and every lurch sent shot tumbling or powder spilling. Sharpe saw General Wellesley turn his horse towards the sepoys. He was doubtless shouting at them to open ranks and so allow the bolting oxen to pass through the line, but instead, quite suddenly, the men themselves turned and ran. ‘Jesus!’ Sharpe said aloud, earning himself a reproving look from Sergeant Colquhoun.
Two battalions of the sepoys were fleeing. Sharpe saw the General riding among the fugitives, and he imagined Wellesley shouting at the frightened men to stop and re-form, but instead they kept running towards the millet. They had been panicked by the oxen and by the weight of enemy shot that beat the dry grassland with dust and smoke. The men vanished in the high stalks, leaving nothing behind but a scatter of embarrassed officers and, astonishingly, the two panicked gun teams which had inexplicably stopped short of the millet and now waited patiently for the gunners to catch them.
‘Sit yourselves down!’ Urquhart called to his men, and the company squatted in the dry riverbed. One man took a stump of clay pipe from his pouch and lit it with a tinderbox. The tobacco smoke drifted slowly in the small wind. A few men drank from their canteens, but most were hoarding their water against the dryness that would come when they bit into their cartridges. Sharpe glanced behind, hoping to see the puckalees who brought the battalion water, but there was no sign of them. When he turned back to the north he saw that some enemy cavalry had appeared on the crest, their tall lances making a spiky thicket against the sky. Doubtless the enemy horsemen were tempted to attack the broken British line and so stampede more of the nervous sepoys, but a squadron of British cavalry emerged from a wood with their sabres drawn to threaten the flank of the enemy horsemen. Neither side charged, but instead they just watched each other. The 74th’s pipers had ceased their playing. The remaining British galloper guns were deploying now, facing up the long gentle slope to where the enemy cannon lined the horizon. ‘Are all the muskets loaded?’ Urquhart asked Colquhoun.
‘They’d better be, sir, or I’ll want to know why.’
Urquhart dismounted. He had a dozen full canteens of water tied to his saddle and he unstrung six of them and gave them to the company. ‘Share it out,’ he ordered, and Sharpe wished he had thought to bring some extra water himself. One man cupped some water in his hands and let his dog lap it up. The dog then sat and scratched its fleas while its master lay back and tipped his shako over his eyes.
What the enemy should do, Sharpe thought, is throw their infantry forward. All of it. Send a massive attack across the skyline and down towards the millet. Flood the riverbed with a horde of screaming warriors who could add to the panic and so snatch victory.
But the skyline stayed empty except for the guns and the stalled enemy lancers.
And so the redcoats waited.
Colonel William Dodd, commanding officer of Dodd’s Cobras, spurred his horse to the skyline from where he stared down the slope to see the British force in disarray. It looked to him as though two or more battalions had fled in panic, leaving a gaping hole on the right of the redcoat line. He turned his horse and kicked it to where the Mahratta warlord waited under his banners. Dodd forced his horse through the aides until he reached Prince Manu Bappoo. ‘Throw everything forward, sahib,’ he advised Bappoo, ‘now!’
Manu Bappoo showed no sign of having heard Dodd. The Mahratta commander was a tall and lean man with a long, scarred face and a short black beard. He wore yellow robes, had a silver helmet with a long horse-tail plume, and carried a drawn sword that he claimed to have taken in single combat from a British cavalry officer. Dodd doubted the claim, for the sword was of no pattern that he recognized, but he was not willing to challenge Bappoo directly on the matter. Bappoo was not like most of the Mahratta leaders that Dodd knew. Bappoo might be a prince and the younger brother of the cowardly Rajah of Berar, but he was also a fighter.
‘Attack now!’ Dodd insisted. Much earlier in the day he had advised against fighting the British at all, but now it seemed that his advice had been wrong, for the British assault had dissolved in panic long before it reached musket range. ‘Attack with everything we’ve got, sahib,’ Dodd urged Bappoo.
‘If I throw everything forward, Colonel Dodd,’ Bappoo said in his oddly sibilant voice, ‘then my guns will have to cease fire. Let the British walk into the cannon fire, then we shall release the infantry.’ Bappoo had lost his front teeth to a lance thrust, and hissed his words so that, to Dodd, he sounded like a snake. He even looked reptilian. Maybe it was his hooded eyes, or perhaps it was just his air of silent menace. But at least he could fight. Bappoo’s brother, the Rajah of Berar, had fled before the battle at Assaye, but Bappoo, who had not been present at Assaye, was no coward. Indeed, he could bite like a serpent.
‘The British walked into the cannon fire at Assaye,’ Dodd growled, ‘and there were fewer of them and we had more guns, but still they won.’
Bappoo patted his horse which had shied away from the sound of a nearby cannon. It was a big, black Arab stallion, and its saddle was encrusted with silver. Both horse and saddle had been gifts from an Arabian sheik whose tribesmen sailed to India to serve in Bappoo’s own regiment. They were mercenaries from the pitiless desert who called themselves the Lions of Allah and they were reckoned to be the most savage regiment in all India. The Lions of Allah were arrayed behind Bappoo: a phalanx of dark-faced, white-robed warriors armed with muskets and long, curved scimitars. ‘You truly think we should fight them in front of our guns?’ Bappoo asked Dodd.
‘Muskets will kill more of them than cannon will,’ Dodd said. One of the things he liked about Bappoo was that the man was willing to listen to advice. ‘Meet them halfway, sahib, thin the bastards out with musket fire, then pull back to let the guns finish them with canister. Better still, sahib, put the guns on the flank to rake them.’
‘Too late to do that,’ Bappoo said.
‘Aye, well. Mebbe.’ Dodd sniffed. Why the Indians stubbornly insisted on putting guns in front of infantry, he did not know. Daft idea, it was, but they would do it. He kept telling them to put their cannon between the regiments, so that the gunners could slant their fire across the face of the infantry, but Indian commanders reckoned that the sight of guns directly in front heartened their men. ‘But put some infantry out front, sahib,’ he urged.
Bappoo thought about Dodd’s proposal. He did not much like the Englishman who was a tall, ungainly and sullen man with long yellow teeth and a sarcastic manner, but Bappoo suspected his advice was good. The Prince had never fought the British before, but he was aware that they were somehow different from the other enemies he had slaughtered on a score of battlefields across western India. There was, he understood, a stolid indifference to death in those red ranks that let them march calmly into the fiercest cannonade. He had not seen it happen, but he had heard about it from enough men to credit the reports. Even so he found it hard to abandon the tried and tested methods of battle. It would seem unnatural to advance his infantry in front of the guns, and so render the artillery useless. He had thirty-eight cannon, all of them heavier than anything the British had yet deployed, and his gunners were as well trained as any in the world. Thirty-eight heavy cannon could make a fine slaughter of advancing infantry, yet if what Dodd said was true, then the red-coated ranks would stoically endure the punishment and keep coming. Except some had already run, which suggested they were nervous, so perhaps this was the day when the gods would finally turn against the British. ‘I saw two eagles this morning,’ Bappoo told Dodd, ‘outlined against the sun.’
So bloody what? Dodd thought. The Indians were great ones for auguries, forever staring into pots of oil or consulting holy men or worrying about the errant fall of a trembling leaf, but there was no better augury for victory than the sight of an enemy running away before they even reached the fight. ‘I assume the eagles mean victory?’ Dodd asked politely.
‘They do,’ Bappoo agreed. And the augury suggested the victory would be his whatever tactics he used, which inclined him against trying anything new. Besides, though Prince Manu Bappoo had never fought the British, nor had the British ever faced the Lions of Allah in battle. And the numbers were in Bappoo’s favour. He was barring the British advance with forty thousand men, while the redcoats were not even a third of that number. ‘We shall wait,’ Bappoo decided,