The guns scarcely paused, only now they raised their aim very slightly so mat the balls could strike against the base of the outer rampart which had been completely unmasked by the collapse of the glacis’s brief connecting wall. Shot after shot slammed home, their impacts reverberating down the whole length of the ancient battlements, and each shot punched out a handful of mud bricks. The water from the punctured ditch kept flowing out, and the shots kept slamming home as the gunners sweated and hauled and spiked and sponged out and rammed and fired again.
All day long they fired, and all day long the old wall crumbled. The shots were kept low, aimed to strike at the foot of the wall so that the bricks above would collapse to make a ramp of rubble that would lead up and through the gap that the guns were making.
By nightfall the wall still stood, but at its base there was a crumbling, dusty cavern that had been carved deep into the rampart. A few British guns fired in the night, mostly
scattering canister or grapeshot in an attempt to stop the Tippoo’s men from repairing the cavern, but in the dark it was difficult to keep the guns aimed true and most of the shots went wild, and in the morning the British gunners pointed their telescopes and saw that the cavern had been plugged with earth-filled wicker gabions and baulks of timber. The first few shots made short shrift of those repairs, scattering the timber and soil in huge gouts as the balls bit home, and once the cavern was re-exposed the gunners went to work on it. The land between the aqueduct and the river became shrouded with a mist of powder smoke as the artillery poured in their fire until, at midday, a cheer from the British lines marked the wall’s collapse.
It crumpled slowly, jetting a cloud of dust into the air, a cloud so thick that at first no man could see the extent of the damage, but as the small wind cleared the smoke away from the guns and the dust from the wall they could see that a breach had been made. The limewashed wall now had a gap twenty yards wide, and the gap was filled with a mound of rubble up which a man could climb so long as he was unencumbered by anything other than a musket, a bayonet and his cartridge box. That made the breach practicable.
Yet still the guns fired. Now the gunners were trying to flatten the slope of the breach and some of their shots ricocheted up to the inner wall and for a time Gudin feared that the British were planning to blast a passage clean through that new inner rampart, but then the gunners lowered their aim to keep their balls hammering at the newly made breach or else to gnaw at the shoulders of the outer wall’s gap.
A half-mile away from Gudin, in the British lines, General Harris and General Baird stared at the breach through their telescopes. Now, for the first time, they could inspect a short stretch of the new inner wall. ‘It isn’t as high as I feared,’ Harris commented.
‘Let’s pray it’s unfinished,’ Baird growled.
‘But still I think it’s better to ignore it,’ Harris decreed. ‘Capture the outer wall first.’
Baird turned to stare at some clouds that lay heavy and low on the western horizon. He feared the clouds presaged rain. ‘We could go tonight, sir,’ he suggested. Baird was remembering the forty-four months he had endured in the Tippoo’s dungeons, some of them spent chained to the wall of his cell, and he wanted revenge. He was also eager to get the bloody business of storming the city done.
Harris collapsed his glass. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said firmly, and scratched beneath the edge of his wig. ‘We risk more by rushing things. We’ll do it properly, and we’ll do it tomorrow.’
That night a handful of British officers crept out from the leading trenches with small white cotton flags attached to bamboo poles. The sky was laced with a tracery of thin clouds that intermittently hid the waning moon, and in the cloud shadows the officers explored the South Cauvery to find the river’s treacherous deep pools. They marked the shallows with their flags and so pointed the path towards the breach.