Sharpe’s Fortress: The Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803. Bernard Cornwell
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the horsemen had passed. Two troops of East India Company cavalry provided the General’s escort. Manu Bappoo’s army might have been trounced and its survivors sent skeltering back into Gawilghur, but the Deccan Plain was still infested with Mahratta cavalry ready to pounce on supply convoys, wood-cutting parties or the grass-cutters who supplied the army’s animals with fodder and so the two troops rode with sabres drawn. Wellesley set a fast pace, revelling in the freedom to ride in the long open country. ‘Did you visit Colonel Stevenson this morning?’ he called back to an aide.
‘I did, sir, and he’s no better than he was.’
‘But he can get about?’
‘On his elephant, sir.’
Wellesley grunted. Stevenson was the commander of his smaller army, but the old Colonel was ailing. So was Harness, the commander of one of Wellesley’s two brigades, but there was no point in asking about Harness. It was not just physical disease that assaulted Harness, for the Scotsman’s wits were gone as well. The doctors claimed it was the heat that had desiccated his brains, but Wellesley doubted the diagnosis. Heat and rum, maybe, but not the heat alone, though he did not doubt that India’s climate was bad for a European’s health. Few men lived long without falling prey to some wasting fever, and Wellesley was thinking it was time he left himself. Time to go back home before his health was abraded and, more important, before his existence was forgotten in London. French armies were unsettling all Europe and it could not be long before London despatched an army to fight the old foe, and Wellesley wanted to be a part of it. He was in his middle thirties and he had a reputation to make, but first he had to finish off the Mahrattas, and that meant taking Gawilghur, and to that end he was now riding towards the great rampart of cliffs that sealed off the plain’s northern edge.
An hour’s ride brought him to the summit of a small rise which offered a view northwards. The plain looked dun, starved of water by the failed monsoon, though here and there patches of millet grew tall. In a good year, Wellesley guessed, the millet would cover the plain from horizon to horizon, a sea of grain bounded by the Gawilghur cliffs. He dismounted on the small knoll and took out a telescope that he settled on his horse’s saddle. It was a brand new glass, a gift from the merchants of Madras to mark Wellesley’s pacification of Mysore. Trade now moved freely on India’s eastern flank, and the telescope, which had been specially ordered from Matthew Berge of London, was a generous token of the merchants’ esteem, but Wellesley could not get used to it. The shape of the eyepiece was less concave than the one he was used to, and after a moment he snapped the new telescope shut and pulled out his old glass which, though lower powered, was more comfortable. He stared for a long time, gazing at the fort which crowned the rock promontory. The black stone of the fortress walls looked particularly sinister, even in the sunlight. ‘Good God,’ the General muttered after a while. Fail up there, he thought, and there would be no point in going home. He could go to London with some victories under his belt, and men would respect him even if the victories had not been against the French, but go with a defeat and they would despise him. Gawilghur, he thought sourly, had the look of a career-breaker.
Colonel Wallace, Wellesley’s healthy brigade commander, had also dismounted and was inspecting the fortress through his own glass. ‘Devil of a place, Sir Arthur,’ Wallace said.
‘How high is it, Blackiston?’ Wellesley called to one of his aides, an engineer.
‘I took a triangulation yesterday, sir,’ Blackiston said, ‘and discovered the fortress walls are eighteen hundred feet above the plain.’
‘Is there water up there?’ Colonel Butters, the chief engineer, asked.
‘We hear there is, sir,’ Blackiston said. ‘There are tanks in the fort; huge things like lakes.’
‘But the water level must be low this year?’ Butters suggested.
‘I doubt it’s low enough, sir,’ Blackiston murmured, knowing that Butters had been hoping that thirst might defeat the garrison.
‘And the rascals will have food, no doubt,’ Wellesley commented.
‘Doubtless,’ Wallace agreed drily.
‘Which means they’ll have to be prised out,’ the General said, then bent to the glass again and lowered the lens to look at the foothills below the bluff. Just south of the fort was a conical hill that rose almost halfway up the flank of the great promontory. ‘Can we get guns on that near hill?’ he asked.
There was a pause while the other officers decided which hill he was referring to. Colonel Butters flinched. ‘We can get them up there, sir, but I doubt they’ll have the elevation to reach the fort.’
‘You’ll get nothing bigger than a twelve-pounder up there,’ Wallace said dubiously, then slid the telescope’s view up the bluff to the walls. ‘And you’ll need bigger shot than twelve-pounders to break down that wall.’
‘Sir Arthur!’ The warning call came from the officer commanding the East India Company cavalry who was pointing to where a group of Mahratta horsemen had appeared in the south. They had evidently been following the lingering dust cloud left by the General’s party and, though the approaching horsemen only numbered about twenty men, the sepoy cavalry wheeled to face them and spread into a line.
‘It’s all right,’ Wellesley called, ‘they’re ours. I asked them to meet us here.’ He had inspected the approaching horsemen through his telescope and now, waving the sepoy cavalry back, he walked to greet the silladars. ‘Syud Sevajee,’ Wellesley acknowledged the man in the shabby green and silver coat who led the cavalrymen, ‘thank you for coming.’
Syud Sevajee nodded brusquely at Wellesley, then stared up at Gawilghur. ‘You think you can get in?’
‘I think we must,’ Wellesley said.
‘No one ever has,’ Sevajee said with a sly smile.
Wellesley returned the smile, but slowly, as if accepting the implied challenge, and then, as Sevajee slid down from his saddle, the General turned to Wallace. ‘You’ve met Syud Sevajee, Wallace?’
‘I’ve not had that pleasure, sir.’
Wellesley made the introduction, then added that Syud Sevajee’s father had been one of the Rajah of Berar’s generals.
‘But is no longer?’ Wallace asked Sevajee.
‘Beny Singh murdered him,’ Sevajee said grimly, ‘so I fight with you, Colonel, to gain my chance to kill Beny Singh. And Beny Singh now commands that fortress.’ He nodded towards the distant promontory.
‘So how do we get inside?’ Wellesley asked.
The officers gathered around Sevajee as the Indian drew his tulwar and used its tip to draw a figure eight in the dust. He tapped the lower circle of the eight, which he had drawn far larger than the upper. ‘That’s what you’re looking at,’ he said, ‘the Inner Fort. And there are only two entrances. There’s a road that climbs up from the plain and goes to the Southern Gate.’ He drew a squiggly line that tailed away from the bottom of the figure eight. ‘But that road is impossible. You will climb straight into their guns. A child with a pile of rocks could keep an army from climbing that road. The only possible route into the Inner Fort is through the main entrance.’ He scratched a brief line across the junction of the two circles.
‘Which will not be easy?’ Wellesley asked drily.
Sevajee offered the General a grim smile. ‘The main entrance is a long corridor, barred by four gates and flanked by high walls. But even to reach it, Sir Arthur, you will have to take the Outer Fort.’ He tapped the small upper circle of the figure eight.
Wellesley nodded. ‘And that, too, is difficult?’
‘Again, two entrances,’ Sevajee said. ‘One is a road that climbs from the plain. You can’t see it from here, but it twists up the hills to the west and it comes to the fort here.’ He tapped the waist of the figure eight. ‘It’s an easier climb than the southern road, but for the last mile of the journey your men will