“Charge!” Wallace shouted, and his men screamed as they ran into the smoke-shrouded arch and pushed past the gun and trampled over the bloody halves of the slaughtered sepoy.
“Come on, Sharpe, come on!” McCandless had his own claymore drawn and the old man’s face was alight with excitement as he spurred his horse towards the doomed city. The assault troops who had been waiting to climb the ladders now joined the surge of men running towards the broken gates.
For Ahmednuggur had fallen, and from the first shot until the opening of the gate it had taken just twenty minutes. And now the redcoats went for their reward and the suffering inside the city could begin.
Major William Dodd had never reached his breakfast. Instead he had hurried back to the walls the moment he heard the first muskets fire and, once on the fire step he had stared appalled at the ladder parties for he had never once anticipated that the British would attempt an escalade. Of all the methods of taking a city, an escalade was the riskiest, but Dodd realized he should have foreseen it. Ahmednuggur had no ditch, nor any glacis, indeed the city had no obstacle outside its ramparts and that made it a prime candidate for escalade, though Dodd had never believed that Boy Wellesley would dare try such a stratagem.
He thought Wellesley too cautious.
None of the assaults was aimed at the stretch of wall where Dodd’s men were positioned, so all they could do was fire their muskets obliquely at the advancing British, but the distance was too great for their fire to be effective and the thick powder smoke of their muskets soon obscured their aim and so Dodd ordered them to cease fire.
“I can only see four ladders,” his interpreter said.
“Must have more than four,” Dodd remarked.
“Can’t do it with just four.”
For a time it seemed the Major must be right for the defence was making a mockery of the attack, while Dodd’s men were troubled by nothing more threatening than a scatter of sepoy skirmishers who fired ineffectually at his stretch of the wall. He showed his derision of the skirmishers’ fire by standing openly in an embrasure from where he could watch the enemy’s cavalry ride about the city’s flank to cut off any escape from the northern gate. He could deal with a few cavalrymen, he decided. A scrap of stone was driven from the coping beside him by a musket ball. The stone flake rapped against the leather sword belt that was buckled round Dodd’s new white coat. He did not like wearing white.
It showed the dirt, but worse, it made any wound look much worse than it really was. Blood on a red coat hardly showed, but even a small amount of blood on a white coat could make a nervous man terrified.
He wondered if Pohlmann or Scindia would agree to the cost of new jackets. Brown, maybe, or dark blue.
The interpreter came to where the Major stood in the embrasure.
“The kill adar requests that we form up behind the gate, sir.”
“Noted,” Dodd said curtly.
“He says the enemy are approaching the gate with a gun, sahib.”
“Sensible of them,” Dodd said, but otherwise ignored the request.
Instead he stared eastwards and saw a Scottish officer suddenly appear at the summit of a bastion. Kill him, he silently urged the Arabs in the bastion, but the young officer jumped down and began laying about him with his claymore, and suddenly there were more kilted
Scotsmen crossing the wall.
“I do hate the bloody Scots,” he said.
“Sahib?” The interpreter asked.
“Priggish bastards, they are,” Dodd said, but the priggish bastards looked as if they had just captured the city and Dodd knew it would be madness to get involved in a doomed fight to save it. That way he would lose his regiment.
“Sahib’?” the interpreter interrupted Dodd nervously.
“The killadarwas insistent, sir.”
“Bugger the kill adar Dodd said, jumping down from the embrasure.
“I want the men off the wall,” he ordered, ‘and formed in companies on the inner esplanade.” He pointed down to the wide space just inside the wall.