The musket fire spurted scraps of dried mud all around Wellesley and his aides, but the General seemed to have a charmed life.
The 778th returned to the attack on the left, only this time they ran their two ladders directly at the bastion which flanked the wall where their first attempt had failed. The threatened bastion reacted with an angry explosion of musket fire. One of the ladders fell, its carriers hard hit by the volley, but the other swung on up and as soon as its top struck the bastion’s summit a kilted officer climbed the rungs.
“No!” McCandless cried, as the officer was hit and fell. Other men took his place, but the defenders tipped a basket of stones over the parapet and the tumbling rocks scoured the ladder clear. A volley of musketry made the defenders duck and when the smoke cleared Sharpe saw that the kilted officer was again ascending the ladder, this time without his tall hat. He carried his claymore in his right hand and the big sword hampered him. An Arab fleetingly appeared at the top of the ladder with a lump of timber that he hurled down at the attacker, and the officer was thrown back a second time.
“No!” McCandless lamented again, but then the same officer appeared a third time. He was determined to have the honour of being first into the city, and this time he had tied his red waist-sash to his wrist and let his claymore hang by its hilt from a loop of the silk, thus leaving both hands free and allowing him to climb much faster. He kept climbing, and his men crowded behind him in their big bearskin hats, and the loopholes in the bastion’s galleries spat flame and smoke as they scrambled past the bastion’s storeys, but magically the officer survived the fusillade and Sharpe had his heart in his mouth as the man drew nearer and nearer to the top. He expected to see a defender appear at any moment, but the attackers who were not queuing at the foot of the ladder were now hammering the bastion’s summit with musket fire and under its cover the bareheaded officer scrambled up the last few rungs, paused to take hold of his claymore’s hilt, then leaped over the top of the wall. Someone cheered, and Sharpe caught a distinct view of the officer’s claymore rising and falling above the red wall’s coping. More Highlanders were clambering up the ladder and though some were blasted off by musket fire from the bastion’s loopholes, others were at last reaching the high parapet and following their officer onto the de fences The second ladder was swung into place and the trickle of attackers became a stream.
“Thank God,” McCandless said fervently, ‘thank God indeed.”
The 778th were in the bastion, and now the 74th, which had been reduced to just one ladder, also made their lodgement. An officer had organized two companies to give the parapet a blast of musketry just as a sergeant reached the top of the ladder, and the fusillade cleared the embrasures as the sergeant clambered over the wall. His bayonet stabbed down, then he reeled backwards as a defender slashed at him with a tulwar, but a lieutenant was behind him and he hacked down with his claymore and then kicked the defender in the face. A third man crossed, the fourth was killed, and then another man was on the wall and the Scotsmen screamed their war cries as they began the grim job of clearing the defenders off the fire step Sharpe could hear the clash of blades on the wall, and see a cloud of powder smoke above the crenellations where the Scots of the 74th were fighting their way along the parapet, but he could see nothing on the bastion where the kilted 778th were fighting. He guessed they were clearing the bastion floor by floor, charging down the steep stone steps and carrying their bayonets to the gunners and infantrymen who manned the lower galleries.
The Scots at last reached the bastion’s ground floor where they killed one last defender and then burst out of the tower’s inner doorway to be faced by a horde of Arabs who poured a volley of matchlock fire into the attackers’ ranks.