“Peashooters!” Dodd said disparagingly.
“Monsieur?” Captain Joubert, the Frenchman who had desperately hoped to be given command of the regiment himself, asked.
“You heard me, Monsewer. Peashooters!” Dodd said as he lifted a limber’s lid and hoisted out one of the four-pounder shots. It was half the size of a cricket ball.
“You might as well spit at them, Monsewer!”
Joubert, a small man, shrugged.
“At close range, Monsieur…” he began to defend the guns.
“At close range, Monsewer, close range!” Dodd tossed the shot to Joubert who fumbled the catch.
“That’s no use at close range! No more use than a musket ball, and the gun’s ten times more cumbersome than a musket.” He rummaged through the limber.
“No canister? No grape?”
“Canister isn’t issued for four-pounder guns,” Joubert said.
“It isn’t even made for them.”
“Then we make our own,” Dodd said.
“Bags of scrap metal, Monsewer, strapped to a sabot and a charge. One and a half pounds of powder per round. Find a dozen women in the town and have them sew up the bags.
Maybe your wife can help, Monsewer?” He leered at Joubert who showed no reaction. Dodd could smell a man’s weakness, and the oddly attractive Simone Joubert was undoubtedly her husband’s weakness, for she clearly despised him and he, just as clearly, feared losing her.
“I want thirty bags of grape for each gun by this time tomorrow,” Dodd ordered.
“But the barrels, Major!”Joubert protested.
“You mean they’ll be scratched?” Dodd jeered.
“What do you want, Monsewer? A scratched bore and a live regiment? Or a clean gun and a row of dead men? By tomorrow, thirty rounds of canister per gun, and if there ain’t room in the limbers then throw out that bloody round shot.
Might as well spit cherrystones as fire those pebbles.”
Dodd slammed down the limber’s lid. Even if the guns fired makeshift grapeshot he was not certain that they were worth keeping. Every battalion in India had such close-support artillery, but in Dodd’s opinion the guns only served to slow down a regiment’s manoeuvres. The weapons themselves were cumbersome, and the livestock needed to haul them was a nuisance, and if he were ever given his own compoo he would strip the regiments of field guns for if a battalion of infantry could not defend itself with fire locks what use was it? But he was stuck with the five guns, so he would use them as giant shotguns and open fire at three hundred yards. The gunners would moan about the damage to their barrels, but damn the gunners.
Dodd inspected the howitzer, found it as clean as the other guns, and nodded to the gunner-sub adar He offered no compliment, for Dodd did not believe in praising men for merely doing their duty.
I Praise was due to those who exceeded their duty, punishment for those I who fell short, and silence must serve the rest.
I Once the five guns had been inspected Dodd walked slowly down the white-jacketed infantry ranks where he looked every man in the ; eye and did not change his grim expression once, even though the soldiers had taken particular care to be well turned out for their new commanding officer. Captain Joubert followed a pace behind Dodd and there was something ludicrous about the conjunction of the tall, long-legged Dodd and the diminutive Joubert who needed to scurry to keep up with the Englishman. Once in a while the Frenchman would make a comment.
“He’s a good man, sir,” he might say as they passed a soldier, but Dodd ignored all the praise and, after a while, Joubert fell silent and just scowled at Dodd’s back. Dodd sensed the ; Frenchman’s dislike, but did not care.
Dodd showed no reaction to the regiment’s appearance, though all the same he was impressed. These men were smart and their weapons were as clean as those of his own sepoys who, re-issued with white jackets, now paraded as an extra company at the regiment’s left flank where, in British regiments, the skirmishers paraded. East India Company battalions had no skirmishers, for it was believed that sepoys were i’ no good at the task, but Dodd had decided to make his loyal sepoys into the finest skirmishers in India. Let them prove the Company , wrong, and in the proving they could help destroy the Company.