“And we have eighty thousand men. Five against eighty!”
“He has guns,” the minister observed sourly.
“We have five guns for every one of his. Five against one. And our guns are bigger and they are served just as well as his.”
Scindia whispered to Surjee Rao who then demanded that the other European officers give their advice, but all had been forewarned by Pohlmann to sing his tune. March east, they said, draw one British army into battle, then turn on the other. The minister thanked the foreign officers for their advice, then pointedly turned back to the brahmins for their comments. Some advised that emissaries should be sent to Holkar, begging his help, but Pohlmann’s confidence had worked its magic and another man indignantly demanded to know why Holkar should be offered a share in the glory of victory. The tide of the durbar was turning in Pohlmann’s favour, and he said nothing more, but nor did he need to.
The durbar talked all day and no course of action was formally agreed, but at dusk Scindia and the Rajah of Berar conferred briefly, then Scindia took his leave between rows of brahmins who bowed as their ruler passed. He paused in the huge tent’s doorway while his servants brought the palanquin that would preserve him from the rain.
Only when the palanquin was ready did he turn and speak loudly enough for all the durbar to hear.
“We march east tomorrow,” he said, ‘then we shall ponder another decision. Colonel Pohlmann will make the arrangements.” He stood for a second, looking up at the rain, then ducked under the palanquin’s canopy.
“Praise God,” Pohlmann said, for he reckoned that the decision to march eastwards was sufficient to bring on battle. The enemy was closing all the time, and so long as the Mahrattas did not run northwards, the two sides must eventually meet. And if Scindia’s men went eastwards then they would meet on Pohlmann’s terms. He rammed on his cocked hat and stalked from the tent, followed by all the European officers.
“We’ll march east along the Kaitna!” he said excitedly.
“That’s where we’ll march tomorrow, and the river bank will be our killing ground.” He whooped like an excited child.
“One short march, gentlemen, and we shall be close to Wellesley’s men, and in two or three days we’ll fight whether our lords and masters want it or not.”
The army marched early next morning. It covered the earth like a dark swarm that flowed beneath the clearing clouds alongside the muddy River Kaitna which slowly deepened and widened as the army followed it eastwards. Pohlmann gave them a very short march, a mere six miles, so that the leading horsemen had reached Pohlmann’s chosen campsite long before dawn and by nightfall the slowest of the Mahratta infantry had reached a small, mud-walled village that lay just two miles north of the Kaitna. Scindia and the Rajah of Berar pitched their lavish tents just outside the village, while the Rajah’s infantry was ordered to barricade the streets and make loopholes in the thick mud walls of the outermost houses.
The village lay on the southern bank of the River Juah, a tributary of the Kaitna, and south of the village stretched two miles of open farmland that ended at the steep bank of the River Kaitna. Pohlmann placed his best infantry, his three compoos of superbly trained killers, south of the village on the high bluff of the Kaitna’s northern bank, and in front of them he ranged his eighty best guns. Wellesley, if he wished to reach Borkardan, must come to the Kaitna and he would find his path blocked by a river, by a fearsome line of heavy guns, by an array of infantry and, behind them, like a fortress, a village crammed with the Rajah of Berar’s troops. The trap was laid.
In the fields of a village called Assaye.
The two British armies were close to each other now, close enough for General Wellesley to ride across country to see Colonel Stevenson, the commander of the second army. The General rode with his aides and an escort of Indian cavalry, but they saw no enemy on their way westwards across a long flat plain greened by the previous day’s rain. Colonel Stevenson, old enough to be Wellesley’s father, was alarmed by his General’s high spirits. He had seen such elation in young officers before, and seen “it crushed by humiliating defeats brought on by overconfidence.