“Are you sure you’re not hurrying too much?” he asked.
“We must hurry, Stevenson, must.” Wellesley unrolled a map onto the Colonel’s table and pointed to Borkardan.
“We hear they’re likely to stay there, but they won’t stay for ever. If we don’t close on them now, they’ll slip away.”
“If the bastards are that close,” Stevenson said, peering at the map, ‘then maybe we should join forces now?”
“And if we do,” the General said, ‘it will take us twice as long to reach Borkardan.” The two roads on which the armies advanced were narrow and, a few miles south of the River Kaitna, those roads followed passes through a small but steep range of hills. Every wheeled vehicle in both armies would have to be fed through those defiles in the hills, and if the two small armies combined the cumbersome business of negotiating the pass would take a whole day, a day in which the Mahrattas might escape northwards.
Instead the two armies would advance separately and meet at Borkardan.
“Tomorrow night,” Wellesley ordered, ‘y u camp here’ he made a cross on the map at a village called Hussainabad – ‘and we’ll be here.” The pencil made another cross at a village called Naulniah which lay four miles south of the River Kaitna. The villages were ten miles apart, and both about the same distance south of Borkardan.
“On the twenty-fourth,” Wellesley said, ‘we march and join here.” He dashed a circle about the village of Borkardan.
“There!” he added, jabbing the pencil down and breaking its point.
Stevenson hesitated. He was a good soldier with a long experience of India, but he was cautious by nature and it seemed to him that Wellesley was being headstrong and foolish. The Mahratta army was vast, the British armies small, yet Wellesley was rushing into battle. There was a dangerous excitement in the usually cool-headed Wellesley, and Stevenson now tried to rein it in.
“We could meet at Naulniah,” he suggested, thinking it better if the armies combined the day before the battle rather than attempt to make their junction under fire.
“We have no time,” Wellesley declared, ‘no time!” He swept aside the weights holding down the map’s corners so that the big sheet rolled up with a snap.
“Providence has put their army within striking distance, so let us strike!” He tossed the map to his aide, Campbell, then ducked out of the tent into the day’s late sunlight and there found himself staring at Colonel McCandless who was mounted on a small, bony horse.
“You!”
Wellesley said with surprise.
“I thought you were wounded, McCandless?”
“I am, sir, but it’s healing.” The Scotsman patted his left thigh.
“So what are you doing here?”
“Seeking you, sir,” McCandless answered, though in truth he had come to Stevenson’s army by mistake. One of Sevajee’s men, scouting the area, had seen the redcoats and McCandless had thought it must be Wellesley’s men.
“And what on earth are you riding?” Wellesley asked, pulling himself onto Diomed’s back.
“Looks like a gypsy nag, McCandless. I’ve seen ponies that are bigger.”
McCandless patted the captured Mahratta horse.
“She’s the best I can do, sir. I lost my own gelding.”
‘For four hundred guineas you can have my spare. Give me a note, McCandless, and he’s all yours. Aeolus, he’s called, a six-year-old gelding out of County Meath. Good lungs, got a capped hock, but it don’t stop him. I’ll see you in two days, Colonel,” Wellesley now addressed Stevenson.
“Two days! We’ll test our Mahrattas, eh? See if their vaunted infantry can stand some pounding. Good day, Stevenson!
Are you coming, McCandless?”
“I am, sir, I am.”
Sharpe fell in beside Daniel Fletcher, the General’s orderly.
“I’ve never seen the General so happy,” Sharpe said to Fletcher.
“Got the bit between his teeth,” Fletcher said.
“He reckons we’re going to surprise the enemy.”
“He ain’t worried? There are thousands of the buggers.”
“He ain’t showing nothing if he is frightened,” Fletcher said.
“Up and at them, that’s his mood.”
“Then God help the rest of us,” Sharpe said.
The General talked with McCandless on his way back, but nothing the Scotsman said diminished Wellesley’s eagerness, even though McCandless warned him of the effectiveness of the Mahratta artillery and the efficiency of the infantry.