He watched the road widen, and lengthen, and one morning he saw that
two battalions of infantry had camped in one of the high valleys, and
next day he saw the beginnings of an artillery park: three guns, a
forage cart, a spare wheel wagon and four ammunition limbers.
He cursed Bappoo, knowing that his Cobras could destroy that small park
and hurl the British into dazed confusion, yet the Prince was content
to let the enemy climb the escarpment unopposed. The road was being
remade, yet even so it was still steep enough in places to need a
hundred men to haul one gun. Yet day by day Dodd saw the number of
guns increase in the artillery park, then inch up the hill and he knew
it would not be long before the British reached the plateau and their
besieging forces would seal off the narrow isthmus of rock that led
from the cliffs to the great fortress.
And still Manu Bappoo made no proper effort to harry the redcoats.
“We shall stop them here,” the Prince told Dodd, ‘here,” and he would
gesture at Gawilghur’s walls, but William Dodd was not so sure that the
redcoats would be stopped so easily. Bappoo might be convinced of the
fortress’s strength, but Bappoo knew nothing of modern siege craft.
Each morning, as he returned from his excursion along the cliff top,
Dodd would dismount as he reached the isthmus and give his horse to one
of his escort so that he could walk the attackers’ route. He tried to
see the fortress as the redcoats would see it, tried to anticipate
where their attack would come and how it would be made.
It was, he had to admit, a brutal place to attack. Two great walls
protected the Outer Fort, and though the British could undoubtedly
breach those walls with cannon fire, the two ramparts stood on a steep
slope so that the attackers would need to fight their way uphill to
where the defenders would be waiting among the ruins of the breaches.
And those breaches would be flanked by the massive round bastions that
were too big to be collapsed by the twelve- or eighteen-pounder guns
Dodd expected the British to deploy. The bastions would spit round
shot, musket balls and rockets down into the British who would be
struggling towards the nearer breach, their approach route getting ever
narrower until it was finally constricted by the vast tank of water
that blocked most of the approach. Dodd walked the route obsessively
and could almost feel sorry for the men who would have to do it under
fire.
A hundred paces from the fort, where the defenders’ fire would be most
lethal, the attackers would be squeezed between the reservoir and the
cliff edge, compressed into a space just twenty paces wide. Dodd stood
in that space each day and stared up at the double walls and counted
the artillery pieces. Twenty-two cannon were pointing at him and when
the redcoats came those barrels would be loaded with canister, and
besides those heavy guns there was a mass of smaller weapons, the
murderers and spitfires that could be held by one man and which could
blast out a fistful of stone scraps or pistol balls. True, the British
would have destroyed some of the larger guns, but the barrels could be
mounted on new carriages and re sited behind the vast bastions so that
the attackers, if they even succeeded in climbing up to the breach,
would be enfiladed by cannon fire. And to reach that far they would
need to fight uphill against Bappoo’s Arabs, and against the massed
musketry of the garrison.
It was a prospect so daunting that Prince Manu Bappoo expected most of
the attackers would sheer away from the breaches and run to the Delhi
Gate, the Outer Fort’s northern entrance. That gate would undoubtedly
have been shattered by British cannon fire, but once inside its arch
the attackers would find themselves in a trap. The road inside the
gate curled up beside the wall, with another great wall outside it, so
that anyone on the cobbles was dwarfed by the stone ramparts on either