One by one the other siege guns woke and had their throats blasted clear. The first few shots were often lackadaisical as the gun barrels were still cool and thus caused the balls to fly low. A handful of guns answered the fire from the city walls, but none of them was large. The Tippoo was hiding his big guns for the assault, but he permitted his gunners to mount and fire their small cannon, some of which discharged a ball no bigger than a grapeshot. The defenders’ fire did no damage, but even the sound of their guns gave the citizens a feeling that they were fighting back.
This morning the British guns seemed erratic. Every battery was at work, but their fire was uncoordinated. Some aimed at the wall in the glacis while others targeted the higher ramparts, but an hour after dawn they all fell silent and, a moment later, the Tippoo’s gunners also ceased firing. Colonel Gudin, staring through a spyglass from the western ramparts, distinctly saw the sepoy gunners in one breaching battery heaving at the trail of their piece. Gudin reckoned that the big guns were at last being carefully aligned on the section of wall that had been chosen for the breach. The guns
were hot now, they would fire true, and soon they would concentrate a dreadful intensity of iron against the chosen spot in the city’s defences. With his spyglass he could see men straining at the gun, but he could not see the gun itself for the embrasure had been momentarily stopped up with wicker baskets filled with earth. Gudin prayed that the British would take the Tippoo’s bait and aim their pieces at the weakest section of the wall.
He trained his glass on the nearest battery which was scarce four hundred yards from the vulnerable section of wall. The gunners were stripped to the waist, and no wonder, for the temperature would soon be well over ninety degrees and the humidity was already stifling and these men had to handle enormous weights of gun and shot. An eighteen-pounder siege gun weighed close to twelve tons, and all that mass of hot metal was hurled back with each shot and the gun then had to be manhandled back into its firing position. The shot of such a gun measured a little over five inches across, and each gun could fire perhaps one such ball every two minutes and the Tippoo’s spies had reported that General Harris now had thirty-seven of these heavy guns, and two more cannon, even heavier, that each fired a twenty-four-pound missile. Gudin, waiting for the gunfire to start again, made a simple computation in his head. Each minute, he reckoned, about three hundred and fifty pounds of iron, travelling at unimaginably high velocities, would hammer into the city wall. And to that hefty weight of metal the British could add a score of howitzers and several dozen twelve-pounders that would be used to bombard the walls either side of the place General Harris had chosen to make his breach.
Gudin knew that the serious business of making the breach was about to begin and he almost held his breath as he waited for the first shot, for that opening gun would tell him whether or not the Tippoo’s gamble had succeeded. The waiting seemed to stretch for ever, but at last one of the batteries
unmasked a gun and the great brute belched a jet of smoke fifty yards in front of its embrasure. The sound came a half-second later, but Gudin had already seen the shot fall.
The British had swallowed the bait. They were coming straight for the trap.
The rest of the breaching guns now opened fire. For a moment a rumbling thunder filled the sky that was flapping with the wings of startled birds. The shots seared over the dry land, across the river and slammed into the brief curtain wall that joined the sections of glacis. The wall lasted less than ten minutes before an eighteen-pounder shot pierced through it and suddenly the water of the inner ditch was gushing out into the South Cauvery. For a few seconds the water was a clear, thin spurt arcing out to the river, then the force of the flow abraded the remaining mud and the wall collapsed so that a murky flood washed irresistibly down the river bank.