telescope’s mount tight shut, so that the tube could not move, then
summoned the gun captain of the battery’s eighteen-pounder. A major
actually commanded this battery, but he insisted that his sergeant go
to the spyglass.
“That’s your target,” Stokes told the Sergeant.
The Sergeant stooped to the telescope, then straightened to see over
the glass, then stooped again. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and had
no lower front teeth so that the yellow spittle ran down his chin in a
continuous dribble. He straightened, then stooped a third time. The
telescope was powerful, and all he could see in the glass circle was a
vertical joint between two great stones. The joint was some four feet
above the wall’s base, and when it gave way the wall would spill
forward down the slope to make the ramp up which the attackers could
swarm.
“Smack on the joint, sir?” the Sergeant asked in a Northumbrian accent
so pronounced that Stokes did not at first understand him.
“Low on the joint,” Stokes said.
“Low it is, sir,” the Sergeant said, and stooped to squint through the
glass once more.
“The joint gapes a bit, don’t it?”
“It does,” Stokes said.
The Sergeant grunted. For a while, he reckoned, the battering would
drive the stones in, sealing the gap, but there was pressure there and
the wall must eventually give way as the battered stones weakened.
“That bugger’ll burst like an abscess,” the Sergeant said happily,
straightening from the telescope. He returned to his gun and barked at
his men to make some minute adjustments to its trail. He himself
heaved on the elevating screw, though as yet the gun was still masked
by some half filled gab ions that blocked the embrasure. Every few
seconds the Sergeant climbed onto the trail to see over the gab ions
then he would demand that the gun was shifted a half-inch left or a
finger’s breadth to the right as he made another finicky adjustment to
the screw. He tossed grass in the air to gauge the wind, then twisted
the elevation again to raise the barrel a tiny amount.
“Stone cold shot,” he explained to Stokes, ‘so I’m pointing her a bit
high. Maybe a half turn more.” He hammered the screw with the heel of
his hand.
“Perfect,” he said.
The pucka lees were bringing water which they poured into great wooden
tubs. The water was not just to slake the gunners’ thirst and soak the
sponges that cleaned out the barrels between shots, but was also
intended to cool the great weapons. The sun was climbing, it promised
to be a searing hot day, and if the huge guns were not drenched
intermittently with water they could overheat and explode the powder
charges prematurely. The Sergeant was choosing his shot now, rolling
two eighteen-pounder balls up and down a stretch of bare earth to judge
which was the more perfect sphere.
“That one,” he said, spitting tobacco juice onto his chosen missile.
Morris’s Light Company trailed back up the road, going to the camp
where they would sleep. Stokes watched them pass and thought of
Sharpe. Poor Sharpe, but at least, from wherever he was imprisoned
inside the fortress, he would hear the siege guns and know that the
redcoats were coming. If they got through the breach, Stokes thought
gloomily, or if they ever managed to cross the fortress’s central
ravine.
He tried to suppress his pessimism, telling himself that his job was
simply to make the breach, not win the whole victory.
The chosen shot was rolled into the gun’s muzzle, then rammed down onto
the canvas bags of powder. The Sergeant took a length of wire that
hung looped on his belt and rammed it through the cannon’s touch-hole,
piercing the canvas bag beneath, then selected a priming tube, a reed
filled with finely milled powder, and slid it down into the powder
charge, but leaving a half-inch of the reed protruding above the
touchhole.
“Ready when you are, sir,” he told the Major commanding the battery
who, in turn, looked at Stokes.
Stokes shrugged.
“I imagine we wait for Colonel Stevenson’s permission.”
The gunners in the second breaching battery which lay fifty yards west