Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe’s Fortress

Harris sighed. ‘I still think it has to be the west,’ he said, ‘despite this new wall.’

‘The north?’ Wellesley asked.

‘According to our farmer fellow,’ Gent answered, ‘the new inner wall goes all the way round the north.’ He picked up a pencil and sketched the line of the new inner wall on the map to show that wherever the river flowed close to the city there was now a double rampart. ‘And the west is infinitely preferable to the north,’ Gent added. ‘The South Cauvery’s shallow, while the main river can still be treacherous at this time of year. If our fellows have to wade through the Cauvery, let them do it here.’ He tapped the city’s western approach. ‘Of course,’ he added optimistically, ‘maybe that fellow was right, and maybe that inner wall ain’t finished.’

Harris wished to God that McCandless was still with the army. That subtle Scotsman would have despatched a dozen disguised sepoys and discovered within hours the exact state of the new inner wall, but McCandless was lost and so, Harris suspected, were the two men sent to rescue him.

‘We could cross the Arrakerry Ford,’ Baird suggested, ‘then blast our way in from the east like Cornwallis did.’

Harris lifted the hem of his wig and scratched at his old scalp wound. ‘We discussed all this before,’ he said wearily. He offered Baird a wan smile to take the sting from his mild reproof, then explained his reasons for not assaulting from the east. ‘First we have to force the crossing, and the enemy has the river banks entrenched. Then we must get through the new wall around their encampment’ – he touched the map, showing where the Tippoo had constructed a stout mud wall, well served with guns, that surrounded the encampment which lay outside the city’s southern and eastern walls – ‘and after that we have to lay siege to the city proper, and we know that both the east and south ramparts already have inner walls. And to breach those walls every round shot and pound of powder will have to be carried across the river.’

‘And one good rainfall will make the ford impassable,’ Gent put in gloomily, ‘not to mention bringing those damned crocodiles back.’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to be carrying three tons of supplies a day across a half-flooded river full of hungry teeth.’

‘So wherever we attack,’ Wellesley asked, ‘we have to pierce two walls?’

‘That’s what the man said,’ Baird growled.

‘This new inner wall,’ Wellesley asked Gent, ignoring Baird, ‘what do we know of it?’

‘Mud,’ Gent said, ‘red mud bricks. Just like Devon mud.’

‘Mud will crumble,’ Wellesley pointed out.

‘If it’s dry, it will,’ Gent agreed, ‘but the core of the wall won’t be dry. Thoroughly good stuff, mud. Soaks up the cannon fire. I’ve seen twenty-four-pounder shots bounce off mud like currants off a suet pudding. Give me a good stone wall to break down any day. Break its crust and the guns turn the rubble core into a staircase. But not mud.’ Gent stared at the map, picking his teeth with the sharpened nib of a quill. ‘Not mud,’ he added in a gloomy undertone.

‘But it will yield?’ Harris asked anxiously.

‘Oh, it’ll yield, sir, it’ll yield, I can warrant you that, but how much time do we have to persuade it to yield?’ The engineer peered over his spectacles at the bewigged General. ‘The monsoon ain’t so far off, and once the rains begin we might as well go home for all the good we’ll ever do. You want a path through both walls? It’ll take two weeks more, and even then the inner breach will be perilously narrow. Perilously narrow! Can’t enfilade it, you see, and the breach in the outer wall will serve as a glacis to protect the base of the inner wall. Straight on fire, sir, and all aimed a deal higher than any respectable gunner would want. We can make you a breach of sorts, but it’ll be narrow and high, and God only knows what’ll be waiting on the other side. Nothing good, I dare say.’

‘But we can breach this outer wall quickly enough?’ Harris asked, tapping the place on his map.

‘Aye, sir. It’s mostly mud again, but it’s older so the centre will be drier. Once we break through the crust the thing should fall apart in hours.’

Harris stared down at the map, unconsciously scratching beneath his wig. ‘Ladders,’ he said after a long pause.

Baird looked alarmed. ‘You’re not thinking of an escalade, God save us?’

‘We’ve no timber!’ Gent protested.

‘Bamboo scaling ladders,’ Harris said, ‘just a few.’ He smiled as he leaned back in his chair. ‘Make me a breach, Colonel Gent, and forget the inner wall. We’ll assault the breach, but we won’t go through it. Instead we’ll attack the shoulders of the breach. We’ll use ladders to climb off the breach onto the walls, then attack round the ramparts. Once those outer walls are ours, the beggars will have to surrender.’

There was silence in the tent as the three officers considered Harris’s suggestion. Colonel Gent tried to clean his spectacle lenses with a corner of his sash. ‘You’d better pray our fellows get up on the walls damned fast, sir.’ Gent broke the silence. ‘You’ll be sending whole battalions across the river, General, and the lads behind will be pushing the fellows in front, and if there’s any delay they’ll spill into the space between the walls like water seeking its level. And God knows what’s in between those walls. A flooded ditch? Mines? But even if there’s nothing there, the poor fellows will still be trapped between two fires.’

‘Two Forlorn Hopes,’ Harris said, thinking aloud and ignoring Gent’s gloomy comments, ‘instead of one. They both attack two or three minutes ahead of the main assault. Their orders will be to climb off the breach and onto the walls. One Hope turns north along the outer ramparts, the other south. That way they don’t need to go between the walls.’

‘It’ll be a desperate business,’ Gent said flatly.

‘Assaults always are,’ Baird said stoutly. ‘That’s why we employ Forlorn Hopes.’ The Forlorn Hope was the small band of volunteers who went first into a breach to trigger the enemy’s surprises. Casualties were invariably heavy, though there was never a shortage of volunteers. This time, though, it did promise to be desperate, for the two Forlorn Hopes were not being asked to fight through the breach, but rather to turn towards the walls either side of the breach and fight their way up onto the ramparts. ‘You can’t take a city without shedding blood,’ Baird went on, then stiffened in his chair. ‘And once again, sir, I request permission to lead the main assault.’

Harris smiled. ‘Granted, David.’ He spoke gently, using Baird’s Christian name for the first time. ‘And God be with you.’

‘God be with the damned Tippoo,’ Baird said, hiding his delight. ‘He’s the one who’ll need the help. I thank you, sir. You do me honour.’

Or I send you to your death, Harris thought, but kept the sentiment silent. He rolled up the city map. ‘Speed, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘speed. The rains will come soon enough, so let’s get this business done.’

The troops went on digging, zigzagging their way across the fertile fields between the aqueduct and the south branch of the Cauvery. A second British army, six and a half thousand men from Cannanore on India’s western Malabar coast, arrived to swell the besiegers’ ranks. The newcomers camped north of the Cauvery and placed gun batteries that could sweep the approach to the proposed breach so that the city, with its thirty thousand defenders, was now besieged by fifty-seven thousand men, half of whom marched under British colours and half under the banners of Hyderabad. Six thousand of the British troops were actually British, the rest were sepoys, and behind all the troops, in the sprawling encampments, more than a hundred thousand hungry civilians waited to plunder the supplies rumoured to be inside Seringapatam.

Harris had men enough for the siege and assault, but not enough to ring the city entirely and so the Tippoo’s cavalry made daily sallies from the unguarded eastern side of the island to attack the foraging parties who ranged deep into the country in search of timber and food. The Nizam of Hyderabad’s horsemen fought off the daily attacks. The Nizam was a Muslim, but he had no love for his coreligionist, the Tippoo, and the men of Hyderabad’s army fought fiercely. One horseman came back to the camp with the heads of six enemies tied by their long hair to his lance. He held the bloody trophies aloft and galloped proudly along the tent lines to the cheers of the sepoys and redcoats. Harris sent the man a purse of guineas, while Meer Allum, the commander of the Nizam’s forces, more practically ordered a concubine to express his gratitude.

The trenches made ground daily, but one last formidable obstacle prevented their approach close enough to the city for the siege guns to begin their destructive work. On the southern bank of the Cauvery, a half-mile west of the city, stood the ruins of an old watermill. Built of stone, the ancient walls were thick enough to withstand the artillery fire from Harris’s camp and from the new British positions across the river. The ruined buildings had been converted into a stout fort that was equipped with a deep defensive ditch and was strongly garrisoned by two of the Tippoo’s finest cushoons, reinforced by cannon and rocketmen, and so long as the mill fort existed no British gun could be dragged within battering range of the city’s walls. The two flags that flew over the mill fort were shot away every day, but each dawn the flags would be hoisted again, albeit on shorter staffs, and once again the British and Indian gunners would blaze away with round shot and shell, and once again the sun flag and the banner of the Lion of God would be felled, but whenever skirmishers went close to the fort to discover if any defender survived, there would be a blast of cannon, rockets and musketry to prove that the Tippoo’s men were still dangerous. The Tippoo could even reinforce the garrison thanks to a deep trench that ran close to the south branch of the Cauvery and up which his men could creep through the night to relieve the fort’s battered garrison.

The fort had to be taken. Harris ordered a dusk attack that was led by Indian and Scottish flank companies supported by a party of engineers whose job was to bridge the mill’s deep ditch. For an hour before the assault the artillery on both banks of the river rained shells into the mill. The twelve-pounder guns were loaded with howitzer shells and the wispy trails of their burning fuses sputtered across the darkening sky to plunge into the smoke which churned up from the battered fort. To the waiting infantry who would have to wade through the Little Cauvery, cross the ditch and assault the mill it seemed as if the small fort was being obliterated, for there was nothing to be seen but the boiling smoke and dust amongst which the shells exploded with dull red flashes, but every few moments, as if to belie the destruction that seemed so complete, an Indian gun would flash back its response and a round shot would scream across the fields towards the British batteries. Or else a rocket would flare up from the defenders and snake its thicker smoke trail across the delicate tracery left by the fuses of the howitzer shells. The largest guns on the city wall were also firing, trying to bounce their shot up from the ground so that the ricochets would reach the besiegers’ artillery. Sharpe, inside the city, heard the vast hammering of the guns and wondered if it presaged an assault on the city’s walls, but Sergeant Rothière assured the men that it was only the British wasting ammunition on the old mill.

The bombardment suddenly ceased and the Tippoo’s men came scrambling out of the mill’s damp cellars to take their places at their fire-scorched ramparts. They reached their broken firesteps just in time, for the leading engineers were already hurling lit carcasses into the ditch. The carcasses were bundles of damp straw tight wrapped about a paper-cased shell of saltpetre, corned gunpowder and antimony. The carcasses burned fiercely, consuming the straw from the inside to billow choking streams of smoke through vents left in the casings so that within seconds the ditch was filled with a dense fog of grey smoke into which the frightened defenders poured a badly aimed musket volley. More carcasses were hurled, adding to the blinding smoke, and under this cover a dozen planks were thrown across the ditch and screaming attackers charged across with fixed bayonets. Only a few of the Tippoo’s men still had loaded muskets. Those men fired, and one of the attackers fell through the smoke to fall on the hissing carcasses, but the rest were already scrambling over the walls. Half the attackers were Macleod’s Highlanders from Perthshire, the others were Bengali infantry, and both came into the mill like avenging furies. The Tippoo’s men seemed stunned by the suddenness of the assault, or else they had been so shaken by the shelling and were so confused by the choking smoke that they were incapable of resistance, and incapable, too, of surrender. Bengalis and Highlanders hunted through the ruins, their war cries shrill as they bayoneted and shot the garrison, while behind them, before the smoke of the carcasses had even begun to fade or the fighting in the mill die down, the engineers were constructing a stouter bridge across which they could haul their siege guns so they could turn the old mill into a breaching battery.

The smoke of the carcasses at last died and drifted away, its remnants touched red by the setting sun, and in the lurid light a Highlander capered on the ramparts with the captured sun banner at the end of his bayonet while a Bengali havildar waved the Tippoo’s lion flag in celebration. The assault had turned into a massacre and the officers now tried to calm the attackers down as they pierced ever deeper into the mill’s vaults. The innermost cellar was grimly defended by a group of the Tippoo’s infantry, but an engineer brought the last remaining carcass into the mill, lit its fuse, waited until the smoke began to pour from the vents and then hurled it down the steps. There were a few seconds of silence, then dazed and gasping defenders came scrambling up the steep stairs. The mill fort was taken, and astonishingly only one of the attackers had been killed, but a shocked Highlander lieutenant counted two hundred dead bodies dressed in the Tippoo’s tiger-striped tunic, and still more enemy dead were piled bloodily in every embrasure. The rest of the garrison was either taken prisoner or else had managed to flee down the connecting trench to the city. A Scottish sergeant, finding one of the Tippoo’s rockets in a magazine, stuck it vertically between two of the ruin’s bigger stones, then lit the fuse. There were cheers as the rocket flamed and smoked, then louder cheers as it screamed up into the sky. It began to corkscrew, leaving a crazy trail of smoke in the twilight air, and then, reaching its apogee, and by now almost invisible, it tumbled and fell into the Cauvery.

Next morning the first eighteen-pounders were already emplaced in the mill. The range to the city was long, but not impossible, and Harris gave the order for the guns to open fire. The eighteen-pounder cannon were among the heavy siege guns that would make the breach, but for now they were employed to batter the enemy’s own guns. Seringapatam’s outer wall was protected by a glacis, but there was not enough distance between the river and the wall to construct a full glacis with a gently sloping outer face high enough to bounce cannon shot over the city’s walls, and so the low glacis could only protect the wall’s base, not the parapet, and the eighteen-pounders’ first shots were aimed to scour that parapet of its guns. The good fortune that had accompanied the Bengalis and the Highlanders in their assault on the old mill now seemed to settle on the shoulders of the gunners for their very first shot cracked apart an embrasure and the second dismounted the gun behind it, and after that every shot seemed to have an equally destructive effect. British and Indian officers watched through spyglasses as embrasure after embrasure was destroyed and as gun after gun was thrown down. A dozen heavy cannon were tumbled forward into the flooded ditch between the city wall and the glacis, and every tumbling fall was greeted by a cheer from the besiegers. The city’s western wall was being stripped of guns, and the artillerymen’s prowess seemed to promise an easy assault. Spirits in the allied ranks soared.

While inside the city, watching his precious cannon being destroyed, the Tippoo fumed. The mill fort, on which he had pinned such high hopes of delaying the enemy till the monsoon washed them away, had fallen like a child’s wooden toy. And now his precious guns were being obliterated.

It was time, the Tippoo decided, to show his soldiers that these red-coated enemies were not invulnerable demons, but mortal men, and that like any other mortal men, they could be made to whimper. It was time to unsheath the tiger’s claws.

A half-hour’s walk east of the city, just outside the embrasured wall that protected the Tippoo’s encampment, lay his Summer Palace, the Daria Dowlat. It was much smaller than the Inner Palace within the city, for the Inner Palace was where the Tippoo’s enormous harem lived and where his government had its offices and his army its headquarters, and so it was a sprawl of stables, storehouses, courtyards, state rooms and prison cells. The Inner Palace seethed with activity, a place where hundreds of folk had their daily living, while the Summer Palace, set in its wide green gardens and protected by a thick hedge of aloe, was a haven of peace.

The Daria Dowlat had not been built to impress, but rather for comfort. Only two storeys high, the building was made from huge teak beams over which stucco had been laid, then modelled and painted so that every surface glittered in the sunlight. The whole palace was surrounded by a two-storeyed verandah and on the western outer wall, under the verandah where the sun could not fade it, the Tippoo had ordered painted a vast mural showing the battle of Pollilur at which, seventeen years before, he had destroyed a British army. That great victory had extended Mysore’s dominion along the Malabar Coast and, in honour of the triumph, the palace had been built and received its name, the Daria Dowlat or Treasure of the Sea. The palace lay on the road leading to the island’s eastern tip, the same road on which was built the fine, elegant mausoleum in which the Tippoo’s great father, Hyder Ali, and his mother, the Begum Fatima, were buried. There too, one day, the Tippoo prayed he would lie at rest.

The Daria Dowlat’s garden was a wide lawn dotted with pools, trees, shrubs and flowers. Roses grew there, and mangoes, but there were also exotic strains of indigo and cotton mixed with pineapples from Africa and avocados from Mexico, all of them plants that the Tippoo had encouraged or imported in the hope that they would prove profitable for his country, but on this day, the day after the mill fort had been swamped with smoke, fire and blood, the garden was filled with two thousand of the Tippoo’s thirty thousand troops. The men paraded in three sides of a hollow square to the north of the palace, leaving the Daria Dowlat’s shadowed facade as the fourth side of their square.

The Tippoo had ordered entertainment for his troops. There were dancers from the city, two jugglers and a man who charmed snakes, but, best of all, the Tippoo’s wooden tiger organ had been fetched from the Inner Palace and the soldiers laughed as the life-size model tiger raked its claws across the redcoat’s blood-painted face. The bellow-driven growl did not carry very far, any more than did the pathetic cry of the tiger’s victim, but the action of the toy alone was sufficient to amuse the men.

The Tippoo arrived in a palanquin just after midday. None of his European advisers accompanied him, nor were any of his European troops present, though Appah Rao was in attendance, for two of the five cushoons parading in the palace gardens came from Rao’s brigade, and the Hindu General stood tall and silent just behind the Tippoo on the palace’s upper verandah. Appah Rao disapproved of what was about to happen, but he dared not make a protest, for any sign of disloyalty from a Hindu was enough to rouse the Tippoo’s suspicions. Besides, the Tippoo could not be dissuaded. His astrologers had told him that a period of ill luck had arrived and that it could only be averted by sacrifice. Other sages had peered into the smoke-misted surface of a pot of hot oil, the Tippoo’s favourite form of divination, and had deciphered the strange-coloured and slow-moving swirls to declare that they told the same grim tale: a season of bad fortune had come to Seringapatam. That bad luck had caused both the fall of the mill fort and the destruction of the guns on the outer western wall and the Tippoo was determined to avert this sudden ill fortune.

The Tippoo let his soldiers enjoy the tiger for a few moments longer, then he clapped his hands and ordered his servants to carry the model back to the Inner Palace. The tiger’s place was taken by a dozen jettis who strode onto the forecourt with their bare torsos gleaming. For a few moments they amused the soldiers with their more commonplace tricks: they bent iron rods into circles, lifted grown men on both hands or juggled with cannonballs.

Then a goatskin drum sounded and thejettis, obedient to its strokes, went back to the shadows under the Tippoo’s balcony. The watching soldiers fell into an expectant silence, then growled as a sorry party of prisoners was herded onto the forecourt. There were thirteen prisoners, all in red coats, all of them men of the 33rd who had been captured during the night battle at the Sultanpetah tope.

The thirteen men stood uncertainly amidst the ring of their enemies. The sun beat down. One of the prisoners, a sergeant, twitched as he stared at the ranks of tiger-striped soldiers, and still his face twitched as he turned around and gazed with a curious intensity when the Tippoo stepped to the rail of the upper verandah and, in a clear high voice, spoke to his troops. The enemy, the Tippoo said, had been fortunate. They had gained some cheap victories to the west of the city, but that was no reason to fear them. The British sorcerers, knowing they could not defeat the tigers of Mysore by force alone, had made a powerful spell, but with the help of Allah that spell would now be confounded. The soldiers greeted the speech with a long and approving sigh while the prisoners, unable to understand any of the Tippoo’s words, looked anxiously about, but could make no sense of the occasion.

Guards surrounded the prisoners and pushed them back to the palace, leaving just one man alone on the forecourt. That man tried to go with his companions, but a guard thrust him back with a bayonet and the uneven contest between a confused prisoner and an armed guard sparked a gust of laughter. The prisoner, driven back to the centre of the forecourt, waited nervously.

Two jettis walked towards him. They were big men, formidably bearded, tall and with their long hair bound and tied about their heads. The prisoner licked his lips, the jettis smiled and suddenly the redcoat sensed his fate and took two or three hurried steps away from the strongmen. The watching soldiers laughed as the redcoat tried to escape, but he was penned in by three walls of tiger-striped infantry and there was nowhere to run. He tried to dodge past the two jettis, but one of them reached out and snatched a handful of his red coat. The prisoner beat at the jetti with his fists, but it was like a rabbit cuffing at a wolf. The watching soldiers laughed again, though there was a nervousness in their amusement.

The jetti drew the soldier in to his body, then hugged him in a terrible last embrace. The second jetti took hold of the redcoat’s head, paused to take breath, then twisted.

The prisoner’s dying scream was choked off in an instant. For a second his head stared sightlessly backwards, then the jettis released him and, as the twisted neck grotesquely righted itself, the man collapsed. One of the jettis picked up the corpse in one huge hand and contemptuously tossed it high into the air like a terrier tossing a dead rat. The watching soldiers were silent for a second, then cheered. The Tippoo smiled.

A second redcoat was driven to the jettis, and this man was forced to kneel. He did not move as the nail was placed on his head. He uttered one curse, then died in seconds as his blood spurted out onto the gravel forecourt. A third man was killed with a single punch to his chest, a blow so massive that it drove him back a full twelve paces before, shuddering, his ruptured heart gave up. The watching soldiers shouted that they wanted to see another man’s neck wrung like a chicken, and the jettis obliged. And so, one by one, the prisoners were forced to their killers. Three of the men died abjectly, calling for mercy and weeping like babes. Two died saying prayers, but the rest died defiantly. Three put up a fight, and one tall grenadier raised an ironic cheer from the watching troops by breaking a jetti’s finger, but then he too died like the rest. One after the other they died, and those who came last were forced to watch their comrades’ deaths and to wonder how they would be sent to meet their Maker; whether they would be spiked through the skull or have their necks twisted north to south or simply be beaten to bloody death. And all of the prisoners, once dead, were decapitated by a sword blow before the two parts of their bodies were wrapped in reed mats and laid aside.