“Stimulates the blood, y’see?”
Wellesley disliked making enquiries about senior officers, but he took care to ride alongside his new aide, Colin Campbell.
“Was there much flogging in the ySth?” he asked the aide who, until the siege of Ahmednuggur, had served under Harness.
“There’s been much recent talk of it, sir, but not in practice.”
“Your Colonel seems much enamoured of the practice.”
“His enthusiasms come and go,” Campbell said blandly.
“But until a few weeks ago, sir, he was not a man for enthusiasms. Now, suddenly, he is. He encouraged us to eat snakes in July, though he didn’t insist on it.
I gather he tried some cobra seethed in milk, but it didn’t agree with him.”
“Ah!” the General said, understanding the carefully phrased message. So Harness was going out of his wits? Wellesley chided himself for not guessing as much from the Colonel’s fixed glare.
“The battalion has a doctor?”
“You can take a horse to water, sir,” Campbell said carefully.
“Indeed, indeed.” Not that the General could do anything about Harness’s incipient madness now, nor had the Colonel done anything that deserved dismissal. Indeed, mad or not, he led a fine battalion and Wellesley would need the Scotsmen when he came to Borkardan.
He thought constantly of Borkardan, though what that place was other than a mark on the map, he did not know. He simply imagined the village as swirls of dust and bellowing noise, a place of galloping horses where big guns would flatten the air with their hot thumps and the sky would be ripped apart with shrieking metal and murderous volleys. It would be Wellesley’s first field battle. He had fought skirmishes enough, and led a cavalry charge that rode a bandit army into bloody oblivion, but he had never commanded guns and horse and infantry together, and he had never tried to impose his own will on an enemy general. He did not doubt his ability, nor did he doubt that he would stay calm amidst the dust and smoke and flame and blood, but he did fear that some unlucky shot would kill or maim him and the army would then be in the hands of a man without a vision of victory.
Stevenson or Wallace would be competent enough, though Wellesley privately thought them both too cautious, but God help an army guided by Harness’s enthusiasms.
The other colonels, all Company men, echoed Wallace’s advice to make sure of the junction with Stevenson before battle was joined, and Wellesley recognized the wisdom of that opinion, even while he refused to deflect his army to join Stevenson before they both reached Borkar-dan.
There was no time for such a nicety, so instead whichever army first came to the enemy must engage him first, and the other must join the battle, to which end Wellesley knew he must keep his left flank open, for that was where Stevenson’s men would join his own. The General reckoned he must put the bulk of his cavalry on the left and station one of his two Highland regiments to serve as a bulwark on that flank, but beyond that he did not know what he would do once he reached Borkardan except attack, attack and attack again. He reasoned that when a small army faced a great horde then the small army had better keep moving and so destroy the enemy piece by piece, but if the small army stayed still then it risked being surrounded and pulverized into surrender.
Borkardan on the twenty-fourth day of September, that was the goal, and Wellesley marched his men hard. The cavalry vanguard and the infantry picquets of the day were roused at midnight and, an hour later, just as the rest of the army was being stirred into sullen wakefulness, those men would start the northwards march. By two o’clock the whole army was moving. Dogs barked as the cavalry vanguard clattered through the villages, and after the horsemen came heavy guns hauled by oxen, marching Highlanders and long ranks of sepoys under their leather-cased colours. Ten miles to the west Stevenson’s army marched parallel to Wellesley’s, but ten miles was a half-day’s march and if either force was confronted by the enemy then the other could do nothing to help.