Sharpe's Tiger (33 page)

“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 center 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 be 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 around 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 toward 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 m
e
honor.”

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 colors 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 rumored to be inside Seringapatam.

Harris bad 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 toward 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 saltpeter, 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 gray 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 lull 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, lav 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 stories high, the building was made from huge teak beams over which stucco had been laid, then modeled and painted so that every surface glittered in the sunlight. The whole palace was surrounded by a two-storied 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, fifteen years before, he had destroyed a British army. That great victory had extended Mysore's dominion along the Malabar Coast and, in honor 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.