scatter of embarrassed officers and, astonishingly, the two panicked
gun teams which had inexplicably stopped short of the millet and now
waited patiently for the gunners to catch them.
“Sit yourselves down!” Urquhart called to his men, and the company
squatted in the dry riverbed. One man took a stump of clay pipe from
his pouch and lit it with a tinderbox. The tobacco smoke drifted
slowly in the small wind. A few men drank from their canteens, but
most were hoarding their water against the dryness that would come when
they bit into their cartridges. Sharpe glanced behind, hoping to see
the pucka lees who brought the battalion water, but there was no sign
of them. When he turned back to the north he saw that some enemy
cavalry had appeared on the crest, their tall lances making a spiky
thicket against the sky. Doubtless the enemy horsemen were tempted to
attack the broken British line and so stampede more of the nervous
sepoys, but a squadron of British cavalry emerged from a wood with
their sabres drawn to threaten the flank of the enemy horsemen.
Neither side charged, but instead they just watched each other. The
74th’s pipers had ceased their playing. The remaining British galloper
guns were deploying now, facing up the long gentle slope to where the
enemy cannon lined the horizon.
“Are all the muskets loaded?” Urquhart asked Colquhoun.
“They’d better be, sir, or I’ll want to know why.”
Urquhart dismounted. He had a dozen full canteens of water tied to his
saddle and he unstrung six of them and gave them to the company.
“Share it out,” he ordered, and Sharpe wished he had thought to bring
some extra water himself. One man cupped some water in his hands and
let his dog lap it up. The dog then sat and scratched its fleas while
its master lay back and tipped his shako over his eyes.
What the enemy should do, Sharpe thought, is throw their infantry
forward. All of it. Send a massive attack across the skyline and down
towards the millet. Flood the riverbed with a horde of screaming
warriors who could add to the panic and so snatch victory.
But the skyline stayed empty except for the guns and the stalled enemy
lancers.
And so the redcoats waited.
Colonel William Dodd, commanding officer of Dodd’s Cobras, spurred his
horse to the skyline from where he stared down the slope to see the
British force in disarray. It looked to him as though two or more
battalions had fled in panic, leaving a gaping hole on the right of the
redcoat line. He turned his horse and kicked it to where the Mahratta
warlord waited under his banners. Dodd forced his horse through the
aides until he reached Prince Manu Bappoo.
“Throw everything forward, sahib,” he advised Bappoo, ‘now!”
Manu Bappoo showed no sign of having heard Dodd. The Mahratta
commander was a tall and lean man with a long, scarred face and a short
black beard. He wore yellow robes, had a silver helmet with a long
horse-tail plume, and carried a drawn sword that he claimed to have
taken in single combat from a British cavalry officer. Dodd doubted
the claim, for the sword was of no pattern that he recognized, but he
was not willing to challenge Bappoo directly on the matter.
Bappoo was not like most of the Mahratta leaders that Dodd knew.
Bappoo might be a prince and the younger brother of the cowardly Rajah
of Berar, but he was also a fighter.
“Attack now!” Dodd insisted. Much earlier in the day he had advised
against fighting the British at all, but now it seemed that his advice
had been wrong, for the British assault had dissolved in panic long
before it reached musket range.
“Attack with everything we’ve got, sahib,” Dodd urged Bappoo.
“If I throw everything forward, Colonel Dodd,” Bappoo said in his oddly
sibilant voice, ‘then my guns will have to cease fire. Let the ;
British walk into the cannon fire, then we shall release the infantry.”
i Bappoo had lost his front teeth to a lance thrust, and hissed his
words so that, to Dodd, he sounded like a snake. He even looked