Ahmed was as thin as a half-drowned cat. He wore dirty robes and a
tattered headdress secured by a loop of frayed rope that was stained
with blood, evidently where Sharpe’s blow with the musket had caught
him during the battle. But he had bright eyes and a defiant face, and
though his voice had not yet broken he was braver than many fullgrown
men. Sharpe unslung his canteen and pushed it into the boy’s hand,
first taking away the broken pistol that he tossed away.
“Drink up, you little bugger,” Sharpe said, ‘then come for a walk.”
The boy glanced up the hill, but his army was long gone. It had
vanished into the evening beyond the crest and was now being pursued by
vengeful cavalry. He said something in Arabic, drank what remained of
Sharpe’s water, then offered a grudging nod of thanks.
So Sharpe had a servant, a battle had been won, and now he walked south
in search of pucka lees
Colonel William Dodd watched the Lions of Allah break, and spat with
disgust. It had been foolish to fight here in the first place and now
the foolery was turning to disaster.
“Jemadar!” he called.
“Sahib?”
“We’ll form square. Put our guns in the centre. And the baggage.”
“Families, sahib?”
“Families too.” Dodd watched Manu Bappoo and his aides galloping back
from the British advance. The gunners had already fled, which meant
that the Mahrattas’ heavy cannon would all be captured, every last
piece of it. Dodd was tempted to abandon his regiment’s small battery
of five-pounders which were about as much use as pea-shooters, but a
soldier’s pride persuaded him to drag the guns from the field.
Bappoo might lose all his guns, but it would be a cold day in hell
before William Dodd gave up artillery to an enemy.
His Cobras were on the Mahratta right flank and there, for the moment,
they were out of the way of the British advance. If the rest of the
Mahratta infantry remained firm and fought, then Dodd would stay with
them, but he saw that the defeat of the Arabs had demoralized Bappoo’s
army. The ranks began to dissolve, the first fugitives began to run
north and Dodd knew this army was lost. First Assaye, now this. A
goddamn disaster! He turned his horse and smiled at his white-jacketed
men.
“You haven’t lost a battle!” he shouted to them.
“You haven’t even fought today, so you’ve lost no pride! But you’ll
have to fight now! If you don’t, if you break ranks, you’ll die. If
you fight, you’ll live!
Jemadar! March!”
The Cobras would now attempt one of the most difficult of all feats of
soldiering, a fighting withdrawal. They marched in a loose square, the
centre of which gradually filled with their women and children. Some
other infantry tried to join the families, but Dodd snarled at his men
to beat them away.
“Fire if they won’t go!” he shouted. The last thing he wanted was for
his men to be infected by panic.
Dodd trailed the square. He heard cavalry trumpets and he twisted in
his saddle to see a mass of irregular light horsemen come over the
crest.
“Halt!” he shouted.
“Close ranks! Charge bayonets!”
The white-jacketed Cobras sealed the loose square tight. Dodd pushed
through the face of the square and turned his horse to watch the
cavalrymen approach. He doubted they would come close, not when there
were easier pickings to the east and, sure enough, as soon as the
leading horsemen saw that the square was waiting with levelled muskets,
they sheered away.
Dodd holstered his pistol.
“March on, Jemadar!”
Twice more Dodd had to halt and form ranks, but both times the
threatening horsemen were scared away by the calm discipline of his
white-coated soldiers. The red-coated infantry was not pursuing. They
had reached the village of Argaum and were content to stay there,
leaving the pursuit to the horsemen, and those horsemen chased after
the broken rabble that flooded northwards, but none chose to die by
charging Dodd’s formed ranks.
Dodd inclined to the west, angling away from the pursuers. By
nightfall he was confident enough to form the battalion into a column