Sharpe’s Tiger: The Siege of Seringapatam, 1799

‘Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill’s sudden scream was loud enough to drown the cheer that the Tippoo’s troops gave as they advanced. ‘Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill screamed again. He was hurrying along the back of the Light Company and Captain Morris, momentarily dismounted, was following him. ‘Give me your musket, Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill bellowed.

‘Nothing wrong with it,’ Sharpe protested. He was in the front rank and had to turn and push his way between Garrard and Mallinson to hand the gun over.

Hakeswill snatched the musket and gleefully presented it to Captain Morris. ‘See, sir!’ the Sergeant crowed. ‘Just as I thought, sir! Bastard sold his flint, sir! Sold it to an ’eathen darkie.’ Hakeswill’s face twitched as he gave Sharpe a triumphant glance. The Sergeant had unscrewed the musket’s doghead, extracted the flint in its folded leather pad and now offered the scrap of stone to Captain Morris. ‘Piece of common rock, sir, no good to man or beast. Must have flogged his flint, sir. Flogged it in exchange for a pagan whore, sir, I dare say. Filthy beast that he is.’

Morris peered at the flint. ‘Sell the flint, did you, Private?’ he asked in a voice that mingled derision, pleasure and bitterness.

‘No, sir.’

‘Silence!’ Hakeswill screamed into Sharpe’s face, spattering him with spittle. ‘Lying to an officer! Flogging offence, sir, flogging offence. Selling his flint, sir? Another flogging offence, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.’

‘It is a flogging offence,’ Morris said with a tone of satisfaction. He was as tall and lean as Sharpe, with fair hair and a fine-boned face that was just beginning to show the ravages of the liquor with which the Captain assuaged his boredom. His eyes betrayed his cynicism and something much worse: that he despised his men. Hakeswill and Morris, Sharpe thought as he watched them, a right bloody pair.

‘Nothing wrong with that flint, sir,’ Sharpe insisted.

Morris held the flint in the palm of his right hand. ‘Looks like a chip of stone to me.’

‘Common grit, sir,’ Hakeswill said. ‘Common bloody grit, sir, no good to man or beast.’

‘Might I?’ A new voice spoke. Lieutenant William Lawford had dismounted to join Morris and now, without waiting for his Captain’s permission, he reached over and took the flint from Morris’s hand. Lawford was blushing again, astonished by his own temerity in thus intervening. ‘There’s an easy way to check, sir,’ Lawford said nervously, then he drew out his pistol, cocked it and struck the loose flint against the pistol’s steel. Even in the day’s bright sunlight there was an obvious spark. ‘Seems like a good flint to me, sir,’ Lawford said mildly. Ensign Fitzgerald, standing behind Lawford, gave Sharpe a conspiratorial grin. ‘A perfectly good flint,’ Lawford insisted less diffidently.

Morris gave Hakeswill a furious look then turned on his heel and strode back towards his horse. Lawford tossed the flint to Sharpe. ‘Make your gun ready, Sharpe,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Lawford and Fitzgerald walked away as Hakeswill, humiliated, thrust the musket back at Sharpe. ‘Clever bastard, Sharpie, aren’t you?’

‘I’ll have the leather as well, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said and, once he had the flint’s seating back, he called after Hakeswill who had begun to walk away. ‘Sergeant!’

Hakeswill turned back.

‘You want this, Sergeant?’ Sharpe called. He took a chip of stone out of his pocket. He had found it when he had untied the rag from the musket’s lock and realized that Hakeswill had substituted the stone for the flint when he had pretended to inspect Sharpe’s musket. ‘No use to me, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said. ‘Here.’ He tossed the stone at Hakeswill who ignored it. Instead the Sergeant spat and turned away. ‘Thanks, Tom,’ Sharpe said, for it had been Garrard who had supplied him with a spare flint.

‘Worth being in the army to see that,’ Garrard said, and all around him men laughed to have seen Hakeswill and Morris defeated.

‘Eyes to your front, lads!’ Ensign Fitzgerald called. The Irish Ensign was the youngest officer in the company, but he had the confidence of a much older man. ‘Got some shooting to do.’

Sharpe pushed back into his file. He brought up the musket, folded the leather over the flint and seated it in the doghead, then looked up to see that the mass of the enemy was now just a hundred paces away. They were shouting rhythmically and pausing occasionally to let a trumpet sound or a drum flourish a ripple, but the loudest sound was the beat of their feet on the dry earth. Sharpe tried to count the column’s front rank, but kept losing count as enemy officers marched slantwise across the column’s face. There had to be thousands of the tiger troops, all marching like a great sledgehammer to shatter the two-deep line of redcoats.

‘Cutting it fine, aren’t we?’ a man complained.

‘Wait lads, wait,’ Sergeant Green said calmly.

The enemy now filled the landscape ahead. They came in a column formed of sixty ranks of fifty men, three thousand in all, though to Sharpe’s inexperienced eye it seemed as if there must be ten times that number. None of the Tippoo’s men fired as they advanced, but held their fire just as the 33rd were holding theirs. The enemy’s muskets were tipped with bayonets while their officers were holding deeply curved sabres. On they came and to Sharpe, who was watching the column from the left of the line so that he could see its flank as well as its leading file, the enemy formation seemed as unstoppable as a heavily loaded farm wagon that was rolling slowly and inexorably towards a flimsy fence.

He could see the enemy’s faces now. They were dark, with black moustaches and oddly white teeth. The tiger men were close, so close, and their chanting began to dissolve into individual war shouts. Any second now, Sharpe thought, and the heavy column would break into a run and charge with levelled bayonets.

‘Thirty-third!’ Colonel Wellesley’s voice called out sharply from beneath the regiment’s colours. ‘Make ready!’

Sharpe put his right foot behind his left so that his body half turned to the right, then he brought his musket to hip height and pulled the hammer back to full cock. It clicked solidly into place, and somehow the pent-up pressure of the gun’s mainspring was reassuring. To the approaching enemy it seemed as though the whole British line had half turned and the sudden movement, coming from men who had been waiting so silently, momentarily checked their eagerness. Above the tiger troops of Mysore, beneath a bunch of flags on the ridge where the guns fired, a group of horsemen watched the column. Was the Tippoo himself there? Sharpe wondered. And was the Tippoo dreaming of that far-off day when he had broken three and half thousand British and Indian troops and marched them off to captivity in his capital at Seringapatam? The cheers of the attackers were filling the sky now, but still Colonel Wellesley’s voice was audible over the tumult. ‘Present!’

Seven hundred muskets came up to seven hundred shoulders. The muskets were tipped with steel, seven hundred muskets aimed at the head of the column and about to blast seven hundred ounces of lead at the leading ranks of that fast-moving, confident mass that was plunging straight towards the pair of British colours under which Colonel Arthur Wellesley waited. The tiger men were hurrying now, their front rank breaking apart as they began running. The wagon was about to hit the fence.

Arthur Wellesley had waited six years for this moment. He was twenty-nine years old and had begun to fear that he would never see battle, but now, at last, he would discover whether he and his regiment could fight, and so he filled his lungs to give the order that would start the slaughter.

Colonel Jean Gudin sighed, then, for the thousandth time in the last hour, he fanned his face to drive away the flies. He liked India, but he hated flies, which made India quite hard to like, but on balance, despite the flies, he did like India. Not nearly as much as he liked his native Provence, but where on earth was as lovely as Provence? ‘Your Majesty?’ he ventured diffidently, then waited as his interpreter struggled to gain the Tippoo’s attention. The interpreter was exchanging Gudin’s French for the Tippoo’s Persian tongue. The Tippoo did understand some French and he spoke the local Kanarese language well enough, but he preferred Persian for it reminded him that his lineage went back to the great Persian dynasties. The Tippoo was ever mindful that he was superior to the darker-skinned natives of Mysore. He was a Muslim, he was a Persian and he was a ruler, while they were mostly Hindus, and all of them, whether rich, poor, great or lowly, were his obedient subjects. ‘Your Majesty?’ Colonel Gudin tried again.

‘Colonel?’ The Tippoo was a short man inclined to plumpness, with a moustached face, wide eyes and a prominent nose. He was not an impressive-looking man, but Gudin knew the Tippoo’s unprepossessing appearance disguised a decisive mind and a brave heart. Although the Tippoo acknowledged Gudin, he did not turn to look at the Colonel. Instead he leaned forward in his saddle with one hand clasped over the tiger hilt of his curved sabre as he watched his infantry march on the infidel British. The sword was slung on a silken sash that crossed the pale yellow silk jacket that the Tippoo wore above chintz trousers. His turban was of red silk and pinned with a gold badge showing a tiger’s mask. The Tippoo’s every possible accoutrement was decorated with the tiger, for the tiger was his mascot and inspiration, but the badge on his turban also incorporated his reverence for Allah, for the tiger’s snarling face was formed by a cunning cipher that spelled out a verse of the Koran: ‘The Lion of God is the Conqueror.’ Above it, pinned to the turban’s brief white plume and brilliant in the day’s sunlight, there glittered a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg. ‘Colonel?’ the Tippoo said again.

‘It might be wise, Your Majesty,’ Gudin suggested hesitantly, ‘if we advanced cannon and cavalry onto the British flank.’ Gudin gestured to where the 33rd waited in its thin red line to receive the charge of the Tippoo’s column. If the Tippoo threatened a flank of that fragile line with cavalry then the British regiment would be forced to shrink into square and thus deny three quarters of their muskets a chance to fire at the column.

The Tippoo shook his head. ‘We shall sweep that scum away with our infantry, Gudin, then send the cavalry against the baggage.’ He let go of his sword’s hilt to touch his fingers fleetingly together. ‘Please Allah.’

‘And if it does not please Allah?’ Gudin asked, and suspected that his interpreter would change the insolence of the question into something more acceptable to the Tippoo.

‘Then we shall fight them from the walls of Seringapatam,’ the Tippoo answered, and turned briefly from watching the imminent battle to offer Colonel Gudin a quick smile. It was not a friendly smile, but a feral grimace of anticipation. ‘We shall destroy them with cannon, Colonel,’ the Tippoo continued with relish, ‘and shatter them with rockets, and in a few weeks the monsoon will drown their survivors, and after that, if Allah pleases, we shall hunt fugitive Englishmen from here to the sea.’

‘If Allah pleases,’ Gudin said resignedly. Officially he was an adviser to the Tippoo, sent by the Directorate in Paris to help Mysore defeat the British, and the patient Gudin had just done his best to give advice and it was none of his fault if the advice was spurned. He brushed flies from his face, then watched as the 33rd brought their muskets to their shoulders. When those muskets flamed, the Frenchman thought, the front of the Tippoo’s column would crumple like a honeycomb hit by a hammer, but at least the slaughter would teach the Tippoo that battles could not be won against disciplined troops unless every weapon was used against them: cavalry to force them to bunch up in protection, then artillery and infantry to pour fire into the massed ranks. The Tippoo surely knew that, yet he had insisted on throwing his three thousand infantry forward without cavalry support, and Gudin could only suppose that either the Tippoo believed Allah would be fighting on his side this afternoon, or else he was so consumed by his famous victory over the British seventeen years before that he believed he could always beat them in open conflict.

Gudin slapped at flies again. It was time, he thought, to go home. Much as he liked India he felt frustrated. He suspected that the government in Paris had forgotten about his existence, and he was keenly aware that the Tippoo was not receptive to his advice. He did not blame the Tippoo; Paris had made so many promises, but no French army had come to fight for Mysore and Gudin sensed the Tippoo’s disappointment and even sympathized with it, while Gudin himself felt useless and abandoned. Some of his contemporaries were already generals; even little Bonaparte, a Corsican whom Gudin had known slightly in Toulon, now had an army of his own, while Jean Gudin was stranded in distant Mysore. Which made victory all the more important, and if the British were not broken here then they would have to be beaten by the massed artillery and rockets that waited on Seringapatam’s walls. That was also where Gudin’s small battalion of European soldiers was waiting, and Seringapatam, he suspected, was where this campaign would be decided. And if there was victory, and if the British were thrown out of southern India, then Gudin’s reward would surely be back in France. Back home where the flies did not swarm like mice.

The enemy regiment waited with levelled muskets. The Tippoo’s men cheered and charged impetuously onwards. The Tippoo leaned forward, unconsciously biting his lower lip as he waited for the impact.

Gudin wondered whether his woman in Seringapatam would like Provence, or whether Provence would like her. Or maybe it was time for a new woman. He sighed, slapped at flies, then involuntarily shuddered.

For, beneath him, the killing had begun.

‘Fire!’ Colonel Wellesley shouted.

Seven hundred men pulled their triggers and seven hundred flints snapped forward onto frizzens. The sparks ignited the powder in the pans, there was a pause as the fire fizzed through the seven hundred touchholes, then an almighty crackling roar as the heavy muskets flamed.

The brass butt of the gun slammed into Sharpe’s shoulder. He had aimed the weapon at a sashed officer leading the enemy column, though even at sixty yards’ range it was hardly worth aiming a musket for it was a frighteningly inaccurate weapon, but unless the ball flew high it ought to hit someone. He could not tell what damage the volley had caused for the instant the musket banged into his shoulder his vision was obscured by the filthy bank of rolling smoke coughed out of the seven hundred musket muzzles. He could hardly hear anything either, for the sound of the rear rank muskets, going off close beside his head, had left his ears ringing. His right hand automatically went to find a new cartridge from his pouch, but then, above the ringing in his ears, he heard the Colonel’s brusque voice. ‘Forward! Thirty-third, forward!’

‘Go on, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Steady now! Don’t run! Walk!’

‘Damn your eagerness!’ Ensign Fitzgerald shouted at the company. ‘Hold your ranks! This ain’t a race!’

The regiment marched into the musket smoke which stank like rotting eggs. Lieutenant Lawford suddenly remembered to draw his sword. He could see nothing beyond the smoke, but imagined a terrible enemy waiting with raised muskets. He touched the pocket of his coat in which he kept the Bible given to him by his mother.

The front rank advanced clear of the stinking smoke fog and suddenly there was nothing ahead but chaos and carnage.

The seven hundred lead balls had converged on the front of the column to strike home with a brutal efficiency. Where there had been orderly ranks there were now only dead men and dying men who writhed on the ground. The rearward ranks of the enemy could not advance over the barrier of the dead and injured, so they stood uncertainly as, out of the smoke, the seven hundred bayonets appeared.

‘On the double! On the double! Don’t let them stand!’ Colonel Wellesley called.

‘Give them a cheer, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Go for them now! Kill the buggers!’

Sharpe had no thought of deserting now, for now he was about to fight. If there was any one good reason to join the army, it was to fight. Not to hurry up and do nothing, but to fight the King’s enemies, and this enemy had been shocked by the awful violence of the close-range volley and now they stared in horror as the redcoats screamed and ran towards them. The 33rd, released from the tight discipline of the ranks, charged eagerly. There was loot ahead. Loot and food and stunned men to slaughter and there were few men in the 33rd who did not like a good fight. Not many had joined the ranks out of patriotism; instead, like Sharpe, they had taken the King’s shilling because hunger or desperation had forced them into uniform, but they were still good soldiers. They came from the gutters of Britain where a man survived by savagery rather than by cleverness. They were brawlers and bastards, alley-fighters with nothing to lose but tuppence a day.