‘Me, sir? No, sir. Never taught, sir.’
‘He’s stupid, sir, he is, sir,’ Hakeswill offered from across the corridor. ‘Always was, sir. Dumb as a bucket.’
‘We must teach you your letters,’ McCandless said, ignoring the Sergeant’s comments.
‘Mister Lawford was going to do that, sir,’ Sharpe said.
‘Then I suggest he begins now,’ McCandless said firmly.
Lawford smiled diffidently. ‘It’s difficult to know where to begin, Uncle.’
‘Why not with T for tiger?’ McCandless suggested.
The beast growled, then settled in its straw. And Sharpe, some years late, began his lessons.
The siege works advanced fast. Redcoats and sepoys worked day and night, sapping forward and shoring up the trench sides with bamboo mats. Rockets continually harassed the work, and the Tippoo succeeded in remounting some of his guns on the western walls, though their fire did little to disturb the work and the gunners suffered grievously from the counter fire of the British eighteen-pounders emplaced in the captured mill fort. Smaller guns, twelve-pounders and short-barrelled howitzers, joined the bombardment of the ramparts and their shells and round shot seared above the ground where yard by yard the red earth was broken until, at last, the big short-range breaching batteries were dug and the rest of the massive siege guns were rolled forward in the night and concealed in their gun pits. To the Tippoo’s troops, watching from the battered summit of the western wall, the approaches to the city were now a maze of newly turned earth. Approach trenches angled their way across the farmland, ending in larger mounds of earth thrown up from the deeper pits that held the breaching guns. Not all those bigger mounds concealed guns, for some of the spoil heaps were deliberately thrown up as deceptions so that the Tippoo could not guess where the real guns were emplaced until they opened fire. The Tippoo only knew that the British would aim at his western wall, but he did not yet
know the exact stretch of wall that the enemy engineers had chosen, and it suited General Harris that the Tippoo should not learn that spot until it was necessary for the breaching batteries to open fire. If the defenders had too much warning of the place chosen for the storm then they would have time to build elaborate new defences behind it.
But the Tippoo was gambling that he already knew where the British would choose to make their breach, and in the old gatehouse where the massive mine was concealed his engineers finished their preparations. They stacked stone around the vast powder charge so that its explosion would be directed northwards into the space between the walls. For the mine to be effective the British had to site their breach in the short stretch of wall between the old gatehouse and the city’s north-west bastion, and the Tippoo’s gamble was not an outrageous risk for it was not difficult to forecast that the breach would indeed be blasted in that section of wall. The site was dictated by the outer wall’s decay, and by the shortcomings of the low glacis that lay outside that inviting wall. The rudimentary glacis half protected most of the city’s western battlements, its raw earth slope designed to deflect cannonballs up from the wall’s base, but where the city wall was most decayed the river ran very close to the defences and there had been no room to construct even the pretence of a glacis. Instead a low mud wall continued the line of the glacis, and that wall penned in the water that had been pumped into the ditch between the outer ramparts and the glacis. That low wall was no obstacle compared to a glacis and the Tippoo reckoned it would be an irresistible target for the enemy engineers.
He did not put all his faith in the single massive mine. That mine could well kill or maim hundreds of the assaulting troops, but there were thousands more enemy soldiers who could be sent against the city and so the Tippoo prepared his army for its test. The western walls would be crammed
with men when the time came, and those men would each have at least three loaded muskets, and behind each fighting soldier would be men trained to reload the discharged weapons. The British storm would thus be met with a blistering hail of musket fire, and mixed with that maelstrom of lead would be round shot and canister fired from the cannons that had replaced the destroyed guns and which were now concealed behind the mutilated ramparts. Thousands of rockets were also ready. At long range the weapon was erratic, but in the close confines of a breach, where men were crammed as tight as sheep in a pen, the rockets could inflict a dreadful slaughter. ‘We shall stuff hell with infidel souls,’ the Tippoo boasted, though at every prayer time he took care to beseech Allah for an early monsoon and every dawn he would look at the sky in hope of seeing some signs of rain, but the skies remained obstinately clear. An early monsoon would drown the British in torrential rain before the rockets and guns could cut them to bloody shreds, but it seemed the rains would not come early to Mysore this year.