Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803

CHAPTER 3

Colonel McCandless led his small force into Sir Arthur Wellesley’s encampment late the following afternoon. For most of the morning they had been shadowed by a band of enemy horsemen who sometimes galloped close as if inviting Sevajee’s men to ride out and fight, but McCandless kept Sevajee on a tight leash and at midday a patrol of horsemen in blue coats with yellow facings had chased the enemy away. The blue-coated cavalry were from the 19th Light Dragoons and the Captain leading the troop gave McCandless a cheerful wave as he cantered after the enemy who had been prowling the road in hope of finding a laggard supply wagon. Four hours later McCandless topped a gentle rise to see the army’s lines spread across the countryside while, four miles farther north, the red walls of Ahmednuggur stood in the westering sun. From this angle the fort and the city appeared as one continuous building, a vast red rampart studded with bastions. Sharpe cuffed sweat from his face. ‘Looks like a brute, sir,’ he said, nodding at the walls.

‘The wall’s big enough,’ the Colonel said, ‘but there’s no ditch, no glacis and no outworks. It’ll take us no more than three days to punch a hole.’

‘Then pity the poor souls who must go through the hole,’ Sevajee commented.

‘It’s what they’re paid to do,’ McCandless said brusquely.

The area about the camp seethed with men and animals. Every cavalry horse in the army needed two lascars to gather forage, and those men were busy with sickles, while nearer to the camp’s centre was a vast muddy expanse where the draught bullocks and pack oxen were picketed. Puckalees, the men who carried water for the troops and the animals, were filling their buckets from a tank scummed with green. A thorn hedge surrounded six elephants that belonged to the gunners, while next to the great beasts was the artillery park with its twenty-six cannon, and after that came the sepoys’ lines where children shrieked, dogs yapped and women carried patties of bullock dung on their heads to build the evening fires. The last part of the journey took them through the lines of the 78th, a kilted Highland regiment, and the soldiers saluted McCandless and then looked at the red facings on Sharpe’s coat and called out the inevitable insults. ‘Come to see how a real man fights, Sergeant?’

‘You ever done any proper fighting?’ Sharpe retorted.

‘What’s a Havercake doing here?’

‘Come to teach you boys a lesson.’

‘What in? Cooking?’

‘Where I come from,’ Sharpe said, ‘it’s the ones in skirts what does the cooking.’

‘Enough, Sharpe,’ McCandless snapped. The Colonel liked to wear a kilt himself, claiming it was a more suitable garment for India’s heat than trousers. ‘We must pay our respects to the General,’ McCandless said, and turned towards the larger tents in the centre of the encampment.

It had been two years since Sharpe had last seen his old Colonel and he doubted that Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley would prove any friendlier now than he ever had. Sir Arthur had always been a cold fish, sparing with approval and frightening in his disapproval, and his most casual glance somehow managed to make Sharpe feel both insignificant and inadequate, and so, when McCandless dismounted outside the General’s tent, Sharpe deliberately hung back. The General, still a young man, was standing beside a line of six picketed horses and was evidently in a blazing temper. An orderly, in the blue-and-yellow coat of the 19th Dragoons, was holding a big grey stallion by its bridle and Wellesley was alternately patting the horse and snapping at the half-dozen aides who cowered nearby. A group of senior officers, majors and colonels, stood beside the General’s tent, suggesting that a council of war had been interrupted by the horse’s distress. The grey stallion was certainly suffering. It was shivering, its eyes were rolling white and sweat or spittle was dripping from its drooping head.

Wellesley turned as McCandless and Sevajee approached. ‘Can you bleed a horse, McCandless?’

‘I can put a knife in it, sir, if it helps,’ the Scotsman answered.

‘It does not help, damn it!’ Wellesley retorted savagely. ‘I don’t want him butchered, I want him bled. Where is the farrier?’

‘We’re looking for him, sir,’ an aide replied.

‘Then find him, damn it! Easy, boy, easy!’ These last three words were spoken in a soothing tone to the horse which had let out a feeble whinny. ‘He’s fevered,’ Wellesley explained to McCandless, ‘and if he ain’t bled, he’ll die.’

A groom hurried to the General’s side carrying a fleam and a blood stick, both of which he mutely offered to Wellesley. ‘No good giving them to me,’ the General snapped, ‘I can’t bleed a horse.’ He looked at his aides, then at the senior officers by the tent. ‘Someone must know how to do it,’ Wellesley pleaded. They were all men who lived with horses and professed to love them, though none knew how to bleed a horse, for that was a job left to servants, but finally a Scottish major averred that he had a shrewd idea of how the thing was done, and so he was given the fleam and its hammer. He took off his red coat, chose a fleam blade at random and stepped up to the shivering stallion. He placed the blade on the horse’s neck and drew back the hammer with his right hand.

‘Not like that!’ Sharpe blurted out. ‘You’ll kill him!’ A score of men stared at him while the Scottish Major, the blade unhit, looked rather relieved. ‘You’ve got the blade the wrong way round, sir,’ Sharpe explained. ‘You have to line it up along the vein, sir, not across it.’ He was blushing for having spoken out in front of the General and all the army’s senior officers.

Wellesley scowled at Sharpe. ‘Can you bleed a horse?’

‘I can’t ride the things, sir, but I do know how to bleed them. I worked in an inn yard,’ Sharpe added as though that was explanation enough.

‘Have you actually bled a horse?’ Wellesley demanded. He showed not the slightest surprise at seeing a man from his old battalion in the camp, but in truth he was far too distracted by his stallion’s distress to worry about mere men.

‘I’ve bled dozens, sir,’ Sharpe said, which was true, but those horses had been big heavy carriage beasts, and this white stallion was plainly a thoroughbred.

‘Then do it, damn it,’ the General said. ‘Don’t just stand there, do it!’

Sharpe took the fleam and the blood stick from the Major. The fleam looked like a misshapen penknife, and inside its brass case were folded a dozen blades. Two of the blades were shaped as hooks, while the rest were spoon-shaped. He selected a middle-sized spoon, checked that its edge was keen, folded the other blades away and then approached the horse. ‘You’ll have to hold him hard,’ he told the dragoon orderly.

‘He can be lively, Sergeant,’ the orderly warned in a low voice, anxious not to provoke another outburst from Wellesley.

‘Then hang on hard,’ Sharpe said to the orderly, then he stroked the horse’s neck, feeling for the jugular.

‘How much are you going to let out?’ Wellesley asked.

‘Much as it takes, sir,’ Sharpe said, who really had no idea how much blood he should spill. Enough to make it look good, he reckoned. The horse was nervous and tried to pull away from the orderly. ‘Give him a stroke, sir,’ Sharpe said to the General. ‘Let him know it ain’t the end of the world.’

Wellesley took the stallion’s head from the orderly and gave the beast’s nose a fondling. ‘It’s all right, Diomed,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make you better. Get on with it, Sharpe.’

Sharpe had found the jugular and now placed the sharp curve of the spoon-blade over the vein. He held the knife in his left hand and the blood stick in his right. The stick was a small wooden club that was needed to drive the fleam’s blade through a horse’s thick skin. ‘All right, boy,’ he murmured to the horse, ‘just a prick, nothing bad,’ and then he struck the blade hard with the stick’s blunt head.

The fleam sliced through hair and skin and flesh straight into the vein, and the horse reared up, but Sharpe, expecting the reaction, held the fleam in place as warm blood spurted out over his shako. ‘Hold him!’ he snapped at Wellesley, and the General seemed to find nothing odd in being ordered about by a sergeant and he obediently hauled Diomed’s head down. ‘That’s good,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s good, just keep him there, sir, keep him there,’ and he skewed the blade slightly to open the slit in the vein and so let the blood pulse out. It ran red down the white horse’s flank, it soaked Sharpe’s red coat and puddled at his feet.

The horse shivered, but Sharpe sensed that the stallion was calming. By relaxing the pressure on the fleam he could lessen the blood flow and after a while he slowed it to a trickle and then, when the horse had stopped shivering, Sharpe pulled the blade free. His right hand and arm were drenched in blood.

He spat on his clean left hand, then wiped the small wound. ‘I reckon he’ll live, sir,’ he told the General, ‘but a bit of ginger in his feed might help.’ That was another trick he had learned at the coaching tavern.

Wellesley stroked Diomed’s nose and the horse, suddenly unconcerned by the fuss all about him, lowered his head and cropped at a miserable tuft of grass. The General smiled, his bad mood gone. ‘I’m greatly obliged to you, Sharpe,’ Wellesley said, relinquishing the bridle into the orderly’s grasp. ‘ ’Pon my soul, I’m greatly obliged to you,’ he repeated enthusiastically. ‘As neat a blood-letting as ever I did see.’ He put a hand into his pocket and brought out a haideri that he offered to Sharpe. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Sharpe said, taking the gold coin. It was a generous reward.

‘Good as new, eh?’ Wellesley said, admiring the horse. ‘He was a gift.’

‘An expensive one,’ McCandless observed drily.

‘A valued one,’ Wellesley said. ‘Poor Ashton left him to me in his will. You knew Ashton, McCandless?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Henry Ashton had been Colonel of the 12th, a Suffolk regiment posted to India, and he had died after taking a bullet in the liver during a duel.

‘A damned shame,’ Wellesley said, ‘but a fine gift. Pure Arab blood, McCandless.’

Most of the pure Arab blood seemed to be on Sharpe, but the General was delighted with the horse’s sudden improvement. Indeed, Sharpe had never seen Wellesley so animated. He grinned as he watched the horse, then he told the orderly to walk Diomed up and down, and he grinned even more widely as he watched the horse move. Then, suddenly aware that the men about him were taking an amused pleasure from his own delight, his face drew back into its accustomed cold mask. ‘Obliged to you, Sharpe,’ he said yet again, then he turned and walked towards his tent. ‘McCandless! Come and give me your news!’

McCandless and Sevajee followed the General and his aides into the tent, leaving Sharpe trying to wipe the blood from his hands. The dragoon orderly grinned at him. ‘That’s a six-hundred-guinea horse you just bled, Sergeant,’ he said.

‘Bloody hell!’ Sharpe said, staring in disbelief at the dragoon. ‘Six hundred!’

‘Must be worth that. Best horse in India, Diomed is.’

‘And you look after him?’ Sharpe asked.

The orderly shook his head. ‘He’s got grooms to look after his horses, and the farrier to bleed and shoe them. My job is to follow him into battle, see? And when one horse gets tired I give him another.’

‘You drag all those six horses around?’ Sharpe asked, astonished.

‘Not all six of them,’ the dragoon said, ‘only two or three. But he shouldn’t have six horses anyway. He only wants five, but he can’t find anyone to buy the spare. You don’t know anyone who wants to buy a horse, do you?’

‘Hundreds of the buggers,’ Sharpe said, gesturing at the encampment. ‘Every bleeding infantryman over there for a start.’

‘It’s theirs if they’ve got four hundred guineas,’ the orderly said. ‘It’s that bay gelding, see?’ He pointed. ‘Six years old and good as gold.’

‘No use looking at me,’ Sharpe said. ‘I hate the bloody things.’

‘You do?’

‘Lumpy, smelly beasts. I’m happier on my feet.’

‘You see the world from a horse’s back,’ the dragoon said, ‘and catch women’s eyes.’

‘So they’re not entirely useless,’ Sharpe said and the orderly grinned. He was a happy, round-faced young man with tousled brown hair and a ready smile. ‘How come you’re the General’s orderly?’ Sharpe asked him.

The dragoon shrugged. ‘He asked my Colonel to give him someone and I was chosen.’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘He’s all right,’ the orderly said, jerking his head towards Wellesley’s tent. ‘Don’t crack a smile often, leastwise not with the likes of you and me, but he’s a fair man.’

‘Good for him.’ Sharpe stuck out his bloodied hand. ‘My name’s Dick Sharpe.’

‘Daniel Fletcher,’ the orderly said, ‘from Stoke Poges.’

‘Never heard of it,’ Sharpe said. ‘Where can I get a scrub?’

‘Cook tent, Sergeant.’

‘And riding boots?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Find a dead man in Ahmednuggur,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’ll be cheaper than buying them off me.’

‘That’s true,’ Sharpe said, then he limped to the cook tent. The limp was caused by the sore muscles from long hours in the saddle. He had purchased a length of cotton cloth in the village where they had spent the night, then torn the cloth into strips that he had wrapped about his calves to protect them from the stirrup leathers, but his calves still hurt. God, he thought, but he hated bloody horses.

He washed the worst of Diomed’s blood from his hands and face, diluted what was on his uniform, then went back to wait for McCandless. Sevajee’s men still sat on their horses and stared at the distant city that was topped by a smear of smoke. Sharpe could hear the murmur of voices inside the General’s tent, but he paid no attention. It wasn’t his business. He wondered if he could scrounge a tent for his own use, for it had already rained earlier in the day and Sharpe suspected it might rain again, but Colonel McCandless was not a man much given to tents. He derided them as women’s luxuries, preferring to seek shelter with local villagers or, if no peasant house or cattle byre was available, happily sleeping beneath the stars or in the rain. A pint of rum, Sharpe thought, would not go amiss either.

‘Sergeant Sharpe!’ Wellesley’s familiar voice broke into his thoughts and Sharpe turned to see his old commanding officer coming from the big tent.

‘Sir!’ Sharpe stiffened to attention.

‘So Colonel McCandless has borrowed you from Major Stokes?’ Wellesley asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said. The General was bareheaded and Sharpe saw that his temples had turned prematurely grey. He seemed to have forgotten Sharpe’s handiwork with his horse, for his long-nosed face was as unfriendly as ever.

‘And you saw this man Dodd at Chasalgaon?’

‘I did, sir.’

‘Repugnant business,’ Wellesley said, ‘repugnant. Did he kill the wounded?’

‘All of them, sir. All but me.’

‘And why not you?’ Wellesley asked coldly.

‘I was covered in blood, sir. Fair drenched in it.’

‘You seem to be in that condition much of the time, Sergeant,’ Wellesley said with just a hint of a smile, then he turned back to McCandless. ‘I wish you joy of the hunt, Colonel. I’ll do my best to help you, but I’m short of men, woefully short.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the Scotsman said, then watched as the General went back into his big tent which was crammed with red-coated officers. ‘It seems,’ McCandless said to Sharpe when the General was gone, ‘that we’re not invited to supper.’

‘Were you expecting to be, sir?’

‘No,’ McCandless said, ‘and I’ve no business in that tent tonight either. They’re planning an assault for first light tomorrow.’

Sharpe thought for a moment that he must have misheard. He looked northwards at the big city wall. ‘Tomorrow, sir? An assault? But they only got here today and there isn’t a breach!’

‘You don’t need a breach for an escalade, Sergeant,’ McCandless said. ‘An escalade is nothing but ladders and murder.’

Sharpe frowned. ‘Escalade?’ He had heard the word, but was not really sure he knew what it meant.

‘March straight up to the wall, Sharpe, throw your ladders against the ramparts and climb.’ McCandless shook his head. ‘No artillery to help you, no breach, no trenches to get you close, so you must accept the casualties and fight your way through the defenders. It isn’t pretty, Sharpe, but it can work.’ The Scotsman still sounded disapproving. He was leading Sharpe away from the General’s tent, seeking a place to spread his blanket. Sevajee and his men were following, and Sevajee was walking close enough to listen to McCandless’s words. ‘Escalades can work well against an unsteady enemy,’ the Colonel went on, ‘but I’m not at all convinced the Mahrattas are shaky. I doubt they’re shaky at all, Sharpe. They’re dangerous as snakes and they usually have Arab mercenaries in their ranks.’

‘Arabs, sir? From Arabia?’

‘That’s where they usually come from,’ McCandless confirmed. ‘Nasty fighters, Sharpe.’

‘Good fighters,’ Sevajee intervened. ‘We hire hundreds of them every year. Hungry men, Sergeant, who come from their bare land with sharp swords and long muskets.’

‘Doesn’t serve to underestimate an Arab,’ McCandless agreed. ‘They fight like demons, but Wellesley’s an impatient man and he wants the business over. He insists they won’t be expecting an escalade and thus won’t be ready for one, and I pray to God he’s right.’

‘So what do we do, sir?’ Sharpe asked.

‘We go in behind the assault, Sharpe, and beseech Almighty God that our ladder parties do get into the city. And once we’re inside we hunt for Dodd. That’s our job.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said.

‘And once we have the traitor we take him to Madras, put him on trial and have him hanged,’ McCandless said with satisfaction, as though the job was as good as done. His gloomy forebodings of the previous night seemed to have vanished. He had stopped at a bare patch of ground. ‘This looks like a fair billet. No more rain in the offing, I think, so we should be comfortable.’

Like hell, Sharpe thought. A bare bed, no rum, a fight in the morning, and God only knew what kind of devils waiting across the wall, but he slept anyway.

And woke when it was still dark to see shadowy men straggling past with long ladders across their shoulders. Dawn was near and it was time for an escalade. Time for ladders and murder.

Sanjit Pandee was Killadar of the city, which meant that he commanded Ahmednuggur’s garrison in the name of his master, Dowlut Rao Scindia, Maharajah of Gwalior, and in principle every soldier in the city, though not in the adjacent fortress, was under Pandee’s command. So why had Major Dodd ejected Pandee’s troops from the northern gatehouse and substituted his own men? Pandee had sent no orders, but the deed had been done anyway and no one could explain why, and when Sanjit Pandee sent a message to Major Dodd and demanded an answer, the messenger was told to wait and, so far as the Killadar knew, was still waiting.

Sanjit Pandee finally summoned the courage to confront the Major himself. It was dawn, a time when the Killadar was not usually stirring, and he discovered Dodd and a group of his white-coated officers on the southern wall from where the Major was watching the British camp through a heavy telescope mounted on a tripod. Sanjit Pandee did not like to disturb the tall Dodd who was being forced to stoop awkwardly because the tripod was incapable of raising the glass to the level of his eye. The Killadar cleared his throat, but that had no effect, and then he scraped a foot on the firestep, and still Dodd did not even glance at him, so finally the Killadar demanded his explanation, though in very flowery terms just in case he gave the Englishman offence. Sanjit Pandee had already lost the battle over the city treasury which Dodd had simply commandeered without so much as a by-your-leave, and the Killadar was nervous of the scowling foreigner.

‘Tell the bloody man,’ Dodd told his interpreter without taking his eye from the telescope, ‘that he’s wasting my bloody time. Tell him to go and boil his backside.’

Dodd’s interpreter, who was one of his younger Indian officers, courteously suggested to the Killadar that Major Dodd’s attention was wholly consumed by the approaching enemy, but that as soon as he had a moment of leisure, the Major would be delighted to hold a conversation with the honoured Killadar.

The Killadar gazed southwards. Horsemen, British and Indian, were ranging far ahead of the approaching enemy column. Not that Sanjit Pandee could see the column properly, only a dark smudge among the distant green that he supposed was the enemy. Their feet kicked up no dust, but that was because of the rain that had fallen the day before. ‘Are the enemy truly coming?’ he enquired politely.

‘Of course they’re not bloody coming,’ Dodd said, standing upright and massaging the small of his back. ‘They’re running away in terror.’

‘The enemy are indeed approaching, sahib,’ the interpreter said deferentially.

The Killadar glanced along his defences and was reassured to see the bulk of Dodd’s regiment on the firestep, and alongside them the robed figures of his Arab mercenaries. ‘Your regiment’s guns,’ he said to the interpreter, ‘they are not here?’