An ensign in the colour party took a musket ball in his left eye and fell backwards without a sound. A sergeant gripped the staff in one hand and in his other was a halberd with a wicked blade. In a moment, the sergeant knew, he might have to fight with the halberd. The square would end with a huddle of bloodied men around the colours and the enemy would fall on them and for a few moments it would be steel against steel, and the sergeant reckoned he would give the flag to a wounded man and do what harm he could with the heavy, long-shafted axe. It was a pity to die, but he was a soldier, and no one had yet devised a way a man could live for ever, not even those clever bastards in Edinburgh. He thought of his wife in Dundee, and of his woman in the camp at Naulniah, and he regretted his many sins for it was not good for a man to go to his God with a bad conscience, but it was too late now and so he gripped the halberd and hid his fear and determined he would die like a man and take a few other men with him.
The muskets banged into Highlanders’ shoulders. They bit the tips from new cartridges and every bite added salty gunpowder to their mouths so that they had no spittle, only bone-dry throats that breathed filthy smoke, and the regiment’s pucka lees were far away, lost somewhere in the country behind. The Scots went on firing, and the powder sparks from the pan burned their cheeks, and they loaded and rammed and knelt and fired again, and somewhere beyond the smoke the enemy’s fire came flashing in to shudder the corpses of the barricade or else to snatch a man back in a spray of blood. Wounded men fought alongside the living, their faces blackened by powder, their mouths parched, their shoulders bruised, and the white facings and cuffs of their red coats were spattered with the blood of men now dead or dying.
“Close up!” the sergeants shouted and the square shrank another few feet as dying men were hauled back to the square’s centre and the living closed the files. Men who had started the day five or six files apart were neighbours now.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Orrock insisted.
Swinton had nothing to say. There was nothing to say, and nothing more to do except die, and so he picked up the musket of a dead man, took the cartridge box from the corpse’s pouch, and pushed into the square’s western face. The man to his right was drunk, but Swinton did not care, for the man was fighting.
“Come to do some proper work, Major?” the drunken man greeted Swinton, with a toothless grin.
“Come to do some proper work, Tarn,” Swinton agreed. He bit the end from a cartridge, charged the musket, primed the lock and fired into the smoke. He reloaded, fired again, and prayed he would die bravely.
Fifty yards away William Dodd watched the cloud of smoke made by the Scottish muskets. The cloud was getting smaller, he thought. Men were dying there and the square was shrinking, but it was still spitting flame and lead. Then he heard the jingle of chains and turned to see the two four-pounder guns being hauled towards him. He would let the guns fire one blast of canister each, then he would have his men fix bayonets and he would lead them across the rampart of corpses into the heart of the smoke.
And then the trumpet called.
CHAPTER 11
Colonel McCandless had stayed close to his friend Colonel Wallace, the commander of the brigade which formed the right of Wellesley’s line.
Wallace had seen the picquciets and his own regiment, the 74th, vanish somewhere to the north, but he had been too busy bringing his two sepoy battalions into the s-attacking line to worry about Orrock or Swinton. He did charge an aid to keep watching for Orrock’s men, expecting to see them veering baock towards him at any moment, then he forgot the errant picquets as his men climbed from the low ground into the fire of the Mahratta gun line. Canister shredded Wallace’s ranks, it beat like hail on his men’ss muskets and it swept the leaves from the scattered trees through which the Madrassi battalions marched, but, just like the 778th, the sepoys did not turn. They walked doggedly on like men pushing into a storm, amid at sixty paces Wallace halted them to pour a vengeful volley into the gunners and McCandless could hear the musket balls clanging off the ppainted gun barrels. Sevajee was with McCandless and he stared in as the sepoys reloaded and went forward again, this time carrying their bayonets to the gunners. For a moment there was chaotic slaughter as Madrassi sepoys chased Goanese gunners around limbers and guns, but Wallace was already looking ahead and could see this. At the vaunted enemy infantry was wavering, evidently shaken by theae easy victory of the 778th, and so the Colonel shouted at his sepoys to ignore the gunners and re-form and push on to attack the infantry. It ~ took a moment to reform the line, then it advanced from the guns. VAVallace gave the enemy infantry one volley, then charged, and all alon: j-g the line the vaunted Mahratta foot fled from the sepoy attack.