The General had left Sharpe alone by the gun, all but for the dead and dying men and the trooper who was trying to staunch Diomed’s wound with a rag. Sharpe laughed suddenly, startling the trooper.
“He didn’t even say thank you,” Sharpe said aloud.
“What, sahib?” the trooper asked.
“You don’t call me sahib,” Sharpe said.
“I’m just another bloody soldier like you. Good for bloody nothing except fighting other people’s battles.
And ten to one the buggers won’t thank you.” He was thirsty so he opened one of the General’s canteens and drank from it greedily.
“Is that horse going to live?”
The Indian did not seem to understand everything Sharpe said, but the question must have made some sense for he pointed at Diomed’s mouth.
The stallion’s lips were drawn back to reveal yellow teeth through which a pale pink froth seeped. The Indian shook his head sadly.
“I bled that horse,” Sharpe said, ‘and the General said he was greatly obliged to me. Those were his very words, “greatly obliged”. Gave me a bloody coin, he did. But you save his life and he doesn’t even say thank you! I should have bled him, not his bloody horse. I should have bled him to bloody death.” He drank more of the water and wished it were arrack or rum.
“You know what the funny thing is?” he asked the Indian.
“I didn’t even do it because he was the General. I did it because I like him. Not personally, but I do like him. In a strange sort of way. I wouldn’t have done it for you. I’d have done it for Tom Garrard, but he’s a friend, see? And I’d have done it for Colonel McCandless, because he’s a proper gentleman, but I wouldn’t have done it for too many others.” Sharpe sounded drunk, even to himself, but in truth he was stone cold sober in a battlefield that had suddenly gone silent beneath the westering sun. It was almost evening, but there was still enough daylight left to finish the battle, though whether Sharpe would have anything to do with the finishing seemed debatable, for he had lost his job as the General’s orderly, had lost his horse, had lost his musket and was stranded with nothing but a dented sabre.
“That ain’t really true,” he confessed to the uncomprehending Indian, ‘what I said about liking him. I want him to like me, and that’s different, ain’t it? I thought the miserable bugger might make me an officer! Sod that for a hope, eh? No sash for me, lad. It’s back to being a bloody infantryman.”
He used the bloody sabre to cut a strip of cloth from the robes of a dead Arab, and he folded the strip into a pad that he pushed under his jacket to staunch the blood from the tulwar wound on his left shoulder. It was not a serious injury, he decided, for he could feel no broken bones and his left arm was unhindered. He tossed the dented sabre away, found a discarded Mahratta musket, tugged the cartridge box and bayonet off the dead owner’s belt, then went to find someone to kill.
It took half an hour to form the new line from the five battalions that had marched through the Mahratta gunfire and put Pohlmann’s right to flight, but now the five battalions faced north towards Pohlmann’s new position which rested its left flank on Assaye’s mud walls then stretched along the southern bank of the River Juah. The Mahrattas had forty guns remaining, Pohlmann still commanded eight thousand infantry and innumerable cavalry, and the Rajah of Berar’s twenty thousand infantrymen still waited behind the village’s makeshift ramparts.
Wellesley’s infantry numbered fewer than four thousand men, he had only two light guns that were serviceable and scarcely six hundred cavalrymen mounted on horses that were bone weary and parched dry.
“We can hold them!” Pohlmann roared at his men.
“We can hold them and beat them! Hold them and beat them.” He was still on horseback, and still in his gaudy silk coat. He had dreamed of riding his elephant across a field strewn with the enemy’s dead and piled with the enemy’s captured weapons, but instead he was encouraging his men to a last stand beside the river.