“We’re going to kill the bastards with volley fire,” he told his men, then waited for his translator to interpret.
“And then we’ll finish them off with bayonets. And I want those two colours! I want those flags hanging in Scindia’s tent tonight.”
The Scots were not waiting idly for the attack. Dodd could see small groups of men dashing out of the square and at first he thought they were plundering the dead cavalrymen, and then he saw they were dragging the bodies of men and horses back to make a low rampart. The few survivors of the picquets were among the Scots, who were now caught in a terrible dilemma. By staying in square they would keep themselves safe from any attack by the cavalry which still hovered to the south, though the square made them into an easy target for the enemy’s muskets, but if they deployed into line, so that they could use all their muskets against the enemy’s infantry line, they made themselves into cavalry bait. Their commanding officer decided to stay in square. Dodd reckoned he would do the same if he was ever so foolish as to be trapped like these fools were trapped. They still had to be finished off, and that promised to be grim work for the 74th was a notoriously tough regiment, but Dodd had the advantage of numbers and the advantage of position and he knew he must win.
Except that the Scotsmen did not agree with him. They crouched behind their barricade of dead men and horses and poured a blistering fire of musketry at the white-coated Cobras. A lone piper, who had disobeyed the order to leave his instrument at Naulniah, played in the square’s centre. Dodd could hear the sound, but he could not see the piper, nor, indeed, the square itself, which was hidden by a churning fog of dark powder smoke. The smoke was illuminated by the flashes of musket fire, and Dodd could hear the heavy balls thumping into his men. The Cobras were no longer advancing, for the closer they got to the deadly smoke the greater their casualties and so they had paused fifty yards from the square to let their own muskets do the work. They were reloading as fast as their enemies, but too many of their bullets were being wasted on the barricade of corpses. All four faces of the square were firing now, for the 74th was surrounded. To the west they fired at Dodd’s attacking line, to the north they fired at the Rajah’s infantry, while to the east and south they kept the cavalry at bay.
The Mahratta horsemen, scenting the Scottish regiment’s death, were prowling ever closer in the hope that they could dash in and take the colours before the infantry.
Dodd’s Cobras, together with the battalion from Dupont’s compoo, began to curl about the southern flank of the trapped regiment. It should take only three or four volleys, Dodd thought, to end the business, after which his men could go in with the bayonet. Not that his men were firing volleys any longer; instead they were firing as soon as their muskets were charged and Dodd felt their excitement and sought to curb it.
“Don’t waste your fire!” he shouted.
“Aim low!” William Dodd had no desire to lead a charge through the stinking smoke to find an unbroken formation of vengeful Highlanders waiting with bayonets. Dodd might dislike the Scots, but he had a healthy fear of fighting them with cold steel. Thin the bastards first, he thought, batter them, bleed them, then massacre them, but his men were too excited at the prospect of imminent victory and far too much of their fire was either going high or else being wasted on the barricade of the dead.
“Aim low!” he shouted again.
“Aim low!”
“They won’t last,”Joubert said. Indeed the Frenchman was amazed that the Scots still survived.
“Awkward things to kill, Scotsmen,” Dodd said. He took a drink from his canteen.
“I do hate the bastards. All preachers or thieves. Stealing Englishmen’s jobs. Aim low!” A man was thrown back near Dodd, blood bright on his white coat.
“Joubert?” Dodd called back to the Frenchman.