’d like that, sir,’ Sharpe said straight-faced, then saw that the picquets of the day were running ahead to make a skirmish line that would pepper the wall with musket fire. Still no one fired from the city wall, though by now both the picquets and the two ladder parties were well inside musket range. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir,’ Sharpe said to McCandless, ‘what’s to stop that bugger – sorry, sir – what’s to stop Mister Dodd from escaping out the other side of the city, sir?’

‘They are, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, indicating the cavalry that now galloped off on both sides of the city. The British 19th Dragoons rode in a tight squadron, but the other horsemen were Mahratta allies or else silladars from Hyderabad or Mysore, and they rode in a loose swarm. ‘Their job is to harass anyone leaving the city,’ McCandless went on. ‘Not the civilians, of course, but any troops.’

‘But Dodd’s got a whole regiment, sir.’

McCandless dismissed the problem. ‘I doubt that two whole regiments will serve him. In a minute or two there’ll be sheer panic inside Ahmednuggur, and how’s Dodd to get away? He’ll have to fight his way through a crowd of terrified civilians. No, we’ll find him inside the place if he’s still there.’

‘He is,’ Sevajee put in. He was staring at the wall through a small telescope. ‘I can see the uniforms of his men on the firestep. White jackets.’ He pointed westwards, beyond the stretch of wall that would be attacked by the 78th.

The picquets suddenly opened fire. They were scattered along the southern edge of the city, and their musketry was sporadic and, to Sharpe, futile. Men firing at a city? The musket balls smacked into the red stone of the wall which echoed back the crackle of the gunfire, but the defenders ignored the threat. Not a musket replied, not a cannon fired. The wall was silent. Shreds of smoke drifted from the skirmish line which went on chipping the big red stones with lead.

Colonel Wallace’s assault party was late in starting, while the kilted men of the 78th, who were assaulting the wall to the left of the gate, were now far in advance of the other attackers. They were running across open ground, their two ladders in plain sight of the enemy, but still the defenders ignored them. A regiment of sepoys was wheeling left, going to add their musket fire to the picquet line. A bagpiper was playing, but he must have been running for his instrument kept giving small ignominious hiccups. In truth it all seemed ignominious to Sharpe. The battle, if it could even be called a battle, had begun so casually, and the enemy was not even appearing to regard it as a threat. The skirmishers’ fire was scattered, the assault parties looked under strength and there seemed to be no urgency and no ceremony. There ought to be ceremony, Sharpe considered. A band should be playing, flags should be flying, and the enemy should be visible and threatening, but instead it was ramshackle and almost unreal.

‘This way, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, and swerved away to where Colonel Wallace was chivvying his men into formation. A dozen blue-coated gunners were clustered about a six-pounder cannon, evidently the gun that would be rammed against the city gate, while just beyond them was a battery of four twelve-pounder cannon drawn by elephants and, as Sharpe and McCandless urged their horses towards Wallace, the four mahouts halted their elephants and the gunners hurried to unharness the four guns. Sharpe guessed the battery would spray the wall with canister, though the silence of the defenders seemed to suggest that they had nothing to fear from these impudent attackers. Sir Arthur Wellesley, mounted on Diomed who seemed no worse for his blood-letting, rode up behind the guns and called some instruction to the battery commander who raised a hand in acknowledgement. The General was accompanied by three scarlet-coated aides and two Indians who, from the richness of their robes, had to be commanders of the allied horsemen who had ridden to stop the flight of fugitives from the city’s northern gate.