Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803. Bernard Cornwell
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attackers from the 78th were just a hundred paces from the wall now. They had no packs, only their weapons. And still the enemy treated them with lordly disdain. Not a gun fired, not a musket flamed, not a single rocket slashed out from the wall.
‘Looks like it will be easy, McCandless!’ Wallace called.
‘I pray as much!’ McCandless said.
‘The enemy has been praying too,’ Sevajee said, but McCandless ignored the remark.
Then, suddenly and appallingly, the silence ended.
The enemy was not ignoring the attack. Instead, from serried loopholes in the wall and from the bastions’ high embrasures and from the merlons along the parapet, a storm of gunfire erupted. One moment the wall had been clear in the morning sun, now it was fogged by a thick screen of powder smoke. A whole city was rimmed white, and the ground about the attacking troops was pitted and churned by the strike of bullets. ‘Ten minutes of seven,’ McCandless shouted over the noise, as though the time was important. Rockets, like those Sharpe had seen at Seringapatam, seared out from the walls to stitch their smoke trails in crazy tangles above the assaulting parties’ heads, yet, despite the volume of fire, the defenders’ opening volley appeared to do little harm. One redcoat was staggering, but the assault parties still went forward, and then a pain-filled squeal made Sharpe look to his right to see that an elephant had been struck by a cannonball. The beast’s mahout was dragging on its tether, but the elephant broke free and, maddened by its wound, charged straight towards Wallace’s men. The Highlanders scattered. The gunners had begun to drag their loaded six-pounder forward, but they were right in the injured beast’s path and now sensibly abandoned the gun to flee from the crazed animal’s charge. The wrinkled skin of the elephant’s left flank was sheeted in red. Wallace shouted incoherently, then spurred his horse out of the way. The elephant, trunk raised and eyes white, thumped past McCandless and Sharpe. ‘Poor girl,’ McCandless said.
‘It’s a she?’ Sharpe asked.
‘All draught animals are female, Sharpe. More docile.’
‘She ain’t docile, sir,’ Sharpe said, watching the elephant burst free of the army’s rear and trample through a field of stubble pursued by her mahout and an excited crowd of small skinny children who had followed the attacking troops from the encampment and now whooped shrilly as they enjoyed the chase. Sharpe watched them, then involuntarily ducked as a musket ball whipped just over his shako and another ricocheted off the six-pounder’s barrel with a surprisingly musical note.
‘Not too close now, Sharpe,’ McCandless warned, and Sharpe obediently reined in his mare.
Colonel Wallace was calling his men back into formation. ‘Damned animals!’ he snarled at McCandless.
‘Your mother had no advice on elephants, Wallace?’
‘None I’d repeat to a godly man, McCandless,’ Wallace said, then spurred his horse towards the six-pounder’s disordered gunners. ‘Pick up the traces, you rogues. Hurry!’
The 78th had reached the wall to the left of the gate. They rammed the foot of their two ladders into the soil, then swung the tops up and over onto the wall’s parapet. ‘Good boys,’ McCandless shouted warmly, though he was far too distant for the attackers to hear his encouragement. ‘Good boys!’ The first kilted Highlanders were already scrambling up the rungs, but then a man was hit by a bullet from the flanking bastion and he stopped, clung to the ladder, then slowly toppled sideways. A crowd of Highlanders jostled at the bottom of the ladders to be the next up the rungs. Poor bastards, Sharpe thought, so eager to climb to death, and he saw that the leading men on both ladders were officers. They had swords. The men climbed with their bayonet-tipped muskets slung over their shoulders, but the officers climbed sword in hand. One of them was struck and the man behind unceremoniously shoved him off the ladder and hurried up to the parapet and there, inexplicably, he stopped.
His comrades shouted at him to get a bloody move on and scramble over the wall, but the man did nothing except to unsling his musket, and then he was hurled backwards in a misting spray of blood. Another man took his place, and the same happened to him. The officer at the top of the second ladder was crouching on the top rung, occasionally peering over the coping of the wall between two of the dome-shaped merlons, but he was making no attempt to cross the parapet. ‘They should have more than two ladders, sir,’ Sharpe grumbled.
‘Wasn’t time, laddie, wasn’t time,’ McCandless said. ‘What’s holding them?’ he asked as he stared with an agonized expression at the stalled men. The Arab defenders in the nearest bastion were being given a fine target and their musketry was having a terrible effect on the crowded ladders. The noise of the defenders’ fire was continuous; a staccato crackle of musketry, the hiss of rockets and the thunderous crash of cannon. Men were blasted off the ladders, and their place was immediately taken by others, but still the men at the top of the rungs did not try to cross the wall, and still the defenders fired and the dead and injured heaped up at the foot of the ladders and the living pushed them aside to reach the rungs and so offer themselves as targets to the unending gunfire. One man at last heaved himself onto the wall and straddled the coping where he unslung his musket and fired a shot down into the city, but almost immediately he was hit by a blast of musket fire. He swayed for a second, his musket clattered down the wall’s red face, then he followed it to the ground. The new man at the top of the ladder heaved himself up, then, just like the rest, he checked and ducked back.
‘What’s holding them?’ McCandless cried in frustration. ‘In God’s name! Go!’
‘There’s no bloody firestep,’ Sharpe said grimly.
McCandless glanced at him. ‘What?’
‘Sorry, sir. Forgot not to curse, sir.’
But McCandless was not worried about Sharpe’s language. ‘What did you say, man?’ he insisted.
‘There’s no firestep there, sir.’ Sharpe pointed at the wall where the Scotsmen were dying. ‘There’s no musket smoke on the parapet, sir.’
McCandless looked back. ‘By God, you’re right.’
The wall had merlons and embrasures, but not a single patch of musket smoke showed in those defences, which meant that the castellation was false and there was no firestep on the wall’s far side where defenders could stand. From the outside the stretch of wall looked like any other part of the city’s defences, but Sharpe guessed that once the Highlanders reached the wall’s summit they were faced with a sheer drop on the far side, and doubtless there was a crowd of enemies waiting at the foot of that inner wall to massacre any man who survived the fall. The 78th were attacking into thin air and being bloodied mercilessly by the jubilant defenders.
The two ladders emptied as the officers at last realized their predicament and shouted at their men to come down. The defenders cheered the repulse and kept firing as the two ladders were carried back from the ramparts.
‘Dear God,’ McCandless said, ‘dear God.’
‘I warned you,’ Sevajee said, unable to conceal his pride in the fighting qualities of the Mahratta defenders.
‘You’re on our side!’ McCandless snarled, and the Indian just shrugged.
‘It ain’t over yet, sir,’ Sharpe tried to cheer up the Scotsman.
‘Escalades work by speed, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, ‘and we’ve lost surprise now.’
‘It will have to be done properly,’ Sevajee remarked smugly, ‘with guns and a breach.’
But the escalade was not defeated yet. The assault party of the 74th had now reached the wall to the right of the gate and their two ladders were swung up against the high red stones, but this stretch of wall did possess a firestep and it was crowded with eager defenders who rained a savage fire down onto the attackers. The British twelve-pounders had opened fire, and their canister was savaging the defenders, but the dead and wounded were dragged away to be replaced by reinforcements who quickly learned that if they let the attackers come