The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (28 page)

"Then we are in agreement." It was phrased as a statement, rather than as a question, and deliberately so. Scindia knew that the fat fool was easily led if he thought that there was something in it for him.

"We are," the Raja said at last. "Would you mind seeing to the details?"

A thin smile spread across Scindia's lips. "I should be only too happy to, my friend. Leave it all to me. And have another goblet of arrack."

He had the perfect commander in mind for this regard. Berar, however, must not be allowed to find out until they had already marched. After all, even one as callous as he would balk at sending his own brother to his death…

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Well," Arthur said, pressing his telescope a little more firmly against his right eye, "It appears that the Marathas actually
have
decided to stand and fight. What say you, Wallace?"

The gruff Scotsman accepted the telescope from Wellesley and began to espy the enemy position. From their vantage point, floating some two hundred feet up in the air, the two officers had an excellent view of the enemy position.

"That would be Argaum," Wallace said, referring to the small village in front of which the Maratha troops had deployed. Under the light of the half moon, the place looked unremarkable, like a thousand other native villages and townships: A scattering of mud brick homes and a few larger buildings that were almost certainly grain stores and the equivalent of meeting halls and animal pens. To the south of it was a second, smaller village, which was named Sirsoli, if he recalled correctly.

"It would," Wellesley confirmed. "As good a place to make a stand as any, I suppose. But there aren't nearly enough men, horse, and guns there to put up a real fight. They barely outnumber us two to one, for heaven's sake!"

The Colonel's lip curled at that, a rare smile from a man who was renowned throughout the army for his no-nonsense soldierly demeanor.

"Those crop fields could give us a bit of a headache, if their commander knows what he's doing," Wallace observed.

Wellesley nodded in silent agreement. The crop (was it millet? Something else? Tough to tell at night, even with vampiric eyesight, but it was much too big to be wheat) grew tall; taller than a man, in fact. If the Maratha commander had deployed some men into those fields to the south of the town along the most obvious approach route, they could do a lot of damage before they were cleared out at the point of a bayonet.

"Which makes me think that he doesn't. Look, there. Even the best-disciplined troops would have disturbed the stalks somewhat, no matter how careful they were getting into position."

"Aye, now that you come to mention it..." Wallace swung the telescope's business end around to scrutinize the fields carefully. An irregular watercourse wound its way between them. "Nothing in the way of broken or damaged stalks that I can see. No bodies lying in wait for our lads."

"Good," Wellesley said briskly. "I concur. How many men do you estimate?"

There was a pause. Wallace was too seasoned a campaigner to give a reflexive answer. The two vampires bobbed silently as the light breeze aloft ruffled their hair and clothing. Finally Wallace said, "No more than ten thousand infantry. Twenty guns deployed back there. Perhaps ten thousand horse deployed on each of the flanks."

"Which makes this a rearguard action," the General concluded. "Not a serious attempt to put up a fight. Not that we should underestimate them, of course, but if they meant business, we'd be facing five times that number."

Wallace cleared his throat. "General, may I request the honor of leading this attack?"

Now it was Wellesley's turn to smile. "Indeed you may. But we must be swift." He removed the fob watch from its chain in his pocket, tilting it slightly to get a better view of the hands beneath the moonlight. It is a quarter til one. We must move swiftly, else dawn shall be upon us before we know it.”

“The men are very tired, General, after the night’s forced march. But I know that they shall give it their all.”

“They were tired at Assaye too,” Wellesley countered tartly, “and yet they broke the back of an army many times their size.”

Wallace nodded in silent assent, conceding the point.

Acknowledging the fact that there was no time to lose, the two senior officers flew back to Wellesley’s command tent, where the remaining officers of the army awaited their return expectantly.

“You will forgive me, General Wellesley, for my impetuousness,” Colonel Stevenson began, with just the faintest twinkle of humor in his eye. “But in anticipation of a possible action this night, I have taken the liberty of assembling the men into four formations. Two blocks of cavalry, and two of infantry.”

“Why Colonel, it is almost as if you had read my mind,” Wellesley smiled. The assembled officer corps laughed. “And I would go so far as to say that your bet was well-placed:
Damned
well-placed, at that.”

“What are we facing?” Stevenson enquired.

“The enemy infantry and artillery are drawn up in two parallel lines, running from east to west, just to the south of Argaum. On either flank, there are large, irregular formations of cavalry.”

“Ah.
Those.
The ones who broke and ran at Assaye.” This time, Stevenson’s comment caused a burst of raucous laughter to erupt from the officers, though Wellesley suspected that it was as much a release of nervous energy as a true appreciation of the joke. Nonetheless, his hat went off to Stevenson, who had judged the mood of the room perfectly.

“The very same,” Wellesley continued smoothly, once the laughter had abated. “Although this time, I am afraid to say that they only outnumber us perhaps two to one.”

“Then this cannot be the entirety of their force,” frowned a captain named Fry, one of the 78th’s company commanders.

“Indeed not. This is a blocking force, hoping to fight a rearguard action…albeit a fairly large one.” Wellesley’s gaze roamed the room, meeting each eye in turn. “Scindia and Berar will be thinking that if their force can defeat us here, then all’s well and good. But I suspect that their
real
aim is to delay us, just long enough for their main force to reach the safety of Gawilghur.”

Colonel Stevenson pondered this for a moment and then said, “As strategies go, it’s not a bad one. Unfortunately, it throws our plans for a flanking attack straight onto the dungheap.”

“Yes it does, but that cannot be helped. Remember the most basic of military axioms, gentlemen.” Wellesley repeatedly tapped a fingertip on the tabletop three times for emphasis. “Divide. And. Conquer. The enemy has presented us with an opportunity to destroy a goodly-sized portion of his army in open battle. We cannot — nay, we
dare
not — refuse that battle, now that it has been offered.”

There was a general consensus of nods and mutterings in the affirmative. All assembled took Wellesley’s point for the truth that it was. Veering off and attempting to maneuver around them would only leave the enemy force at their back, which was tactically unacceptable under almost any circumstances. A retreat was unthinkable: Not only would it gain them nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it would also allow the Maratha main force that much longer to entrench themselves at Gawilghur.

No, the only option was to attack.

“I know that the men are tired,” Wellesley went on, his voice softening just a tad. “They have been marching hard since sundown. They have been marching hard for many nights now. There has been precious little respite since Assaye.
But,
the end is now in sight. If — no,
when
we break the Marathas here, on the field of Argaum, then all that paves the way for the final confrontation. Time enough for them to rest when we besiege Gawilghur, gentlemen.

“Now, to business. Colonel Stevenson, you have assembled four columns, did I hear you say?”

“You did, sir. Two each on either side of the
nullah,
” he acknowledged, referring to the watercourse. “It is extremely shallow, little more than ankle-deep.”

“Excellent. I shall command the columns on the right. You shall take those on the left.” Stevenson nodded his understanding. “The 1/8 and 2/7 Madras shall remain behind to guard the baggage train and establish a fortified base camp should the unthinkable happen.”

He means
retreat, Stevenson thought to himself grimly,
but I’ll be damned if that will happen this night.

“The cavalry are deployed on the left and right flanks, I hope,” Wellesley asked. Stevenson nodded serenely. “Then we shall simply go straight up the middle, gentlemen. There shall be little in the way of tactical finesse or graceful maneuvering this night. We simply do not have the time. Our columns shall be little more than blunt instruments, used to smash the Maratha line like a hammer breaking glass.”

“Very good, sir,” Stevenson said equably. “The King’s 33rd under Colonel Connolly shall be my vanguard regiment, followed by the five native Madras battalions. Your column is spearheaded by the 78th under Colonel Wallace, with seven native battalions.”

“Skirmishers?” Connolly chimed in.

“The pickets of the day shall lead us off,” Stevenson replied. Connolly nodded his thanks. The skirmishers would be the ones who made first contact with the enemy, after all. It was good to know that the 33rd and the 78th would not be forced to blunder blindly into the tall fields of crops, where pretty much anything could lie in wait for them.

“Very well then.” The General stood, signifying an end to the conversation. “We are racing against the rising of the sun, gentlemen, and I for one do not intend to come second. Let us be about it.”

No more than twenty minutes later, the British army was on the march.

The little hamlet of Sirsoli soon appeared out of the darkness. Deployed perhaps two thousand feet in front of the main body, the British skirmishers cleared the village with a swiftness and efficiency born of long practice and hard-won experience. The villagers, seemingly aware of the fact that the sword of war had been unsheathed and now hung over their home, had wisely made themselves scarce. Based upon the state of things in each of the houses that they had cleared, the skirmishers believed that the people of Sirsoli had left with little more than the clothes upon their backs, and hopefully a few days’ worth of vittles.

Mounted upon horseback, Wellesley watched with satisfaction as his leading battalion closed upon the village. The
nullah
veered to the northeast just beyond the edge of the hamlet, and would break up the orderliness of his formation if he let it. The pickets had quite wisely shifted to a more northeasterly track, turning to move parallel to the watercourse itself, and now he was pleased to see that Wallace, without being prompted, was giving the same instruction to the men of the 78th: Their leading half-companies turned to the right, keeping the
nullah
ever at their left flank.

Suddenly Wallace steepened the turn a little, pivoting his men so that they were moving in a more easterly direction than before. Not only would this buy the 78th a little more breathing room, but Arthur was forced to admit that it was as good a place as any for him to form the British line of battle. All seven battalions began to peel off, slowly but surely turning the column of march into a long line. When the maneuver was complete, every redcoat and native soldier stood shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, facing the enemy position off to the north.

At which point the Maratha artillery opened fire.

Their guns were heavy 18-pounders, capable of flinging solid shot for thousands of feet. The Maratha gunners were well-trained and experienced, and absolutely itching for vengeance after their defeat on the field of Assaye. Weighty cannonballs screamed through the air between the two armies. Some plowed into the mud or bounced, whickering through the tall millet, snapping off stalks as they went.

Others hit home. The heavy solid rounds blasted bloody holes in the British line, with some well-angled shots punching three, four, even five men out of the files, reducing them to little more than bloody smears on the dark earth.

Here and there, screams began to go up as men lost legs to low-flying shots that skimmed the ground at knee-height, or bounced up after an initially fruitless strike and smashed their way through the British lines.

Wellesley glanced off to his left. Stevenson’s column was getting the same treatment, and his men were still in the process of converting their formation from column into line. As he watched, a native soldier was blown at least thirty feet into the air, losing both of his legs from below the knee in the process.

His own artillery was much smaller — mostly mere 6-pounders, but there was a scattering of larger-bore heavy cannon too. He had left most of the heavier guns behind at the fortified camps, reasoning that it would be more of an encumbrance than a benefit during an engagement such as this, but now he was beginning to second-guess that decision. If nothing else, the friendly artillery fire would give the men heart and help to stiffen their resolve.

Too late now, Arthur. The die is well and truly cast.