Lions of Allah were opening its gates so that this night Manu Bappoo,
Prince, warrior and dreamer, could ride into legend.
CHAPTER 2
“Fire!” Swinton shouted.
The two Highland regiments fired together, close to a thousand muskets
flaming to make an instant hedge of thick smoke in front of the
battalions. The Arabs vanished behind the smoke as the redcoats
reloaded. Men bit into the grease-coated cartridges, tugged ramrods
that they whirled in the air before rattling them down into the
barrels. The churning smoke began to thin, revealing small fires where
the musket wadding burned in the dry grass.
“Platoon fire!” Major Swinton shouted.
“From the flanks!”
“Light Company!” Captain Peters called on the left flank.
“First platoon, fire!”
“Kill them! Your mothers are watching!” Colonel Harness shouted. The
Colonel of the y8th was mad as a hatter and half delirious with a
fever, but he had insisted on advancing behind his kilted Highlanders.
He was being carried in a palanquin and, as the platoon fire began, he
struggled from the litter tojoin the battle, his only weapon a broken
riding crop. He had been recently bled, and a stained bandage trailed
from a coat sleeve.
“Give them a flogging, you dogs! Give them a flogging.”
The two battalions fired in half companies now, each half company
firing two or three seconds after the neighbouring platoon so that the
volleys rolled in from the outer wings of each battalion, met in the
centre and then started again at the flanks. Clockwork fire, Sharpe
called it, and it was the result of hours of tedious practice. Beyond
the battalions’ flanks the six-pounders bucked back with each shot,
their wheels jarring up from the turf as the canisters ripped apart at
the muzzles. Wide swathes of burning grass lay under the cannon smoke.
The gunners were working in shirtsleeves, swabbing, ramming, then
ducking aside as the guns pitched back again Only the gun commanders
most of them sergeants, seemed to look at the enemy, and then only when
they were checking the alignment of the cannon. The other gunners
fetched shot and powder, sometimes heaved on a handspike or pushed on
the wheels as the gun was re laid then swabbed and loaded again.
“Water!” a corporal shouted, holding up a bucket to show that the
swabbing water was gone.
“Fire low! Don’t waste your powder!” Major Swinton called as he
pushed his horse into the gap between the centre companies. He peered
at the enemy through the smoke. Behind him, next to the 74th’s twin
flags, General Wellesley and his aides also stared at the Arabs beyond
the smoke clouds. Colonel Wallace, the brigade commander, trotted his
horse to the battalion’s flank. He called something to Sharpe as he
went by, but his words were lost in the welter of gunfire, then his
horse half spun as a bullet struck its haunch. Wallace steadied the
beast, looked back at the wound, but the horse did not seem badly hurt.
Colonel Harness was thrashing one of the native palanquin bearers who
had been trying to push the Colonel back into the curtained vehicle.
One of Wellesley’s aides rode back to quieten the Colonel and to
persuade him to go southwards.
“Steady now!” Sergeant Colquhoun shouted.
“Aim low!”
The Arab charge had been checked, but not defeated. The first volley
must have hit the attackers cruelly hard for Sharpe could see a line of
bodies lying on the turf. The bodies looked red and white, blood
against robes, but behind that twitching heap the Arabs were firing
back to make their own ragged cloud of musket smoke. They fired
haphazardly, untrained in platoon volleys, but they reloaded swiftly
and their bullets were striking home. Sharpe heard the butcher’s sound
of metal hitting meat, saw men hurled backwards, saw some fall. The
file-closers hauled the dead out of the line and tugged the living
closer together.
“Close up!
Close up!” The pipes played on, adding their defiant music to the
noise of the guns. Private Hollister was hit in the head and Sharpe
saw a cloud of white flour drift away from the man’s powdered hair as
his hat fell off.
Then blood soaked the whitened hair and Hollister fell back with glassy