Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803. Bernard Cornwell
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‘Youth is no barrier to good soldiering,’ Pohlmann said chidingly, though he well understood Dodd’s resentment. For years Dodd had watched younger men rise up through the ranks of the King’s army while he had been stuck in the Company’s hidebound ranks. A man could not buy promotion in the Company, nor were promotions given by merit, but only by seniority, and so forty-year-old men like Dodd were still lieutenants while, in the King’s army, mere boys were captains or majors. ‘Is Wellesley good?’ Pohlmann asked.
‘He’s never fought a battle,’ Dodd said bitterly, ‘not unless you count Malavelly.’
‘One volley?’ Pohlmann asked, half recalling stories of the skirmish.
‘One volley and a bayonet charge,’ Dodd said, ‘not a proper battle.’
‘He defeated Dhoondiah.’
‘A cavalry charge against a bandit,’ Dodd said scornfully. ‘My point, sir, is that Boy Wellesley has never faced artillery and infantry on a real battlefield. He was jumped up to major general solely because his brother is Governor General. If his name had been Dodd instead of Wellesley he’d be lucky to command a company, let alone an army.’
‘He’s an aristocrat?’ Pohlmann enquired.
‘Of course. What else?’ Dodd asked. ‘His father was an earl.’
‘So…’ Pohlmann put a handful of almonds in his mouth and paused to chew them. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘he’s the younger son of a nobleman, sent into the army because he wasn’t good for anything else, and his family purchased him up the ranks?’
‘Exactly, sir, exactly.’
‘But I hear he is efficient?’
‘Efficient?’ Dodd thought about it. ‘He’s efficient, sir, because his brother gives him the cash. He can afford a big bullock train. He carries his supplies with him, so his men are well fed. But he still ain’t ever seen a cannon’s muzzle, not facing him, not alongside a score of others and backed by steady infantry.’
‘He did well as Governor of Mysore,’ Pohlmann observed mildly.
‘So he’s an efficient governor? Does that make him a general?’
‘A disciplinarian, I hear,’ Pohlmann said.
‘He sets a lovely parade ground,’ Dodd agreed sarcastically.
‘But he isn’t a fool?’
‘No,’ Dodd admitted, ‘not a fool, but not a general either. He’s been promoted too fast and too young, sir. He’s beaten bandits, but he took a beating himself outside Seringapatam.’
‘Ah, yes. The night attack.’ Pohlmann had heard of that skirmish, how Arthur Wellesley had attacked a wood outside Seringapatam and there been roundly thrashed by the Tippoo’s troops. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘it never serves to underestimate an enemy.’
‘Overestimate him as much as you like, sir,’ Dodd said stoutly, ‘but the fact remains that Boy Wellesley has never fought a proper battle, not with more than a thousand men under his command, and he’s never faced a real army, not a trained field army with gunners and disciplined infantry, and my guess is that he won’t stand. He’ll run back to his brother and demand more men. He’s a careful man.’
Pohlmann smiled. ‘So let us lure this careful man deep into our territory where he can’t retreat, eh? Then beat him.’ He smiled, then hauled a watch from his fob and snapped open the lid. ‘I have to be going soon,’ he said, ‘but some business first.’ He took an envelope from his gaudy coat’s pocket and handed the sealed paper to Dodd. ‘That is your authority to command Mathers’s regiment, Major,’ he said, ‘but remember, I want you to bring it safely out of Ahmednuggur. You can help the defence for a time, but don’t be trapped there. Young Wellesley can’t invest the whole city, he doesn’t have enough men, so you should be able to escape easily enough. Bloody his nose, Dodd, but keep your regiment safe. Do you understand?’
Dodd understood well enough. Pohlmann was setting Dodd a difficult and ignoble task, that of retreating from a fight with his command intact. There was little glory in such a manoeuvre, but it would still be a difficult piece of soldiering and Dodd knew he was being tested a second time. The first test had been Chasalgaon, the second would be Ahmednuggur. ‘I can manage it,’ he said dourly.
‘Good!’ Pohlmann said. ‘I shall make things easier for you by taking your regiment’s families northwards. You might march soldiers safely from the city’s fall, but I doubt you can manage a horde of women and children too. And what about you, Madame?’ He turned and laid a meaty hand on Simone Joubert’s knee. ‘Will you come with me?’ He talked to her as though she were a child. ‘Or stay with Major Dodd?’
Simone seemed startled by the question. She blushed and looked up at Lieutenant Sillière. ‘I shall stay here, Colonel,’ she answered in English.
‘Make sure you bring her safe home, Major,’ Pohlmann said to Dodd.
‘I shall, sir.’
Pohlmann stood. His purple-coated bodyguards, who had been standing in front of the tent, hurried to take their places on the elephant’s flanks while the mahout, who had been resting in the animal’s capacious shade, now mounted the somnolent beast by gripping its tail and clambering up its backside like a sailor swarming up a rope. He edged past the gilded howdah, took his seat on the elephant’s neck and turned the beast towards Pohlmann’s tent. ‘Are you sure’ – Pohlmann turned back to Simone Joubert – ‘that you would not prefer to travel with me? The howdah is so comfortable, as long as you do not suffer from seasickness.’
‘I shall stay with my husband,’ Simone said. She had stood and proved to be much taller than Dodd had supposed. Tall and somewhat gawky, he thought, but she still possessed an odd attraction.
‘A good woman should stay with her husband,’ Pohlmann said, ‘or someone’s husband, anyway.’ He turned to Dodd. ‘I shall see you in a few days, Major, with your new regiment. Don’t let me down.’
‘I won’t, sir, I won’t,’ Dodd promised as, holding his new sword, he watched his new commander climb the silver steps to the howdah. He had a regiment to save and a reputation to make, and by God, Dodd thought, he would do both things well.
CHAPTER 2
Sharpe sat in the open shed where the armoury stored its gun carriages. It had started to rain, though it was not the sheeting downpour of the monsoon, just a miserable steady grey drizzle that turned the mud in the yard into a slippery coating of red slime. Major Stokes, beginning the afternoon in a clean red coat, white silk stock and polished boots, paced obsessively about a newly made carriage. ‘It really wasn’t your fault, Sharpe,’ he said.
‘Feels like it, sir.’
‘It would, it would!’ Stokes said. ‘Reflects well on you, Sharpe, ’pon my soul, it does. But it weren’t your fault, not in any manner.’
‘Lost all six men, sir. And young Davi.’
‘Poor Hedgehog,’ Stokes said, squatting to peer along the trail of the carriage. ‘You reckon that timber’s straight, Sharpe? Bit hog-backed, maybe?’
‘Looks straight to me, sir.’
‘Ain’t tight-grained, this oak, ain’t tight-grained,’ the Major said, and he began to unbuckle his sword belt. Every morning and afternoon his servant sent him to the armoury in carefully laundered and pressed clothes, and within an hour Major Stokes would be stripped down to breeches and shirtsleeves and have his hands full of spokeshaves or saws or awls or adzes. ‘Like to see a straight trail,’ he said. ‘There’s a number four spokeshave on the wall, Sharpe, be a good fellow.’
‘You