Cornwell, Bernard 01 Sharpe’s Tiger-Serigapatam-Apr-May 1799

The noise slowly faded. The ringing in Sharpe’s ears diminished until he could hear a man whimpering somewhere in the horror. He peered out again and saw that the explosion had scoured the alley of dead and wounded men. There was no sign of the handcart. There was nothing except broken stone, burning thatch and smears of blood.

North of the breach, where the lick of flame and blast had been lessened by distance, the defenders were dizzied by noise. Their banners of gold and scarlet and green silk whipped stiff in the blast as men crouched in embrasures or reeled like drunks before the hot wind. The Tippoo’s heroes who had volunteered to fight the Forlorn Hopes on the breach were killed almost to a man, for they were on the inner side of the breach where nothing could save them, while the survivors of the Forlorn Hopes, thrust back by the first charge of the Tippoo’s men, had been shielded by the southern shoulder of the broken wall.

In the breach itself there was a vast veil of swirling dust. A huge boiling pyre of smoke churned above the walls, but the breach, for a moment at least, was undefended. The Tippoo’s men who should have been guarding the shoulders

of the breach were either dead or so shocked as to be unable to respond, while the men on the inner wall had ducked down as the terrible noise and heat and dust pounded about them. Most of them still crouched, fearful of the strange silence that followed the explosion.

‘Now, boys, now!’ a man shouted on the breach, and the survivors of the Forlorn Hopes climbed into the smoke, then up the broken stonework of the walls. They choked on the airborne dust and their red coats were whitened by it, but they were men who had steeled themselves to the worst ordeal of war, the storming of a breach, and the steel was hard and cold in their souls so that they were scarcely aware of the horror of the last few seconds, only of the need to climb the shoulders of the breach and start their killing. Those who went south found an empty wall, while those who went north climbed to meet dazed men. The redcoats and sepoys had expected no mercy in this assault and were prepared to show none, and so they began their slaughter. ‘Pigsticking time, lads!’ one corporal shouted. He stabbed his bayonet into a wild-eyed man and rid his blade of the body’s encumbrance by shaking the corpse over the inner ramparts’ edge. His comrades stormed past him, their blood whipped into rage by the fear of being the first men into the enemy citadel. Now, up on the ramparts, they killed in a frenzy to let their fear escape in a torrent of enemy blood.

Baird had still been west of the river when the explosion occurred and he had felt a momentary pang of horror as the great blast blossomed in the city. For a terrible second he thought the whole city, all its houses and temples and palaces, was about to disintegrate before his eyes, but he had kept moving, indeed he had quickened his pace so that he splashed into the South Cauvery while the debris was still falling. He waded the shallows as all around him the river foamed with falling stone, and he shouted incomprehensibly, desperate to take his heavy sword to the enemy that had once imprisoned

him. The dust obscuring the breach shifted as a snatch of wind caught and whirled it northwards and Baird saw that his Forlorn Hopes were on the walls now. He saw some red coats, oddly whitened, moving north, then he glimpsed a rush of the enemy coming from the southern bastions to replace the defenders who had been scoured from the ramparts by the explosion. Those reinforcements were running past a great roiling grey-white plume of smoke amongst which pale flames licked the sky. Baird assumed the explosion had been the Tippoo’s feared mine, but his horror at its force turned to exultation as he realized that the blast had been premature and that, instead of slaughtering his men, it had opened the city to storm. But he also recognized that the enemy was now waking from his nightmare and rushing men to face the attack, and so Baird hurried out of the river, through the shattered glacis and up the breach that was now vividly slicked with great splashes of fresh blood. He chose to turn southwards to help that Forlorn Hope face the rush of the Tippoo’s reinforcements.