deployed, and Wellesley knew those columns could never hope to break
into Gawilghur. Their job was to spread the defenders thin, and to
block off the garrison’s escape routes while Colonel Stevenson’s men
did the bloody work.
“You’ll have to establish Stevenson’s batteries,” Wellesley told
Stokes.
“Major Blackiston’s seen the ground’ he indicated his aide ‘and he
reckons two eighteens and three iron twelves should suffice. Major
Blackiston, of course, will give you whatever advice he can.”
“No glacis?” Stokes directed the question to Blackiston.
“Not when I was there,” Blackiston said, ‘though of course they could
have made one since. I just saw curtain walls with a few bastions.
Ancient work, by the look of it.”
“Fifteenth-century work,” Wellesley put in and, when he saw that the
two engineers were impressed by his knowledge, he shrugged.
“Syud Sevajee claims as much, anyway.”
“Old walls break fastest,” Stokes said cheerfully. The two big guns,
with the three smaller cannon, would batter the wall head on to crumble
the ancient stone that was probably unprotected by a glacis of embanked
earth to soak up the force of the bombardment, and the Major had yet to
find a fortress wall in India that could resist the strike of an
eighteen-pounder shot travelling half a mile every two seconds.
“But you’ll want some enfilading fire,” he warned Wellesley.
“I’ll send you some more twelves,” Wellesley promised.
“A battery of twelves and an howitzer,” Stokes suggested.
“I’d like to drop some nasties over the wall. There’s nothing like an
howitzer for spreading gloom.”
“I’ll send an howitzer,” Wellesley promised. The enfilading batteries
would fire at an angle through the growing breaches to keep the enemy
from making repairs, and the howitzer, which fired high in the air so
that its shells dropped steeply down, could bombard the repair parties
behind the fortress ramparts.
“And I want the batteries established quickly,” Wellesley said.
“No dallying, Major.”
“I’m not a man to dally, Sir Arthur,” Stokes said cheerfully. The
Major was leading the General and his staff up a particularly steep
patch of road where an elephant, supplemented by over sixty sweating
sepoys, forced an eighteen-pounder gun up the twisting road. The
officers dodged the sepoys, then climbed a knoll from where they could
stare across at Gawilghur.
By now they were nearly as high as the stronghold itself and the
profile of the twin forts stood clear against the bright sky beyond. It
formed a double hump. The narrow neck of land led from the plateau to
the first, lower hump on which the Outer Fortress stood. It was that
fortress which would receive Stokes’s breaching fire, and that fortress
which would be assailed by Stevenson’s men, but beyond it the ground
dropped into a deep ravine, then climbed steeply to the much larger
second hump on which the Inner Fortress with its palace and its lakes
and its houses stood. Sir Arthur spent a long time staring through his
glass, but said nothing.
“I’ll warrant I can get you into the smaller fortress,” Stokes said,
‘but how do you cross the central ravine into the main stronghold?”
It was that question that Wellesley had yet to answer in his own mind,
and he suspected there was no simple solution. He hoped that the
attackers would simply surge across the ravine and flood up the second
slope like an irresistible wave that had broken through one barrier and
would now overcome everything in its path, but he dared not admit to
such impractical optimism. He dared not confess that he was condemning
his men to an attack on an Inner Fortress that would have unbreached
walls and well-prepared defenders.
“If we can’t take it by escalade,” he said curtly, collapsing his
glass, ‘we’ll have to dig breaching batteries in the Outer Fortress and
do it the hard way.”
In other words, Stokes thought, Sir Arthur had no idea how it was to be
done. Only that it must be done. By escalade or by breach, and by
God’s mercy, if they were lucky, for once they were into the central
ravine the attackers would be in the devil’s hands.
It was a hot December day, but Stokes shivered, for he feared for the