He reckoned, from his own earlier observations in Pohlmann’s camp, that only fifteen thousand of the enemy’s infantry were trained to Company standards, while the rest were make weights but the guns, he added ominously, were well served and well maintained. The despatch had been written in a hurry, and in a shaky hand, but it was concise, confident and comprehensive.
The Colonel’s despatch drove the General to his maps and then to a flurry of orders. The army was readied to march that night, and a galloper went to Colonel Stevenson’s force, west of Wellesley’s, with orders to march north on a parallel course. The two small armies should combine at Borkardan in four days’ time.
“That will give us, what?”
Wellesley thought for a second or two.
“Eleven thousand prime infantry and forty-eight guns.” He jotted the figures on the map, then absentmindedly tapped the numbers with a pencil.
“Eleven thousand against eighty,” he said dubiously, then grimaced.
“It will serve,” he concluded, ‘it will serve very well.”
“Eleven against eighty will serve, sir?” Captain Campbell asked with astonishment. Campbell was the young Scottish officer who had thrice climbed the ladder to be the first man into Ahmednuggur and his reward had been a promotion and an appointment as Wellesley’s aide.
Now he stared at the General, a man Campbell considered as sensible as any he had ever met, yet the odds that Wellesley was welcoming seemed insane.
“I’d rather have more men,” Wellesley admitted, ‘but we can probably do the job with eleven thousand. You can forget Scindia’s cavalry, Campbell, because it won’t manage a thing on a battlefield, and the Rajah of Berar’s infantry will simply get in everyone else’s way, which means we’ll be fighting against fifteen thousand good infantry and rather too many well-served guns. The rest don’t matter. If we beat the guns and the infantry, the rest of them will run. Depend on it, they’ll run.”
“Suppose they adopt a defensive position, sir?” Campbell felt impelled to insert a note of caution into the General’s hopes.
“Suppose they’re behind a river, sir? Or behind walls?”
“We can suppose what we like, Campbell” but supposing is only fancy, and if we take fright at fancies then we might as well abandon soldiering. We’ll decide how to deal with the rogues once we find them, but the first thing to do is find them.” Wellesley rolled up the map.
“Can’t kill your fox till you’ve run him down. So let’s be about our business.”
The army marched that night. Six thousand cavalry, nearly all of them Indian, led the way, and behind them were twenty-two pieces of artillery, four thousand sepoys of the East India Company and two battalions of Scots, while the great clumsy tail of bullocks, wives, children, wagons and merchants brought up the rear. They marched hard, and if any man was daunted by the size of the enemy’s army, they showed no sign of it. They were as well trained as any men that had ever worn the red coat in India, they had been promised victory by their long-nosed General, and now they were going for the kill. And, whatever the odds, they believed they would win. So long as no one blundered.
Borkardan was a mere village with no building fit for a prince, and so the great durbar of the Mahratta chiefs was held in an enormous tent that was hastily made by sewing a score of smaller tents together, then lining the canvas with swathes of brightly coloured silk, and it would have made a marvellously impressive structure had the heavens not opened when the durbar began so that the sound of men’s voices was half drowned by the beat of rain on stretched canvas and if the hastily made seams had not opened to let the water pour through in streams.
“It’s all a waste of time,” Pohlmann grumbled to Dodd, ‘but we have to attend.” The Colonel was fixing his newly tied stock with a diamond studded pin.
“And it isn’t a time for any European opinion except mine, understand?”
“Yours?” Dodd, who had rather hoped to make a case for boldness, asked dourly.
“Mine,” Pohlmann said forcibly.