other. Sharpe might have been at Assaye, he might even have
distinguished himself on the battlefield, but he had not been through
the murderous ordeal of the 74th and so he was an outsider.
“Line to the right!” Sergeant Colquhoun shouted, and the company
wheeled right and shook itself into a line of two ranks. The ditch had
emerged from the millet to join a wide, dry riverbed, and Sharpe looked
northwards to see a rill of dirty white gunsmoke on the horizon.
Mahratta guns. But a long way away. Now that the battalion was free
of the tall crops Sharpe could just detect a small wind. It was not
strong enough to cool the heat, but it would waft the gunsmoke slowly
away.
“Halt!” Urquhart called.
“Face front!”
The enemy cannon might be far off, but it seemed that the battalion
would march straight up the riverbed into the mouths of those guns. But
at least the 74th was not alone. The 78th, another Highland battalion,
was on their right, and on either side of those two Scottish battalions
were long lines of Madrassi sepoys.
Urquhart rode back to Sharpe.
“Stevenson’s joined.” The Captain spoke loud enough for the rest of
the company to hear. Urquhart was encouraging them by letting them
know that the two small British armies had combined. General Wellesley
commanded both, but for most of the time he split his forces into two
parts, the smaller under Colonel Stevenson, but today the two small
parts had combined so that twelve thousand infantry could attack
together. But against how many?
Sharpe could not see the Mahratta army beyond their guns, but doubtless
the bastards were there in force.
“Which means the 94th’s off to our left somewhere,” Urquhart added
loudly, and some of the men muttered their approval of the news. The
94th was another Scottish regiment, so today there were three Scottish
battalions attacking the Mahrattas. Three Scottish and ten sepoy
battalions, and most of the Scots reckoned that they could have done
the job by themselves. Sharpe reckoned they could too. They may not
have liked him much, but he knew they were good soldiers. Tough
bastards. He sometimes tried to imagine what it must be like for the
Mahrattas to fight against the Scots. Hell, he guessed. Absolute
hell.
“The thing is,” Colonel McCandless had once told Sharpe, ‘it takes
twice as much to kill a Scot as it does to finish off an Englishman.”
Poor McCandless. He had been finished off, shot in the dying moments
of Assaye. Any of the enemy might have killed the Colonel, but Sharpe
had convinced himself that the traitorous Englishman, William Dodd, had
fired the fatal shot. And Dodd was still free, still fighting for the
Mahrattas, and Sharpe had sworn over McCandless’s grave that he would
take vengeance on the Scotsman’s behalf. He had made the oath as he
had dug the Colonel’s grave, getting blisters as he had hacked into the
dry soil. McCandless had been a good friend to Sharpe and now, with
the Colonel deep buried so that no bird or beast could feast on his
corpse, Sharpe felt friendless in this army.
“Guns!” A shout sounded behind the 74th.
“Make way!”
Two batteries of six-pounder galloper guns were being hauled up the dry
riverbed to form an artillery line ahead of the infantry. The guns
were called gallopers because they were light and were usually hauled
by horses, but now they were all harnessed to teams of ten oxen so they
plodded rather than galloped. The oxen had painted horns and some had
bells about their necks. The heavy guns were all back on the road
somewhere, so far back that they would probably be too late to join
this day’s party.
The land was more open now. There were a few patches of tall millet
ahead, but off to the east there were arable fields and Sharpe watched
as the guns headed for that dry grassland. The enemy was watching too,
and the first round shots bounced on the grass and ricocheted over the
British guns.
“A few minutes before the gunners bother themselves with us, I fancy,”
Urquhart said, then kicked his right foot out of its stirrup and slid