redcoats as it rolled to a harmless stop, while if the first graze was
too close to the attacking line then the ball would bounce clean over
the redcoats. The skill was to skim the ball low enough to be certain
of a hit, and all along the line the round shots were taking their
toll. Men were plucked back with shattered hips and legs. Sharpe
passed one spent cannonball that was sticky with blood and thick with
flies, lying twenty paces from the man it had eviscerated.
“Close up!” the sergeants shouted, and the file-closers tugged men to
fill the gaps. The British guns were firing into the enemy smoke
cloud, but their shots seemed to have no effect, and so the guns were
ordered farther forward. The ox teams were brought up, the guns were
attached to the limbers, and the six-pounders trundled on up the
slope.
“Like ninepins.” Ensign Venables had appeared at Sharpe’s side.
Roderick Venables was sixteen years old and attached to number seven
company. He had been the battalion’s most junior officer till Sharpe
joined, and Venables had taken it on himself to be a tutor to Sharpe in
how officers should behave.
“They’re bowling us over like ninepins, eh, Richard?”
Before Sharpe could reply a half-dozen men of number six company threw
themselves aside as a cannonball bounced hard and low towards them. It
whipped harmlessly through the gap they had made. The men laughed at
having evaded it, then Sergeant Colquhoun ordered them back into their
two ranks.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on the left of your company?” Sharpe asked
Venables.
“You’re still thinking like a sergeant, Richard,” Venables said.
“Pigears doesn’t mind where I am.” Pig-ears was Captain Lomax, who had
earned his nickname not because of any peculiarity about his ears, but
because he had a passion for crisply fried pig-ears. Lomax was
easygoing, unlike Urquhart who liked everything done strictly according
to regulations.
“Besides,” Venables went on, ‘there’s damn all to do. The lads know
their business.”
“Waste of time being an ensign,” Sharpe said.
“Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,” Venables
said.
“Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to
be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior
officer being useful? That’ll be the day.” Venables gave a hoot of
laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few officers
in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship.
“Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?” he asked.
“Urquhart told me.”
“Fresh men. New officers. You won’t be junior any more.”
Sharpe shook his head.
“Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn’t it?”
“Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain
long before you got the jump up, eh? So you’ll still be the mess
baby.
Bad luck, old fellow.”
Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten
years older than Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no
one had ever bothered to note down his birth date. Ensigns were youths
and Sharpe was a man.
“Whoah!” Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that
a round shot had struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced
vertically upwards in a shower of soil. Tig-ears says he once saw two
cannonballs collide in mid-air,” Venables said.
“Well, he didn’t actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says
they suddenly appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.”
“They’d have shattered and broken up,” Sharpe said.
“Not according to Pig-ears,” Venables insisted.
“He says they flattened each other.” A shell exploded ahead of the
company, whistling scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and
the files stepped round the smoking fragments. Venables stooped and
plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat.
“Like to have keepsakes,” he explained, slipping the piece of iron into
a pouch.
“I’ll send it home for my sisters. Why don’t our guns stop and
fire?”
“Still too far away,” Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a
mile to go and, while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the