Wellesley.
“Captain Morris’s company escorted a convoy here,” Wellesley
answered.
“A light company, eh?” Kenny said, glancing at Morris’s epaulettes.
“You might even be useful. I could do with another company in the
assault party.” He snorted the snuff, stopping one nostril at a
time.
“It cheers my boys up,” he added, ‘seeing white men killed.” Kenny
commanded the first battalion of the tenth Madrassi Regiment.
“What’s in your assault unit now?” Wellesley asked.
“Nine companies,” Kenny said.
“The grenadiers and two others from the Scotch Brigade, the flankers
from my regiment and four others.
Good boys, all of them, but I daresay they won’t mind sharing the
honours with an English light company.”
“And I’ve no doubt you’ll welcome a chance to assault a breach,
Morris?” Wellesley asked drily.
“Of course, sir,” Morris said, cursing Kenny inwardly.
“But in the meantime,” Wellesley went on coldly, ‘bring your men’s
bodies in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do it now.”
Sergeant Green took a half-dozen men down the neck of land, but they
only found two bodies. They were expecting three, but Sergeant
Hakeswill was missing. The enemy, seeing the redcoats among the rocks
above the reservoir, opened fire and the musket balls smacked into
stones and ricocheted up into the air. Green took a bullet in the heel
of his boot. It did not break the skin of his foot, but the blow hurt
and he hopped on the short, dry grass.
“Just grab the buggers and drag them away,” he said. He wondered why
the enemy did not fire their cannon, and just then a gun discharged a
barrel of canister at his squad.
The balls hissed all about the men, but miraculously none was hit as
the soldiers seized Kendrick and Lowry by their feet and ran back
towards the half-completed battery where Captain Morris waited. Both
the dead men had slit throats.
Once safe behind the gab ions the corpses were treated more decorously
by being placed on makeshift stretchers. Colonel Kenny intercepted the
stretcher-bearers to examine the corpses which were already smelling
foul.
“They must have sent a dozen cut-throats out of the fort,” he
reckoned.
“You say there’s a sergeant missing?”
“Yes, sir,” Morris answered.
“Poor fellow must be a prisoner. Be careful tonight, Captain! They’ll
probably try again. And I assure you, Captain, if I decide to take a
stroll this evening, it won’t be to your picquet line.”
That night the 33rd’s Light Company again formed a screen in front of
the new batteries, this time to protect the men dragging up the guns.
It was a nervous night, for the company was expecting throat-slitting
Mahrattas to come silently through the darkness, but nothing stirred.
The fortress stayed silent and dark. Not a gun fired and not a rocket
flew as the British cannon were hauled to their new emplacements and as
powder charges and round shot were stacked in the newly made ready
magazines.
Then the gunners waited.
The first sign of dawn was a grey lightening of the east, followed by
the flare of reflected sun as the first rays lanced over the world’s
rim to touch the summit of the eastern cliffs. The fortress walls
showed grey black Still the gunners waited. A solitary cloud glowed
livid pink on the horizon. Smoke rose from the cooking fires inside
the fortress where the flags hung limp in the windless air. Bugles
roused the British camp which lay a half-mile behind the batteries
where officers trained telescopes on Gawilghur’s northern wall.
Major Stokes’s job was almost finished. He had made the batteries, and
now the gunners must unmake the walls, but first Stokes wanted to be
certain that the outermost breach would be made in the right place.
He had fixed a telescope to a tripod and now he edged it from side to
side, searching the lichen-covered stones just to the right of a
bastion in the centre of the wall. The wall sloped back slightly, but
he was sure he could see a place where the old stones bulged out of
alignment, and he watched that spot as the sun rose and cast a hint of
shadow where the stones were not quite true. Finally he screwed the