“Form up!” Harness shouted, ignoring the lieutenant. Sergeants and corporals shoved men into line.
“Forward!” Harness shouted.
“Hurry, man,” Wellesley said to Sharpe, but not angrily. Sharpe had heaved the saddle over Diomed’s back and now stooped under the grey horse’s belly to gather the girth.
“He doesn’t like it too tight,” the General said.
Sharpe buckled the strap and Wellesley took Diomed’s reins from him and heaved himself up into the saddle without another word. The General’s coat was smeared with blood, but it was horse blood, not his own.
“Well done, Harness!” he called ahead to the Scotsman, then rode away and Sharpe unhitched the mare from the dead horse’s bridle, clambered onto her back and followed.
Three pipers played for the y78th now. They were far from home, under a furnace sun in a blinding sky, and they brought the mad music of Scotland’s wars to India. And it was madness. The ySth had suffered hard from the gunfire and the line of their advance was littered with dead, dying and broken men, yet the survivors now re-formed to attack the main Mahratta battle line. They were back in two ranks, they held their bloody bayonets in front, and they advanced against Pohlmann’s own compoo on the right of the enemy line. The Highlanders looked huge, made into giants by their tall bearskin hats with their feather plumes, and they looked terrible, for they were. These were northern warriors from a hard country and not a man spoke as they advanced. To the waiting Mahrattas they must have seemed like creatures from nightmare, as terrible as the gods who writhed on their temple walls.
Yet the Mahratta infantry in their blue and yellow coats were just as proud. They were warriors recruited from the martial tribes of northern India, and now they levelled their muskets as the two Scottish ranks approached.
The Scots were terribly outnumbered and it seemed to Sharpe that they must all die in the coming volley. Sharpe himself was in a half daze stunned by the noise yet aware that his mood was swinging between elation at the Scottish bravery and the pure terror of battle. He heard a cheer and looked right to see the sepoys charging into the guns.
He watched gunners flee, then saw the Madrassi sepoys tear into the laggards with their bayonets.
“Now we’ll see how their infantry fights,” Wellesley said savagely to Campbell, and Sharpe understood that this was the real testing point, for infantry was everything. The infantry was despised for it did not have the cavalry’s glamour, nor the killing capacity of the gunners, but it was still the infantry that won battles. Defeat the enemy’s infantry and the cavalry and gunners had nowhere to hide.
The Mahrattas waited with levelled muskets. The Highlanders, silent again, marched on. Ninety paces to go, eighty, and then an officer’s sword swung down in the Mahratta ranks and the volley came. It seemed ragged to Sharpe, maybe because most men did not fire on the word of command, but instead fired after they heard their neighbour’s discharge, and he was not even aware of a bullet going close past his head because he was watching the Scots, terrified for them, but it seemed to him that not a man fell. Some men must have been hit, for he saw ripples where the files opened to step past the fallen, but the 778th, or what was left of the y78th, was intact still and still Harness did not fire, but just kept marching them onward.
“They fired high!” Campbell exulted.
“They drill well, fire badly,” Barclay observed happily.
“Seventy paces to go, then sixty. A Highlander staggered from the line and collapsed. Two other men who had been wounded by the canister, but were now recovered, hurried from the rear and pushed their way into the ranks.
“Halt!” Harness suddenly called.
“Present!”
The guns, tipped by their bloodstained steel blades, came up into the Highlanders’ shoulders so that the whole line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right. The Mahratta gunsmoke was clearing and the enemy soldiers could see the Scots’ heavy muskets, with hate behind them, and the Highlanders waited a heartbeat so the enemy could also see their death in the levelled muskets.