of the first had trained their telescopes over the gab ions to watch
where the first shot fell. The scar it left in the wall would be their
aiming mark. The two enfilading batteries also watched. Their work
would begin properly when the first of the three breaches was made, but
till then their twelve-pounders would be aimed at the cannon mounted on
Gawilghur’s ramparts, trying to dismount them or tumble their
embrasures into rubble.
“That wall won’t last long,” the battery Major, whose name was Plummer,
opined. He was staring at the wall through Stokes’s telescope.
“We’ll have it opened up today,” Stokes agreed.
“Thank God there ain’t a glacis,” Plummer said.
“Thank God, indeed,” Stokes echoed piously, but he had been thinking
about that lack and was not so sure now that it was a blessing. Perhaps
the Mahrattas understood that their real defence was the great central
ravine, and so were offering nothing but a token defence of the Outer
Fort. And how was that ravine to be crossed? Stokes feared that he
would be asked for an engineering solution, but what could he do? Fill
the thing with soil? That would take months.
Stokes’s gloomy presentiments were interrupted by an aide who had been
sent by Colonel Stevenson to enquire why the batteries were silent.
“I suspect those are your orders to open fire, Plummer,” Stokes said.
“Unmask!” Plummer shouted.
Four gunners clambered up onto the bastion and manhandled the
half-filled gab ions out of the cannon’s way. The Sergeant squinted
down the barrel a last time, nodded to himself, then stepped aside.
The other gunners had their hands over their ears.
“You can fire, Ned!”
Plummer called to the Sergeant, who took a glowing linstock from a
protective barrel, reached across the gun’s high wheel and touched the
fire to the reed.
The cannon hammered back a full five yards as the battery filled with
acrid smoke. The ball screamed low across the stony neck of land to
crack against the fort’s wall. There was a pause. Defenders were
running along the ramparts. Stokes was peering through the glass,
waiting for the smoke to thin. It took a full minute, but then he saw
that a slab of stone about the size of a soup plate had been chipped
from the wall.
“Two inches to the right, Sergeant,” he called chidingly.
“Must have been a puff of wind, sir,” the Sergeant said, ‘puff of
bloody wind, ‘cos there weren’t a thing wrong with gun’s laying,
begging your pardon, sir.”
“You did well,” Stokes said with a smile, ‘very well.” He cupped his
hands and shouted at the second breaching battery.
“You have your mark! Fire on!” A billow of smoke erupted from the
fortress wall, followed by the bang of a gun and a howl as a round shot
whipped overhead. Stokes jumped down into the battery, clutching his
hat.
“It seems we’ve woken them up,” he remarked as a dozen more Mahratta
guns fired. The enemy’s shots smacked into the gab ions or ricocheted
wildly along the rocky ground. The second British battery fired, the
noise of its guns echoing off the cliff face to tell the camp far
beneath that the siege of Gawilghur had properly begun.
Private Tom Garrard of the 33rd’s Light Company had wandered to the
edge of the cliff to watch the bombardment of the fortress. Not that
there was much to see other than the constantly replenished cloud of
smoke that shrouded the rocky neck of land between the batteries and
the fortress, but every now and then a large piece of stone would fall
from Gawilghur’s wall. The fire from the de fences was furious, but it
seemed to Garrard that it was ill aimed. Many of the shots bounced
over the batteries, or else buried themselves in the great piles of
protective gab ions The British fire, on the other hand, was slow and
sure. The eighteen-pound round shots gnawed at the wall and not one
was wasted. The sky was cloudless, the sun rising ever higher and the
guns were heating so that after every second shot the gunners poured
buckets of water on the long barrels. The metal hissed and steamed,