Sharpe’s Fortress: The Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803

‘Aye, well. Mebbe.’ Dodd sniffed. Why the Indians stubbornly insisted on putting guns in front of infantry, he did not know. Daft idea, it was, but they would do it. He kept telling them to put their cannon between the regiments, so that the gunners could slant their fire across the face of the infantry, but Indian commanders reckoned that the sight of guns directly in front heartened their men. ‘But put some infantry out front, sahib,’ he urged.

Bappoo thought about Dodd’s proposal. He did not much like the Englishman who was a tall, ungainly and sullen man with long yellow teeth and a sarcastic manner, but Bappoo suspected his advice was good. The Prince had never fought the British before, but he was aware that they were somehow different from the other enemies he had slaughtered on a score of battlefields across western India. There was, he understood, a stolid indifference to death in those red ranks that let them march calmly into the fiercest cannonade. He had not seen it happen, but he had heard about it from enough men to credit the reports. Even so he found it hard to abandon the tried and tested methods of battle. It would seem unnatural to advance his infantry in front of the guns, and so render the artillery useless. He had thirty-eight cannon, all of them heavier than anything the British had yet deployed, and his gunners were as well trained as any in the world. Thirty-eight heavy cannon could make a fine slaughter of advancing infantry, yet if what Dodd said was true, then the red-coated ranks would stoically endure the punishment and keep coming. Except some had already run, which suggested they were nervous, so perhaps this was the day when the gods would finally turn against the British. ‘I saw two eagles this morning,’ Bappoo told Dodd, ‘outlined against the sun.’

So bloody what? Dodd thought. The Indians were great ones for auguries, forever staring into pots of oil or consulting holy men or worrying about the errant fall of a trembling leaf, but there was no better augury for victory than the sight of an enemy running away before they even reached the fight. ‘I assume the eagles mean victory?’ Dodd asked politely.

‘They do,’ Bappoo agreed. And the augury suggested the victory would be his whatever tactics he used, which inclined him against trying anything new. Besides, though Prince Manu Bappoo had never fought the British, nor had the British ever faced the Lions of Allah in battle. And the numbers were in Bappoo’s favour. He was barring the British advance with forty thousand men, while the redcoats were not even a third of that number. ‘We shall wait,’ Bappoo decided, ‘and let the enemy get closer.’ He would crush them with cannon fire first, then with musketry. ‘Perhaps I shall release the Lions of Allah when the British are closer, Colonel,’ he said to pacify Dodd.

‘One regiment won’t do it,’ Dodd said, ‘not even your Arabs, sahib. Throw every man forward. The whole line.’

‘Maybe,’ Bappoo said vaguely, though he had no intention of advancing all his infantry in front of the precious guns. He had no need to. The vision of eagles had persuaded him that he would see victory, and he believed the gunners would make that victory. He imagined dead red-coated bodies among the crops. He would avenge Assaye and prove that redcoats could die like any other enemy. ‘To your men, Colonel Dodd,’ he said sternly.

Dodd wheeled his horse and spurred towards the right of the line where his Cobras waited in four ranks. It was a fine regiment, splendidly trained, which Dodd had extricated from the siege of Ahmednuggur and then from the panicked chaos of the defeat at Assaye. Two disasters, yet Dodd’s men had never flinched. The regiment had been a part of Scindia’s army, but after Assaye the Cobras had retreated with the Rajah of Berar’s infantry, and Prince Manu Bappoo, summoned from the north country to take command of Berar’s shattered forces, had persuaded Dodd to change his allegiance from Scindia to the Rajah of Berar. Dodd would have changed allegiance anyway, for the dispirited Scindia was seeking to make peace with the British, but Bappoo had added the inducement of gold, silver and a promotion to colonel. Dodd’s men, mercenaries all, did not care which master they served so long as his purse was deep.

Gopal, Dodd’s second-in-command, greeted the Colonel’s return with a rueful look. ‘He won’t advance?’

‘He wants the guns to do the work.’

Gopal heard the doubt in Dodd’s voice. ‘And they won’t?’

‘They didn’t at Assaye,’ Dodd said sourly. ‘Damn it! We shouldn’t be fighting them here at all! Never give redcoats open ground. We should be making the bastards climb walls or cross rivers.’ Dodd was nervous of defeat, and he had cause to be for the British had put a price on his head. That price was now seven hundred guineas, nearly six thousand rupees, and all of it promised in gold to whoever delivered William Dodd’s body, dead or alive, to the East India Company. Dodd had been a lieutenant in the Company’s army, but he had encouraged his men to murder a goldsmith and, faced with prosecution, Dodd had deserted and taken over a hundred sepoys with him. That had been enough to put a price on his head, but the price rose after Dodd and his treacherous sepoys murdered the Company’s garrison at Chasalgaon. Now Dodd’s body was worth a fortune and William Dodd understood greed well enough to be fearful. If Bappoo’s army collapsed today as the Mahratta army had disintegrated at Assaye, then Dodd would be a fugitive on an open plain dominated by enemy cavalry. ‘We should fight them in the hills,’ he said grimly.

‘Then we should fight them at Gawilghur,’ Gopal said.

‘Gawilghur?’ Dodd asked.

‘It is the greatest of all the Mahratta fortresses, sahib. Not all the armies of Europe could take Gawilghur.’ Gopal saw that Dodd was sceptical of the claim. ‘Not all the armies of the world could take it, sahib,’ he added earnestly. ‘It stands on cliffs that touch the sky, and from its walls men are reduced to the size of lice.’

‘There’s a way in, though,’ Dodd said, ‘there’s always a way in.’

‘There is, sahib, but the way into Gawilghur is across a neck of high rock that leads only to an outer fortress. A man might fight his way through those outer walls, but then he will come to a deep ravine and find the real stronghold lies on the ravine’s far side. There are more walls, more guns, a narrow path, and vast gates barring the way!’ Gopal sighed. ‘I saw it once, years ago, and prayed I would never have to fight an enemy who had taken refuge there.’

Dodd said nothing. He was staring down the gentle slope to where the red-coated infantry waited. Every few seconds a puff of dust showed where a round shot struck the ground.

‘If things go badly today,’ Gopal said quietly, ‘then we shall go to Gawilghur and there we shall be safe. The British can follow us, but they cannot reach us. They will break themselves on Gawilghur’s rocks while we take our rest at the edge of the fortress’s lakes. We shall be in the sky, and they will die beneath us like dogs.’

If Gopal was right then not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men could touch William Dodd at Gawilghur. But first he had to reach the fortress, and maybe it would not even be necessary, for Prince Manu Bappoo might yet beat the redcoats here. Bappoo believed there was no infantry in India that could stand against his Arab mercenaries.

Away on the plain Dodd could see that the two battalions that had fled into the tall crops were now being brought back into the line. In a moment, he knew, that line would start forward again. ‘Tell our guns to hold their fire,’ he ordered Gopal. Dodd’s Cobras possessed five small cannon of their own, designed to give the regiment close support. Dodd’s guns were not in front of his white-coated men, but away on the right flank from where they could lash a murderous slanting fire across the face of the advancing enemy. ‘Load with canister,’ he ordered, ‘and wait till they’re close.’ The important thing was to win, but if fate decreed otherwise, then Dodd must live to fight again at a place where a man could not be beaten.

At Gawilghur.

The British line at last advanced. From east to west it stretched for three miles, snaking in and out of millet fields, through pastureland and across the wide, dry riverbed. The centre of the line was an array of thirteen red-coated infantry battalions, three of them Scottish and the rest sepoys, while two regiments of cavalry advanced on the left flank and four on the right. Beyond the regular cavalry were two masses of mercenary horsemen who had allied themselves to the British in hope of loot. Drums beat and pipes played. The colours hung above the shakos. A great swathe of crops was trodden flat as the cumbersome line marched north. The British guns opened fire, their small six-pound missiles aimed at the Mahratta guns.

Those Mahratta guns fired constantly. Sharpe, walking behind the left flank of number six company, watched one particular gun which stood just beside a bright clump of flags on the enemy-held skyline. He slowly counted to sixty in his head, then counted it again, and worked out that the gun had managed five shots in two minutes. He could not be certain just how many guns were on the horizon, for the great cloud of powder smoke hid them, but he tried to count the muzzle flashes that appeared as momentary bright flames amidst the grey-white vapour and, as best he could guess, he reckoned there were nearly forty cannon there. Forty times five was what? Two hundred. So a hundred shots a minute were being fired, and each shot, if properly aimed, might kill two men, one in the front rank and one behind. Once the attack was close, of course, the bastards would switch to canister and then every shot could pluck a dozen men out of the line, but for now, as the redcoats silently trudged forward, the enemy was sending round shot down the gentle slope. A good many of these missed. Some screamed overhead and a few bounced over the line, but the enemy gunners were good, and they were lowering their cannon barrels so that the round shot struck the ground well ahead of the redcoat line and, by the time the missile reached the target, it had bounced a dozen times and so struck at waist height or below. Grazing, the gunners called it, and it took skill. If the first graze was too close to the gun then the ball would lose its momentum and do nothing but raise jeers from the redcoats as it rolled to a harmless stop, while if the first graze was too close to the attacking line then the ball would bounce clean over the redcoats. The skill was to skim the ball low enough to be certain of a hit, and all along the line the round shots were taking their toll. Men were plucked back with shattered hips and legs. Sharpe passed one spent cannonball that was sticky with blood and thick with flies, lying twenty paces from the man it had eviscerated. ‘Close up!’ the sergeants shouted, and the file-closers tugged men to fill the gaps. The British guns were firing into the enemy smoke cloud, but their shots seemed to have no effect, and so the guns were ordered farther forward. The ox teams were brought up, the guns were attached to the limbers, and the six-pounders trundled on up the slope.

‘Like ninepins.’ Ensign Venables had appeared at Sharpe’s side. Roderick Venables was sixteen years old and attached to number seven company. He had been the battalion’s most junior officer till Sharpe joined, and Venables had taken it on himself to be a tutor to Sharpe in how officers should behave. ‘They’re bowling us over like ninepins, eh, Richard?’

Before Sharpe could reply a half-dozen men of number six company threw themselves aside as a cannonball bounced hard and low towards them. It whipped harmlessly through the gap they had made. The men laughed at having evaded it, then Sergeant Colquhoun ordered them back into their two ranks.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the left of your company?’ Sharpe asked Venables.

‘You’re still thinking like a sergeant, Richard,’ Venables said. ‘Pig-ears doesn’t mind where I am.’ Pig-ears was Captain Lomax, who had earned his nickname not because of any peculiarity about his ears, but because he had a passion for crisply fried pig-ears. Lomax was easy-going, unlike Urquhart who liked everything done strictly according to regulations. ‘Besides,’ Venables went on, ‘there’s damn all to do. The lads know their business.’

‘Waste of time being an ensign,’ Sharpe said.

‘Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,’ Venables said. ‘Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That’ll be the day.’ Venables gave a hoot of laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few officers in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship. ‘Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?’ he asked.

‘Urquhart told me.’

‘Fresh men. New officers. You won’t be junior any more.’

Sharpe shook his head. ‘Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn’t it?’

‘Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain long before you got the jump up, eh? So you’ll still be the mess baby. Bad luck, old fellow.’

Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten years older than Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no one had ever bothered to note down his birth date. Ensigns were youths and Sharpe was a man.

‘Whoah!’ Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that a round shot had struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced vertically upwards in a shower of soil. ‘Pig-ears says he once saw two cannonballs collide in mid-air,’ Venables said. ‘Well, he didn’t actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says they suddenly appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.’

‘They’d have shattered and broken up,’ Sharpe said.

‘Not according to Pig-ears,’ Venables insisted. ‘He says they flattened each other.’ A shell exploded ahead of the company, whistling scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and the files stepped round the smoking fragments. Venables stooped and plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat. ‘Like to have keepsakes,’ he explained, slipping the piece of iron into a pouch. ‘I’ll send it home for my sisters. Why don’t our guns stop and fire?’

‘Still too far away,’ Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a mile to go and, while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get really close so that their shots could not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel McCandless had always told Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you start slaughtering.

A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first graze, still travelling at blistering speed, and the two men of the file were whipped backwards in a spray of mingling blood. ‘Jesus,’ Venables said in awe. ‘Jesus!’ The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered bones, tangled entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the file-closers, stooped to extricate the men’s pouches and haversacks from the scattered offal. ‘Two more names in the church porch,’ Venables remarked. ‘Who were they, Corporal?’

‘The McFadden brothers, sir.’ The Corporal had to shout to be heard over the roar of the Mahratta guns.

‘Poor bastards,’ Venables said. ‘Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.’

Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess. Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as though the sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his first battle, for he had been sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye, but the Ensign was forever explaining that he could not be upset by the sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted his father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside, bent over and vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking. Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables’s retching.

‘Eyes front!’ Sharpe snarled.

Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed that any order that did not come from himself or from Captain Urquhart was an unnecessary order.

Venables caught up with Sharpe. ‘Something I ate.’

‘India does that,’ Sharpe said sympathetically.

‘Not to you.’

‘Not yet,’ Sharpe said and wished he was carrying a musket so he could touch the wooden stock for luck.

Captain Urquhart sheered his horse leftwards. ‘To your company, Mister Venables.’

Venables scuttled away and Urquhart rode back to the company’s right flank without acknowledging Sharpe’s presence. Major Swinton, who commanded the battalion while Colonel Wallace had responsibility for the brigade, galloped his horse behind the ranks. The hooves thudded heavily on the dry earth. ‘All well?’ Swinton called to Urquhart.