gunners must have decided to get really close so that their shots could
not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel McCandless had always told
Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you start
slaughtering.
A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first
graze, still travelling at blistering speed, and the two men of the
file were whipped backwards in a spray of mingling blood.
“Jesus,” Venables said in awe.
“Jesus!” The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered
bones, tangled entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the
file closers stooped to extricate the men’s pouches and haversacks from
the scattered offal.
“Two more names in the church porch,” Venables remarked.
“Who were they, Corporal?”
“The McFadden brothers, sir.” The Corporal had to shout to be heard
over the roar of the Mahratta guns.
“Poor bastards,” Venables said.
“Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.”
Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess.
Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as
though the sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his
first battle, for he had been sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye,
but the Ensign was forever explaining that he could not be upset by the
sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted his
father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside,
bent over and vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking.
Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables’s retching.
“Eyes front!” Sharpe snarled.
Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed
that any order that did not come from himself or from Captain Urquhart
was an unnecessary order.
Venables caught up with Sharpe.
“Something I ate.”
“India does that,” Sharpe said sympathetically.
“Not to you.”
“Not yet,” Sharpe said and wished he was carrying a musket so he could
touch the wooden stock for luck.
Captain Urquhart sheered his horse left wards
“To your company, Mister Venables.”
Venables scuttled away and Urquhart rode back to the company’s right
flank without acknowledging Sharpe’s presence. Major Swinton, who
commanded the battalion while Colonel Wallace had responsibility for
the brigade, galloped his horse behind the ranks. The hooves thudded
heavily on the dry earth.
“All well?” Swinton called to Urquhart.
“All well.”
“Good man!” Swinton spurred on.
The sound of the enemy guns was constant now, like thunder that did not
end. A thunder that pummelled the ears and almost drowned out the
skirl of the pipers. Earth fountained where round shot struck.
Sharpe, glancing to his left, could see a scatter of bodies lying in
the wake of the long line. There was a village there. How the hell
had he walked straight past a village without even seeing it? It was
not much of a place, just a huddle of reed-thatched hovels with a few
patchwork gardens protected by cactus-thorn hedges, but he had still
walked clean past without noticing its existence. He could see no one
there. The villagers had too much sense. They would have packed their
few pots and pans and buggered off as soon as the first soldier
appeared near their fields. A Mahratta round shot smacked into one of
the hovels, scattering reed and dry timber, and leaving the sad roof
sagging.
Sharpe looked the other way and saw enemy cavalry advancing in the
distance, then he glimpsed the blue and yellow uniforms of the British
igth Dragoons trotting to meet them. The late-afternoon sunlight
glittered on drawn sabres. He thought he heard a trumpet call, but
maybe he imagined it over the hammering of the guns. The horsemen
vanished behind a stand of trees. A cannonball screamed overhead, a
shell exploded to his left, then the 74th’s Light Company edged inwards
to give an ox team room to pass back southwards. The British cannon
had been dragged well ahead of the attacking line where they had now
been turned and deployed. Gunners rammed home shot, pushed priming
quills into touch-holes, stood back. The sound of the guns crashed
across the field, blotting the immediate view with grey-white smoke and