Most of the men looked up into Dodd’s eyes as he walked by, although few of them looked at him for long, but instead glanced quickly away. Joubert saw the reaction, and sympathized with it for there was something distinctly unpleasant about the Englishman’s long sour face that edged on the frightening. Probably, Joubert decided, this Englishman was a flogger. The English were notorious for using the whip on their own men, reducing redcoats’ backs to welters of broken flesh and gleaming blood, but Joubert was quite wrong about Dodd.
Major Dodd had never flogged a man in his life, and that was not just because the Company forbade it in their army, but because William Dodd disliked the lash and hated to see a soldier flogged. Major Dodd liked soldiers. He hated most officers, especially those senior to him, but he liked soldiers. Good soldiers won battles, and victories made officers famous, so to be successful an officer needed soldiers who liked him and who would follow him. Dodd’s sepoys were proof of that. He had looked after them, made sure they were fed and paid, and he had given them victory. Now he would make them wealthy in the service of the Mahratta princes who were famous for their generosity.
He broke away from the regiment and marched back to its colours, a pair of bright-green flags marked with crossed tulwars. The flags had been the choice of Colonel Mathers, the Englishman who had commanded the regiment for five years until he resigned rather than fight against his own countrymen, and now the regiment would be known as Dodd’s regiment. Or perhaps he should call it something else. The Tigers? The Eagles? The Warriors of Scindia? Not that the name mattered now. What mattered now was to save these nine hundred well trained men and their five gleaming guns and take them safely back to the Mahratta army that was gathering in the north. Dodd turned beneath the colours.
“My name is Dodd!” he shouted, then paused to let one of his Indian officers translate his words into Marathi, a language Dodd did not speak. Few of the soldiers spoke Marathi either, for most were mercenaries from the north, but men in the ranks murmured their own translation and so Dodd’s message was relayed up and down the files.
“I am a soldier! Nothing but a soldier! Always a soldier!” He paused again.
The parade was being held in the open space inside the gate and a crowd of townsfolk had gathered to gape at the troops, and among the crowd was a scatter of [ the robed Arab mercenaries who were reputed to be the fiercest of all the Mahratta troops. They were wild-looking men, armed with every conceivable weapon, but Dodd doubted they had the discipline of his regiment.
“Together,” he shouted at his men, ‘you and I shall fight and we shall win.” He kept his words simple, for soldiers always liked simple things. Loot was simple, winning and losing were simple ideas, and even death, despite the way the damned preachers tried to tie it up in superstitious knots, was a simple concept.
“It is my intent,” he shouted, then waited for the translation to ripple up and down the ranks, ‘for this regiment to be the finest in Scindia’s service! Do your job well and I shall reward you. Do it badly, and I shall let your fellow soldiers decide on your punishment.” They liked that, as Dodd had known they would.
“Yesterday,” Dodd declaimed, ‘the British crossed our frontier!
Tomorrow their army will be here at Ahmednuggur, and soon we shall fight them in a great battle!” He had decided not to say that the battle would be fought well north of the city, for that might discourage the listening civilians.
“We shall drive them back to Mysore. We shall teach them that the army of Scindia is greater than any of their armies. We shall win!” The soldiers smiled at his confidence.
“We shall take their treasures, their weapons, their land and their women, and those things will be your reward if you fight well. But if you fight badly, you will die.” That phrase sent a shudder through the four white-coated ranks.