Pohlmann’s well-trained infantry waited to pour a devastating weight of volley fire into red-coated regiments already deafened and demoralized by the cannon fire that would have torn their ranks into shreds as they struggled across the bloody fords. The numberless Mahratta cavalry were off to the west, strung along the bank towards Borkardan, and there it would wait until the British were defeated and Pohlmann released the horsemen to the joys of pursuit and slaughter.
The Hanoverian reckoned that his battle line waiting at the fords would decimate the enemy and the horsemen would turn the British defeat into a bloody rout, but there was always a small chance that the enemy might survive the river crossing and succeed in gaining the Kaitna’s northern bank in good order. He doubted the British could force his three compoos back, but in case they did Pohlmann planned to retreat two miles to the village of Assaye and invite the British to waste more men in an assault on what was now a miniature fortress. Assaye, like every other village on the plain, lived in fear of bandit raids and so the outermost houses had high, windowless walls made of thick mud, and the houses were joined so that their walls formed a continous rampart as high as the wall at Ahmednuggur. Pohlmann had blocked the village’s streets with ox carts, he had ordered loopholes hacked in the outer wall, he had placed all his smaller guns, a score of two- and three-pounder cannon, at the foot of the wall and then he had garrisoned the houses with the Rajah of Berar’s twenty thousand infantrymen. Pohlmann doubted that any of those twenty thousand men would need to fight, but he had the luxury of knowing they were in reserve should anything go wrong at the Kaitna.
He had just one problem left and to solve it he asked Dodd to accompany him eastwards along the river bank.
“If you were Wellesley,” he asked Dodd, ‘how would you attack?”
Dodd considered the question, then shrugged as if to suggest that the answer was obvious.
“Concentrate all my best troops at one end of the line and hammer my way through.”
“Which end?”
Dodd thought for a few seconds. He had been tempted to say that Wellesley would attack in the west, at the fords by Kodully, for that would keep him closest to Stevenson’s army, but Stevenson was a long way away and Pohlmann was deliberately riding eastwards.
“The eastern end?” Dodd suggested diffidently.
Pohlmann nodded.
“Because if he drives our left flank back he can place his army between us and Assaye. He divides us.”
“And we surround him,” Dodd observed.
“I’d rather we weren’t divided,” Pohlmann said, for if Wellesley did succeed in driving back the left flank he might well succeed in capturing Assaye, and while that would still leave Pohlmann’s compoos on the field, it would mean that the Colonel would lose his gold. So the Colonel needed a good hard anchor at the eastern end of his line to prevent his left flank being turned, and of all the regiments under his command he reckoned Dodd’s Cobras were the best. The left flank was now being held by one of Dupont’s regiments, a good one, but not as good as Dodd’s.
Pohlmann gestured at the Dutchman’s brown-coated troops who looked across the river towards the small village of Taunklee.
“Good men,” he said, ‘but not as good as yours.”
“Few of them are.”
“But we’d best pray those fellows hold,” Pohlmann said, ‘because if I was Wellesley that’s where I’d put my sharpest attack. Straight up, turn our flank, cut us off from Assaye. It worries me, it does.”
’94
Dodd could not see that it was overmuch cause for worry, for he doubted that the best troops in the world could survive the river crossing under the massed fire of Pohlmann’s batteries, but he did see the left flank’s importance.
“So reinforce Dupont,” he suggested carelessly.
Pohlmann looked surprised, as though the idea had not already occurred to him.
“Reinforce him? Why not? Would you care to hold the left, Major?”
“The left?” Dodd said suspiciously. Traditionally the right of the line was the station of honour on a battlefield and, while most of Pohlmann’s troops neither cared nor knew about such courtesies, William Dodd certainly knew, which was why Pohlmann had let the Major suggest that the left should be reinforced rather than simply order the touchy Dodd to move his precious Cobras.