“You’ll fire low, you bastards, or I’ll want to know why,” Harness growled, then took a deep breath.
“Fire!” he shouted, and his Highlanders did not fire high. They fired low and their heavy balls ripped into bellies and thighs and groins.
“Now go for them!” Harness shouted.
“Just go for the bastards!” And the Highlanders, unleashed, ran forward with their bayonets and began to utter their shrill war cries, as discordant as the music of the pipes that flayed them onwards. They were killers loosed to the joys of slaughter and the enemy did not wait for its coming, but just turned and fled.
The enemy in the rearward ranks of the compoo had room to run, but those in front were impeded by those behind and could not escape. A terrible despairing wail sounded as the ~j78th struck home and as their bayonets rose and fell in an orgy of killing. An officer led an attack on a knot of standard-bearers who tried desperately to save their flags, but the Scots would not be denied and Sharpe watched as the kilted men stepped over the dead to lunge their blades at the living.
The flags fell, then were raised again in Scottish hands. A cheer went up, and just then Sharpe heard another cheer and saw the sepoys charging home at the next section of the enemy line and, just as the first Mahratta troops had run from the Scots, so now the neighbouring battalions fled from the sepoys. The enemy’s vaunted infantry had crumpled at the first contact. They had watched the thin line come towards them, and they must have assumed that the red coats would be turned even redder by the heavy fire of the artillery, but the line had taken the guns’ punishment and just kept coming, battered and bleeding, and it must have seemed to the Mahrattas that such men were invincible. The huge Scots in their strange kilts had started the rout, but the sepoy battalions from Madras now set about the destruction of all the enemy’s centre and right. Only his left still stood its ground.
The sepoys killed, then pursued the fugitives who streamed westwards.
“Hold them!” Wellesley shouted at the nearest battalion commanders.
“Hold them!” But the sepoys would not be held. They wanted to pursue a beaten enemy and they streamed raggedly in his wake, killing as they went. Wellesley wheeled Diomed.
“Colonel Harness!”
“You’ll want me to form post here?” the Scotsman asked. Blood dripped from his sword.
“Here,” Wellesley agreed. The enemy infantry might have fled, but there was a maelstrom of cavalry a half-mile away and those horsemen were cantering forward to attack the disordered British pursuers.
“Deploy your guns, Harness.”
“I’ve given the order already,” Harness said, gesturing towards his two small gun teams that were hurrying six-pounders into position.
“Column of full companies!” Harness shouted.
“Quarter distance!”
The Scots, one minute so savage, now ran back into their ranks and files. The battalion faced no immediate enemy, for there was neither infantry nor artillery within range, but the distant cavalry was a threat and so Harness arranged them in their ten companies, close together, so that they resembled a square. The close formation could defend itself against any cavalry attack, and just as easily shake itself into a line or into a column of assault. Harness’s twin six-pounders were unlimbered and now began firing towards the horsemen who, appalled by the wreckage of their infantry, paused rather than attack the redcoats.
British and Indian officers were galloping among the pursuing sepoys, ordering them back to their ranks, while Harness’s 778th stood like a fortress to which the sepoys could retreat.
“So sanity is not a requisite of soldiering,” Wellesley said quietly.
“Sir?” Sharpe was the only man close enough to hear the General and assumed that the words were addressed to him.
“None of your business, Sharpe, none of your business,” Wellesley said, startled that he had been overheard.
“A canteen, if you please.”
It had been a good start, the General decided, for the right of Pohlmann’s army had been destroyed and that destruction had taken only minutes. He watched as the sepoys hurried back to their ranks and as the first pucka lees appeared from the nearby Kaitna with their huge loads of canteens and waterskins. He would let the men have their drink of water, then the line would be turned to face north and he could finish the job by assaulting Assaye. The General kicked Diomed around to examine the ground over which his infantry must advance and, just as he turned, so all hell erupted at the village.