Splinters flew to eviscerate the crew that had been ramming the gun.
The barrel reared up, its trunnions tearing out of the carriage, then the heavy metal tube slowly toppled onto a wounded man. Another gunner reeled away, gasping for breath, while a third lay on the ground looking as though he slept.
A piper began to play as the General neared the kilted 778th.
“I thought I ordered all musicians to leave their instruments behind, drummers excepted,” Wellesley said angrily.
“Very hard to go into battle without the pipes, sir,” Campbell said reprovingly.
“Hard to save the wounded without orderlies,” Wellesley complained. In battle the pipers’ job was to save the wounded, but Harness had blithely disobeyed the order and brought his bagpipers. However, it was too late to worry about that disobedience now. Another round shot found its mark in a sepoy battalion, flinging men aside like broken dolls, while a high ball struck a tall tree, shaking its topmost leaves and provoking a small green parrot to squawk as it fled the branches.
Wellesley reined in close to the 778th. He glanced to his right, then looked back to the eight or nine hundred yards of country that separated his small force from the enemy. The sound of the guns was constant now, its thunder deafening, and the smoke of their cannonade was hiding the Mahratta infantry that waited for his assault. If the General was nervous he showed no sign of it, unless the fingers drumming softly against his thigh betrayed some worry. This was his first proper battle in the field, gun against gun and infantry against infantry, yet he seemed entirely cool.
Sharpe licked dry lips. His mare fidgeted and Diomed kept pricking his ears at the gunfire. Another British gun was hit, this time losing a wheel to an enemy round shot. The gunners rolled a new wheel forward, while the officer commanding the small battery ran forward with a handspike. The infantry waited beneath their bright silk colours, their long line of two ranks tipped with shining bayonets.
“Time to go,” Wellesley said very quietly.
“Forward, gentlemen,” he said, but still not loudly. He took a breath.
“Forward!” he shouted and, at the same time, took off his cocked hat and waved it towards the enemy.
The British drums began their beat. Sergeants shouted. Officers drew swords. The men began to march.
And the battle had begun.
CHAPTER 10
The redcoats advanced in a line of two ranks. The troops spread out as they walked and sergeants shouted at the files to keep closed. The infantry first had to pass the British gun line that was suffering badly in an unequal artillery duel with the Goanese gunners. The enemy was firing shell as well as solid shot, and Sharpe flinched as a shell exploded among a team of oxen that was picketed a hundred yards behind their gun. The wounded beasts bellowed, and one broke from its picket to limp with a bleeding and trailing leg towards the 10th Madras infantry.
A British officer ran and put the beast out of its misery with his pistol and the sepoys stepped delicately about the shuddering corpse. Colonel Harness, seeing that his two small battalion guns would inevitably be destroyed if they stayed in action, ordered his gunners to limber up and follow the regiment forward.
“Do it fast, you rogues! I want you close behind me.”
The enemy gunners, seeing that they had won the fight between the batteries, turned their pieces on the infantry. They were firing at seven hundred yards now, much too far for canister, but a round shot could whip a file into bloody scraps in the blinking of an eye. The sound of the guns was unending, one shot melding into the next and the whole making a thunderous noise of deafening violence. The enemy line was shrouded in grey-white smoke which was constantly lit by flashes of gunfire deep in the smoke’s heart. Sometimes a Mahratta battery would pause to let the smoke thin and Sharpe, riding twenty paces behind the General who was advancing just to the right of the 778th, could watch the enemy gunners heave at their pieces, see them back away as the gun captain swung the linstock over the barrel, then the gun would disappear again in a cloud of powder smoke and, an instant later, a ball would plunge down in front of the infantry. Sometimes it would bounce clean over the men’s heads, but too often the heavy shots slammed into the files and men would be broken apart in a spray of blood. Sharpe saw the front half of a shattered musket wheel up out of the Highlanders’ ranks. It turned in the air, pursued by its owner’s blood, then fell to impale its bayonet into the turf. A gentle north wind blew a patch of gunsmoke away from the centre of the enemy line where the guns were almost axle boss to axle boss. Sharpe watched men ram the barrels, watched them run clear, watched the smoke blossom again and heard the shriek of a round shot just overhead. Sometimes Sharpe could see the tongue of dark-red fire streaking towards him in the cloud’s heart, and then the lead-grey stroke of a ball arcing towards him in the sky, and once he saw the madly spiralling wisp of smoke left by the burning fuse of a shell, but every time the shots went wide or else fell short to churn up a dusty patch of earth.