Sharpe's Triumph (36 page)

“Regiment will advance,” he ordered, 'at the double!" His interpreter shouted the
order and Dodd watched proudly as his men ran smartly forward. They kept their ranks, and
checked promptly on his command when they reached the em placed artillery.

“Thank you, Lord,” he prayed. The picquets, suddenly aware of the horror that awaited
them, began to hurry as they spread into line, but still Dodd did not fire. Instead he rode
his new horse behind his men's ranks.

“You fire low!” he told his Cobras.

“Make sure you fire low! Aim at their thighs.” Most troops fired high and thus a man who
aimed at his enemy's knees would as like as not hit his chest. Dodd paused to watch the
picquets who were now advancing in a long double line. Dodd took a deep breath.

“Fire!”

Forty guns and over eight hundred muskets were aimed at the picquets and scarce a gun or
a musket missed. One moment the ground in front of the hedge was alive with soldiers, the
next it was a charnel house, swept by metal and flayed by fire, and though Dodd could see
nothing through the powder smoke, he knew he had virtually annihilated the redcoat
line. The volley had been massive. Two of the guns, indeed, had been the eighteen-pounder
siege guns and Dodd's only regret was that they had been loaded with round shot instead of
canister, but at least they could now reload with canister and so savage the British
battalion that had almost reached the cactus hedge.

“Reload!” Dodd called to his men. The smoke was writhing away, thinning as it went, and he
could see enemy bodies on the ground. He could see men twitching, men crawling, men dying.
Most did not move at all, though miraculously their commanding officer, or at least the
only man who had been on horseback, still lived. He was whipping his horse back through the
hedge.

“Fire!” Dodd shouted, and a second volley whipped across the killing ground to thrash
through the hedge and strike the battalion behind. That battalion was taking even worse
punishment from the artillery which was now firing canister, and the blasts of metal
were tearing the hedge apart, destroying the redcoats' small cover. The little
four-pounder guns, which fired such puny round shot, now served as giant shotguns to spray
the redcoats with Dodd's home-made bags of canister. His sepoys loaded and rammed their
muskets. The dry grass in front of them flickered with hundreds of small pale flames where
the burning wadding had started fires.

“Fire!” Dodd shouted again, and saw, just before the cloud of powder smoke blotted out
his view, that the enemy was stepping backwards.

The volley crashed out, filling the air with the stench of rotten eggs.

“Reload!” Dodd shouted and admired his men's efficiency. Not one had panicked, not one
had fired his ramrod by mistake. Clockwork soldiers, he thought, as soldiers ought to be,
while the enemy's return fire was pathetic. One or two of Dodd's men had been killed, and a
handful were wounded, but in return they had destroyed the leading British unit and were
driving the next one back.

“The regiment will advance!” he shouted and listened to his interpreter repeat the
order.

They marched in line through their own powder smoke and then across the scores of dead and
dying enemy picquets. Soldiers stooped to the bodies to filch keepsakes and loot and Dodd
shouted at them to keep going. The loot could wait. They reached the remnants of the cactus
hedge where Dodd halted them. The British battalion was still going backwards, evidently
seeking the safety of the gull)'. “Fire!” he shouted, and his men's volley seemed to push
the redcoats even further back.

“Reload!”

Ramrods rattled in barrels, dog heads were dragged back to the full.

The British line was retreating fast now, but from the north, from the land hard by the
river, a mass of Mahratta cavalry was riding south to join the slaughter. Dodd wished the
cavalry would stay out of it, for he had an idea that he could have pursued this British
battalion clear down the tongue of land to where the rivers met and the last of their men
would die in the Kaitna's muddy shallows, but he dared not fire another volley in case he
hit the cavalry.

“The regiment will advance!” he told his interpreter. He would let the cavalry have
their moment, then go on with the slaughtering himself.

The British battalion commander saw the cavalry and knew his retreat must stop. His
men were still in line, a line of only two ranks, and cavalrymen dreamed of encountering
infantry in line.

“Form square!” their commanding officer shouted, and the two wings of the line
dutifully withdrew towards the centre. The double rank became four, the four ranks
wheeled and dressed, and suddenly the cavalry faced a fortress of redcoats, muskets and
bayonets. The front rank of the square knelt and braced their muskets on the ground while the
other three readied their muskets for the coming horsemen.

The cavalry should have sheered away at the sight of the square, but they had seen the
earlier slaughter and thought to add to it, and so they dipped their penn anted lances,
raised their tulwars and screamed their war cries as they galloped straight towards the
redcoats. And the redcoats let them come, let them come perilously close before the order
was shouted and the face of the square nearest the cavalry exploded in flame and smoke
and the horses screamed as they were hit and died. The surviving horsemen swerved aside and
received another killing volley as they swept past the sides of the square. More horses
tumbled, dust spewing from their sliding bodies. A tulwar spun along the ground, its
owner shrieking as his trapped leg was ground into bloody ruin by the weight of his dying
horse.

“Reload!” a Scots voice shouted from inside the square and the redcoats recharged their
muskets.

The cavalry charged on into open country and there wheeled about.

Some of the horses were riderless now, others were bloody, but all came back towards
the square.

“Let them come close!” a mounted British officer shouted inside the square.

“Let them come close. Wait for it! Fire!”

More horses tumbled, their legs cracking as the bones shattered, and this time the
cavalry did not sheer away to ride down the square's lethal flanks, but instead wheeled
clean about and spurred out of range. Two lessons were sufficient to teach them caution, but
they did not go far away, just far enough to be out of range of the redcoats' muskets. The
cavalry's leaders had seen Dodd's regiment come through the cactus hedge and they knew
that their own infantry, attacking in line, must overwhelm the square with musketry and,
when the square shattered, as it must under the infantry's assault, the horsemen could
sweep back to pick off the survivors and pluck the great gaudy banners as trophies to lay
before Scindia.

Dodd could scarcely believe his luck. At first he had resented the cavalry's
intrusion, believing that they were about to steal his victory, but their two impotent
charges had forced the enemy battalion to form square and mathematics alone dictated
that a battalion in square could only use one quarter of its muskets against an attack
from any one side.

And the British battalion, which Dodd now recognized from its white facings as the
74th, was much smaller than Dodd's Cobras, probably having only half the numbers Dodd
possessed. And, in addition to Dodd's men, a ragged regiment of the Rajah of Berar's
infantry had poured out of Assaye to join the slaughter while a battalion from Dupont's
compoo, which had been posted immediately on Dodd's right, had also come to join the
killing. Dodd resented the presence of those men whom he feared might dilute the glory of
his victory, but he could scarcely order them away. The important thing was to slaughter
the Highlanders.

“We're going to kill the bastards with volley fire,” he told his men, then waited for
his translator to interpret.

“And then we'll finish them off with bayonets. And I want those two colours! I want those
flags hanging in Scindia's tent tonight.”

The Scots were not waiting idly for the attack. Dodd could see small groups of men
dashing out of the square and at first he thought they were plundering the dead
cavalrymen, and then he saw they were dragging the bodies of men and horses back to make
a low rampart. The few survivors of the picquets were among the Scots, who were now caught
in a terrible dilemma. By staying in square they would keep themselves safe from any
attack by the cavalry which still hovered to the south, though the square made them into
an easy target for the enemy's muskets, but if they deployed into line, so that they could
use all their muskets against the enemy's infantry line, they made themselves into
cavalry bait. Their commanding officer decided to stay in square. Dodd reckoned he
would do the same if he was ever so foolish as to be trapped like these fools were trapped.
They still had to be finished off, and that promised to be grim work for the 74th was a
notoriously tough regiment, but Dodd had the advantage of numbers and the advantage
of position and he knew he must win.

Except that the Scotsmen did not agree with him. They crouched behind their barricade
of dead men and horses and poured a blistering fire of musketry at the white-coated
Cobras. A lone piper, who had disobeyed the order to leave his instrument at Naulniah,
played in the square's centre. Dodd could hear the sound, but he could not see the piper, nor,
indeed, the square itself, which was hidden by a churning fog of dark powder smoke. The
smoke was illuminated by the flashes of musket fire, and Dodd could hear the heavy balls
thumping into his men. The Cobras were no longer advancing, for the closer they got to
the deadly smoke the greater their casualties and so they had paused fifty yards from the
square to let their own muskets do the work. They were reloading as fast as their enemies,
but too many of their bullets were being wasted on the barricade of corpses. All four
faces of the square were firing now, for the 74th was surrounded. To the west they fired at
Dodd's attacking line, to the north they fired at the Rajah's infantry, while to the east
and south they kept the cavalry at bay.

The Mahratta horsemen, scenting the Scottish regiment's death, were prowling ever
closer in the hope that they could dash in and take the colours before the infantry.

Dodd's Cobras, together with the battalion from Dupont's compoo, began to curl about
the southern flank of the trapped regiment. It should take only three or four volleys, Dodd
thought, to end the business, after which his men could go in with the bayonet. Not that his
men were firing volleys any longer; instead they were firing as soon as their muskets were
charged and Dodd felt their excitement and sought to curb it.

“Don't waste your fire!” he shouted.

“Aim low!” William Dodd had no desire to lead a charge through the stinking smoke to find
an unbroken formation of vengeful Highlanders waiting with bayonets. Dodd might
dislike the Scots, but he had a healthy fear of fighting them with cold steel. Thin the
bastards first, he thought, batter them, bleed them, then massacre them, but his men were
too excited at the prospect of imminent victory and far too much of their fire was
either going high or else being wasted on the barricade of the dead.

“Aim low!” he shouted again.

“Aim low!”

“They won't last,”Joubert said. Indeed the Frenchman was amazed that the Scots still
survived.

“Awkward things to kill, Scotsmen,” Dodd said. He took a drink from his canteen.

“I do hate the bastards. All preachers or thieves. Stealing Englishmen's jobs. Aim
low!” A man was thrown back near Dodd, blood bright on his white coat.

“Joubert?” Dodd called back to the Frenchman.

“Monsieur?”

“Bring up two of the regiment's guns. Load with canister.” That would end the bastards.
Two gouts of canister from the four-pounders would blow great gaps in the Scottish square
and Dodd could then lead his men into those gaps and fillet the dying regiment from its
inside out.

He would be damned if the cavalry would take the flags. They were his! It was Dodd who had
fought these Highlanders to a standstill and Dodd who planned to carry the silk banners to
Scindia's tent and there fetch his proper reward.

“Hurry, Joubert!” he called.

Dodd drew his pistol and fired over his men's ranks into the smoke that hid the dying
square.

“Aim low!” he shouted.

“Don't waste your fire!”

But it would not be long now. Two blasts of canister, he reckoned, and then the bayonets
would bring him victory.

Major Samuel Swinton stood just behind the western face of the square which looked
towards the white-coated infantry. He could hear an English voice shouting orders and
encouragement in the enemy lines and, though Swinton himself was an Englishman, the
accent angered him. No English bastard was going to destroy the 74th, not while Major
Swinton commanded, and he told his men that a Sassenach was their enemy and that seemed to
add zest to their efforts.

“Keep low!” he told them.

“Keep firing!” By staying low the Scots kept behind the protection of their makeshift
barricade, but it also made their muskets much more difficult to reload and some men took
the risk of standing after each shot. Their only protection then was the mask of smoke
that hid the regiment from its enemies. And thank God, Swinton thought, that the enemy had
brought no artillery forward.

The square was swept by musket fire. Much of it, especially from the north, flew high,
but the white-coated regiment was better trained and their musketry was having an
effect, so much so that Swinton took the inside rank of the eastern face and added it to
the west. The sergeants and corporals closed the ranks as the enemy bullets hurled men back
into the bloody interior of the shrinking square where the Major stepped among the
Scottish dead and wounded. Swinton's horse had died, struck by three musket balls and put
out of its misery by the Major's own pistol. Colonel Orrock, who had first led the
picquets to disaster, had also lost his horse.