enemy who had taken refuge there.”
Dodd said nothing. He was staring down the gentle slope to where the
red-coated infantry waited. Every few seconds a puff of dust showed
where a round shot struck the ground.
“If things go badly today,” Gopal said quietly, ‘then we shall go to
Gawilghur and there we shall be safe. The British can follow us, but
they cannot reach us. They will break themselves on Gawilghur’s rocks
while we take our rest at the edge of the fortress’s lakes. We shall
be in the sky, and they will die beneath us like dogs.”
If Gopal was right then not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s
men could touch William Dodd at Gawilghur. But first he had to reach
the fortress, and maybe it would not even be necessary, for Prince Manu
Bappoo might yet beat the redcoats here. Bappoo believed there was no
infantry in India that could stand against his Arab mercenaries.
Away on the plain Dodd could see that the two battalions that had fled
into the tall crops were now being brought back into the line. In a
moment, he knew, that line would start forward again.
“Tell our guns to hold their fire,” he ordered Gopal. Dodd’s Cobras
possessed five small cannon of their own, designed to give the regiment
close support. Dodd’s guns were not in front of his white-coated men,
but away on the right flank from where they could lash a murderous
slanting fire across the face of the advancing enemy.
“Load with canister,” he ordered, ‘and wait till they’re close.” The
important thing was to win, but if fate decreed otherwise, then Dodd
must live to fight again at a place where a man could not be beaten.
At Gawilghur.
The British line at last advanced. From east to west it stretched for
three miles, snaking in and out of millet fields, through pastureland
and across the wide, dry riverbed. The centre of the line was an array
of thirteen red-coated infantry battalions, three of them Scottish and
the rest sepoys, while two regiments of cavalry advanced on the left
flank and four on the right. Beyond the regular cavalry were two
masses of mercenary horsemen who had allied themselves to the British
in hope of loot. Drums beat and pipes played. The colours hung above
the shakos. A great swathe of crops was trodden flat as the cumbersome
line marched north.
The British guns opened fire, their small six-pound missiles aimed at
the Mahratta guns.
Those Mahratta guns fired constantly. Sharpe, walking behind the left
flank of number six company, watched one particular gun which stood
just beside a bright clump of flags on the enemy-held skyline. He
slowly counted to sixty in his head, then counted it again, and worked
out that the gun had managed five shots in two minutes. He could not
be certain just how many guns were on the horizon, for the great cloud
of powder smoke hid them, but he tried to count the muzzle flashes that
appeared as momentary bright flames amidst the grey-white vapour and,
as best he could guess, he reckoned there were nearly forty cannon
there. Forty times five was what? Two hundred. So a hundred shots a
minute were being fired, and each shot, if properly aimed, might kill
two men, one in the front rank and one behind. Once the attack was
close, of course, the bastards would switch to canister and then every
shot could pluck a dozen men out of the line, but for now, as the
redcoats silently trudged forward, the enemy was sending round shot
down the gentle slope. A good many of these missed. Some screamed
overhead and a few bounced over the line, but the enemy gunners were
good, and they were lowering their cannon barrels so that the round
shot struck the ground well ahead of the redcoat line and, by the time
the missile reached the target, it had bounced a dozen times and so
struck at waist height or below. Grazing, the gunners called it, and
it took skill. If the first graze was too close to the gun then the
ball would lose its momentum and do nothing but raise jeers from the