Sharpe’s Tiger: The Siege of Seringapatam, 1799

‘Half-companies it is, sir! At once, sir. Light Company! Stop your bleeding noise! You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill bellowed. ‘Sergeant Green! Take charge of the after ranks. Mister Fitzgerald! I’ll trouble you to take your proper place on the left, sir. Forward ranks! Shoulder firelocks! Twenty paces, forward, march! Smartly now! Smartly!’

Hakeswill’s face shuddered as the front ten ranks of the company marched twenty paces and halted, leaving the other nine ranks behind. All along the battalion column the companies were similarly dividing, their drill as crisp as though they were back on their Yorkshire parade ground. A quarter-mile off to the 33rd’s left another six battalions were going through the same manoeuvre, and performing it with just as much precision. Those six battalions were all native soldiers in the service of the East India Company, though they wore red coats just like the King’s men. The six sepoy battalions shook out their colours and Sharpe, seeing the bright flags, looked ahead to where the 33rd’s two great regimental banners were being loosed from their leather tubes to the fierce Indian sun. The first, the King’s Colour, was a British flag on which the regiment’s battle honours were embroidered, while the second was the Regimental Colour and had the 33rd’s badge displayed on a scarlet field, the same scarlet as the men’s jacket facings. The tasselled silk banners blazed, and the sight of them prompted a sudden cannonade from the ridge. Till now there had only been the one heavy gun firing, but abruptly six other cannon joined the fight. The new guns were smaller and their round shot fell well short of the seven battalions.

Major Shee, the Irishman who commanded the 33rd while its Colonel, Arthur Wellesley, had control of the whole brigade, cantered his horse back, spoke briefly to Morris, then wheeled away towards the head of the column. ‘We’re going to push the bastards off the ridge!’ Morris shouted at the Light Company, then bent his head to light a cigar with a tinderbox. ‘Any bastard that turns tail, Sergeant,’ Morris went on when his cigar was properly alight, ‘will be shot. You hear me?’

‘Loud and clear, sir!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Shot, sir! Shot like the coward he is.’ He turned and scowled at the two half-companies. ‘Shot! And your names posted in your church porch at home as the cowards you are. So fight like Englishmen!’

‘Scotsmen,’ a voice growled behind Sharpe, but too softly for Hakeswill to hear.

‘Irish,’ another man said.

‘We ain’t none of us cowards,’ Garrard said more loudly.

Sergeant Green, a decent man, hushed him. ‘Quiet, lads. I know you’ll do your duty.’

The front of the column was marching now, but the rearmost companies were kept waiting so that the battalion could advance with wide intervals between its twenty half-companies. Sharpe guessed that the scattered formation was intended to reduce any casualties caused by the enemy’s bombardment which, because it was still being fired at extreme range, was doing no damage. Behind him, a long way behind, the rest of the allied armies were waiting for the ridge to be cleared. That mass looked like a formidable horde, but Sharpe knew that most of what he saw was the two armies’ civilian tail: the chaos of merchants, wives, sutlers and herdsmen who kept the fighting soldiers alive and whose supplies would make the siege of the enemy’s capital possible. It needed more than six thousand oxen just to carry the cannonballs for the big siege guns, and all those oxen had to be herded and fed and the herdsmen all travelled with their families who, in turn, needed more oxen to carry their own supplies. Lieutenant Lawford had once remarked that the expedition did not look like an army on the march, but like a great migrating tribe. The vast horde of civilians and animals was encircled by a thin crust of red-coated infantry, most of them Indian sepoys, whose job was to protect the merchants, ammunition and draught animals from the quick-riding, hard-hitting light cavalry of the Tippoo Sultan.

The Tippoo Sultan. The enemy. The tyrant of Mysore and the man who was presumably directing the gunfire on the ridge. The Tippoo ruled Mysore and he was the enemy, but what he was, or why he was an enemy, or whether he was a tyrant, beast or demigod, Sharpe had no idea. Sharpe was here because he was a soldier and it was sufficient that he had been told that the Tippoo Sultan was his enemy and so he waited patiently under the Indian sun that was soaking his lean tall body in sweat.

Captain Morris leaned on his saddle’s pommel. He took off his cocked hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that had been soaked in cologne water. He had been drunk the previous night and his stomach was still churning with pain and wind. If the battalion had not been going into battle he would have galloped away, found a private spot and voided his bowels, but he could hardly do that now in case his men thought it a sign of weakness and so he raised his canteen instead and swallowed some arrack in the hope that the harsh spirit would calm the turmoil in his belly. ‘Now, Sergeant!’ he called when the company in front had moved sufficiently far ahead.

‘Forward half-company!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Forward march! Smartly now!’

Lieutenant Lawford, given supervision of the last half-company of the battalion, waited until Hakeswill’s men had marched twenty paces, then nodded at Sergeant Green. ‘Forward, Sergeant.’

The redcoats marched with unloaded muskets for the enemy was still a long way off and there was no sign of the Tippoo Sultan’s infantry, nor of his feared cavalry. There were only the enemy’s guns and, high in the fierce sky, the circling vultures. Sharpe was in the leading rank of the final half-company and Lieutenant Lawford, glancing at him, thought once again what a fine-looking man Sharpe was. There was a confidence in Sharpe’s thin, sun-darkened face and hard blue eyes that spoke of an easy competence, and that appearance was a comfort to a young nervous lieutenant advancing towards his first battle. With men like Sharpe, Lawford thought, how could they lose?

Sharpe was ignorant of the Lieutenant’s glance and would have laughed had he been told that his very appearance inspired confidence. Sharpe had no conception of how he looked, for he rarely saw a mirror and when he did the reflected image meant nothing, though he did know that the ladies liked him and that he liked them. He knew, too, that he was the tallest man in the Light Company, so tall, indeed, that he should have been in the Grenadier Company that led the battalion’s advance, but when he had first joined the regiment, six years before, the commanding officer of the Light Company had insisted on having Sharpe in his ranks. Captain Hughes was dead now, killed by a bowel-loosening flux in Calcutta, but in his time Hughes had prided himself on having the quickest, smartest men in his company, men he could trust to fight alone in the skirmish line, and it had been Hughes’s tragedy that he had only ever seen his picked men face an enemy once, and that once had been the misbegotten, fever-ridden expedition to the foggy island off the coast of Flanders where no amount of quick-wittedness by the men could salvage success from the commanding general’s stupidity. Now, five years later, on an Indian field, the 33rd again marched towards an enemy, though instead of the enthusiastic and generous Captain Hughes, the Light Company was now commanded by Captain Morris who did not care how clever or quick his men were, only that they gave him no trouble. Which was why he had brought Sergeant Hakeswill into the company. And that was why the tall, good-looking, hard-eyed private called Richard Sharpe was thinking of running.

Except he would not run today. Today there would be a fight and Sharpe was happy at that prospect. A fight meant plunder, what the Indian soldiers called loot, and any man who was thinking of running and striking up life on his own could do with a bit of loot to prime the pump.

The seven battalions marched towards the ridge. They were all in columns of half-companies so that, from a vulture’s view, they would have appeared as one hundred and forty small scarlet rectangles spread across a square mile of green country as they advanced steadily towards the waiting line of guns on the enemy-held ridge. The sergeants paced beside the half-companies while the officers either rode or walked ahead. From a distance the red squares looked smart, for the men’s red coats were bright scarlet and slashed with white crossbelts, but in truth the troops were filthy and sweating. Their coats were wool, designed for battlefields in Flanders, not India, and the scarlet dye had run in the heavy rains so that the coats were now a pale pink or a dull purple, and all were stained white with dried sweat. Every man in the 33rd wore a leather stock, a cruel high collar that dug into the flesh of his neck, and each man’s long hair had been pulled harshly back, greased with candle wax, then twisted about a small sand-filled leather bag that was secured with a strip of black leather so that the hair hung like a club at the nape of the neck. The hair was then powdered white with flour, and though the clubbed and whitened hair looked smart and neat, it was a haven for lice and fleas. The native sepoys of the East India Company were luckier. They did not cake their hair with powder, nor did they wear the heavy trousers of the British troops but instead marched bare-legged. They did not wear the leather stocks either and, even more amazing, there was no flogging in the Indian battalions.

An enemy cannonball at last found a target and Sharpe saw a half-company of the 33rd broken apart as the round shot whipped through the ranks. He thought he glimpsed an instant red mist appear in the air above the formation as the ball slashed through, but maybe that was an illusion. Two men stayed on the ground as a sergeant closed the ranks up. Two more men were limping and one of them staggered, reeled and finally collapsed. The drummer boys, advancing just behind the unfurled colours, marked the rhythm of the march with steady beats interspersed with quicker flourishes, but when the boys marched past the twin heaps of offal that had been soldiers of the Grenadier Company a few seconds before they began to hurry their sticks and thus quickened the regiment’s pace until Major Shee turned in his saddle and damned their eagerness.

‘When are we going to load?’ Private Mallinson asked Sergeant Green.

‘When you’re told to, lad, when you’re told to. Not before. Oh, sweet Jesus!’ This last imprecation from Sergeant Green had been caused by a deafening ripple of gunfire from the ridge. A dozen more of the Tippoo’s smaller guns had opened fire and the crest of the ridge was now fogged by a grey-white cloud of smoke. The two British galloper guns off to the right had unlimbered and started to return the fire, but the enemy cannon were hidden by their own smoke and that thick screen obscured any damage the small galloper guns might be inflicting. More cavalry trotted forward to the 33rd’s right. These newcomers were Indian troops dressed in scarlet turbans and holding long, wicked-pointed lances.

‘So what are we bleeding supposed to do?’ Mallinson complained. ‘Just march straight up the bloody ridge with empty muskets?’

‘If you’re told to,’ Sergeant Green said, ‘that’s what you’ll do. Now hold your bloody tongue.’

‘Quiet back there!’ Hakeswill called from the half-company in front. ‘This ain’t a bleeding parish outing! This is a fight, you bastards!’

Sharpe wanted to be ready and so he untied the rag from his musket’s lock and stuffed it into the pocket where he kept the ring Mary had given him. The ring, a plain band of worn silver, had belonged to Sergeant Bickerstaff, Mary’s husband, but the Sergeant was dead now and Green had taken Bickerstaff’s sergeant’s stripes and Sharpe his bed. Mary came from Calcutta. That was no place to run, Sharpe thought. Place was full of redcoats.

Then he forgot any prospect of deserting, for suddenly the landscape ahead was filling with enemy soldiers. A mass of infantry was crossing the northern end of the low ridge and marching down onto the plain. Their uniforms were pale purple, they had wide red hats and, like the British Indian troops, were bare-legged. The flags above the marching men were red and yellow, but the wind was so feeble that the flags hung straight down to obscure whatever device they might have shown. More and more men appeared until Sharpe could not even begin to estimate their numbers.

‘Thirty-third!’ a voice shouted from somewhere ahead. ‘Line to the left!’

‘Line to the left!’ Captain Morris echoed the shout.

‘You heard the officer!’ Sergeant Hakeswill bawled. ‘Line to the left! Smartly now!’

‘On the double!’ Sergeant Green called.

The leading half-company of the 33rd had halted and every other half-company angled to their left and sped their pace, with the final half-company, in which Sharpe marched, having the farthest and fastest to go. The men began to jog, their packs and pouches and bayonet scabbards bumping up and down as they stumbled over the small fields of crops. Like a swinging door, the column, that had been marching directly towards the ridge, was now turning itself into a line that would lie parallel to the ridge and so bar the advance of the enemy infantry.

‘Two files!’ a voice shouted.

‘Two files!’ Captain Morris echoed.

‘You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Two files! On the right! Smartly now!’

All the running half-companies now split themselves into two smaller units, each of two ranks and each aligning itself on the unit to its right so that the whole battalion formed a fighting line two ranks deep. As Sharpe ran into position he glanced to his right and saw the drummer boys taking their place behind the regiment’s colours which were guarded by a squad of sergeants armed with long, axe-headed poles.

The Light Company was the last into position. There were a few seconds of shuffling as the men glanced right to check their alignment, then there was stillness and silence except for the corporals fussily closing up the files. In less than a minute, in a marvellous display of drill, the King’s 33rd had deployed from column of march into line of battle so that seven hundred men, arrayed in two long ranks, now faced the enemy.

‘You may load, Major Shee!’ That was Colonel Wellesley’s voice. He had galloped his horse close to where Major Shee brooded under the regiment’s twin flags. The six Indian battalions were still hurrying forward on the left, but the enemy infantry had appeared at the northern end of the ridge and that meant the 33rd was the nearest unit and the one most likely to receive the Tippoo’s assault.

‘Load!’ Captain Morris shouted at Hakeswill.

Sharpe felt suddenly nervous as he dropped the musket from his shoulder to hold it across his body. He fumbled with the musket’s hammer as he pulled it back to the half cock. Sweat stung his eyes. He could hear the enemy drummers.

‘Handle cartridge!’ Sergeant Hakeswill shouted, and each man of the Light Company pulled a cartridge from his belt pouch and bit through the tough waxed paper. They held the bullets in their mouths, tasting the sour salty gunpowder.

‘Prime!’ Seventy-six men trickled a small pinch of powder from the opened cartridges into their muskets’ pans, then closed the locks so that the priming was trapped.

‘Cast about!’ Hakeswill called and seventy-six right hands released their musket stocks so that the weapons’ butts dropped towards the ground. ‘And I’m watching you!’ Hakeswill added. ‘If any of you lilywhite bastards don’t use all his powder, I’ll skin your hides off you and rub salt on your miserable flesh. Do it proper now!’ Some old soldiers advised only using half the powder of a cartridge, letting the rest trickle to the ground so that the musket’s brutal kick would be diminished, but faced by an advancing enemy, no man thought of employing that trick this day. They poured the remainder of their cartridges’ powder down their musket barrels, stuffed the cartridge paper after the powder, then took the balls from their mouths and pushed them into the muzzles. The enemy infantry was two hundred yards away and advancing steadily to the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets. The Tippoo’s guns were still firing, but they had turned their barrels away from the 33rd for fear of hitting their own infantry and were instead aiming at the six Indian regiments that were hurrying to close the gap between themselves and the 33rd.

‘Draw ramrod!’ Hakeswill shouted and Sharpe tugged the ramrod free of the three brass pipes that held it under the musket’s thirty-nine-inch barrel. His mouth was salty with the taste of gunpowder. He was still nervous, not because the enemy was tramping ever closer, but because he had a sudden idiotic idea that he might have forgotten how to load a musket. He twisted the ramrod in the air, then placed the ramrod’s flared tip into the barrel.

‘Ram cartridge!’ Hakeswill snapped. Seventy-six men thrust down, forcing the ball, wadding and powder charge to the bottom of the barrels.

‘Return ramrod!’ Sharpe tugged the ramrod up, listening to it scrape against the barrel, then twirled it about so that its narrow end would slide down into the brass pipes. He let it drop into place.

‘Order arms!’ Captain Morris called and the Light Company, now with loaded muskets, stood to attention with their guns held against their right sides. The enemy was still too far off for a musket to be either accurate or lethal and the long, two-deep line of seven hundred redcoats would wait until their opening volley could do real damage.

‘’Talion!’ Sergeant Major Bywaters’s voice called from the centre of the line. ‘Fix bayonets!’

Sharpe dragged the seventeen-inch blade from its sheath which hung behind his right hip. He slotted the blade over the musket’s muzzle, then locked it in place by twisting its slot onto the lug. Now no enemy could pull the bayonet off the musket. Having the blade mounted made reloading the musket far more difficult, but Sharpe guessed that Colonel Wellesley had decided to shoot one volley and then charge. ‘Going to be a right mucky brawl,’ he said to Tom Garrard.

‘More of them than us,’ Garrard muttered, staring at the enemy. ‘The buggers look steady enough.’

The enemy indeed looked steady. The leading troops had momentarily paused to allow the men behind to catch up, but now, reformed into a solid column, they were readying to advance again. Their ranks and files were ramrod straight. Their officers wore waist sashes and carried highly curved sabres. One of the flags was being waved to and fro and Sharpe could just make out that it showed a golden sun blazoned against a scarlet sky. Vultures swooped lower. The galloper guns, unable to resist the target of the great column of infantry, poured solid shot into its flank, but the Tippoo’s men stoically endured the punishment as their officers made certain that the column was tight packed and ready to deliver its crushing blow on the waiting redcoat line.

Sharpe licked his dry lips. So these, he thought, were the Tippoo’s men. Fine-looking bastards they were, too, and close enough now so that he could see that their tunics were not plain pale purple, but were instead cut from a creamy-white cloth decorated with mauve tiger stripes. Their crossbelts were black and their turbans and waist sashes crimson. Heathens, they might be, but not to be despised for that, for only seventeen years before these same tiger-striped men had torn apart a British army and forced its survivors to surrender. These were the famed tiger troops of Mysore, the warriors of the Tippoo Sultan who had dominated all of southern India until the British thought to climb the ghats from the coastal plain and plunge into Mysore itself. The French were these men’s allies, and some Frenchmen served in the Tippoo’s forces, but Sharpe could see no white faces in the massive column that at last was ready and, to the deep beat of a single drum, lurched ponderously forward. The tiger-striped troops were marching directly towards the King’s 33rd and Sharpe, glancing to his left, saw that the sepoys of the East India Company regiments were still too far away to offer help. The 33rd would have to deal with the Tippoo’s column alone.