Sharpe’s Tiger: The Siege of Seringapatam, 1799. Bernard Cornwell
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‘I heard that, Private Garrard!’ Hakeswill shouted over his shoulder. ‘Got ears in the back of me head, I have. Silence now. Don’t want no heathen horde thinking you’re frit! You’re white men, remember, bleached in the cleansing blood of the bleeding lamb, so no bleeding talking in the ranks! Nice and quiet, like them bleeding nuns what never utters a sound on account of having had their papist tongues cut out.’ He suddenly crashed to attention once again and saluted by bringing his spear-tipped halberd across his body. ‘Company all present, sir!’ he shouted in a voice that must have been audible on the enemy-held ridge. ‘All present and quiet, sir! Have their backs whipped bloody else, sir.’
Lieutenant William Lawford curbed his horse and nodded at Sergeant Hakeswill. Lawford was the Light Company’s second officer, junior to Captain Morris and senior to the brace of young ensigns, but he was newly arrived in the battalion and was as frightened of Hakeswill as were the men in the ranks. ‘The men can talk, Sergeant,’ Lawford observed mildly. ‘The other companies aren’t silent.’
‘No, sir. Must save their breath, sir. Too bleeding hot to talk, sir, and besides, they got heathens to kill, sir, mustn’t waste breath on chit-chat, not when there are black-faced heathens to kill, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.’
‘If you say so, Sergeant,’ Lawford said, unwilling to provoke a confrontation, then he found he had nothing else to say and so, awkwardly aware of the scrutiny of the Light Company’s seventy-six men, he stared at the enemy-held ridge. But he was also conscious of having ignominiously surrendered to the will of Sergeant Hakeswill and so he slowly coloured as he gazed towards the west. Lawford was popular, but thought to be weak, though Sharpe was not so sure of that judgement. He thought the Lieutenant was still finding his way among the strange and sometimes frightening human currents that made up the 33rd, and that in time Lawford would prove a tough and resilient officer. For now, though, William Lawford was twenty-four years old and had only recently purchased his lieutenancy, and that made him unsure of his authority.
Ensign Fitzgerald, who was only eighteen, strolled back from the column’s head. He was whistling as he walked and slashing with a drawn sabre at tall weeds. ‘Off in a moment, sir,’ he called up cheerfully to Lawford, then seemed to become aware of the Light Company’s ominous silence. ‘Not frightened, are you?’ he asked.
‘Saving their breath, Mister Fitzgerald, sir,’ Hakeswill snapped.
‘They’ve got breath enough to sing a dozen songs and still beat the enemy,’ Fitzgerald said scornfully. ‘Ain’t that so, lads?’
‘We’ll beat the bastards, sir,’ Tom Garrard said.
‘Then let me hear you sing,’ Fitzgerald demanded. ‘Can’t bear silence. We’ll have a quiet time in our tombs, lads, so we might as well make a noise now.’ Fitzgerald had a fine tenor voice that he used to start the song about the milkmaid and the rector, and by the time the Light Company had reached the verse that told how the naked rector, blindfolded by the milkmaid and thinking he was about to have his heart’s desire, was being steered towards Bessie the cow, the whole company was bawling the song enthusiastically.
They never did reach the end. Captain Morris, the Light Company’s commanding officer, rode back from the head of the battalion and interrupted the singing. ‘Half-companies!’ he shouted at Hakeswill.
‘Half-companies it is, sir! At once, sir. Light Company! Stop your bleeding noise! You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill bellowed. ‘Sergeant Green! Take charge of the after ranks. Mister Fitzgerald! I’ll trouble you to take your proper place on the left, sir. Forward ranks! Shoulder firelocks! Twenty paces, forward, march! Smartly now! Smartly!’
Hakeswill’s face shuddered as the front ten ranks of the company marched twenty paces and halted, leaving the other nine ranks behind. All along the battalion column the companies were similarly dividing, their drill as crisp as though they were back on their Yorkshire parade ground. A quarter-mile off to the 33rd’s left another six battalions were going through the same manoeuvre, and performing it with just as much precision. Those six battalions were all native soldiers in the service of the East India Company, though they wore red coats just like the King’s men. The six sepoy battalions shook out their colours and Sharpe, seeing the bright flags, looked ahead to where the 33rd’s two great regimental banners were being loosed from their leather tubes to the fierce Indian sun. The first, the King’s Colour, was a British flag on which the regiment’s battle honours were embroidered, while the second was the Regimental Colour and had the 33rd’s badge displayed on a scarlet field, the same scarlet as the men’s jacket facings. The tasselled silk banners blazed, and the sight of them prompted a sudden cannonade from the ridge. Till now there had only been the one heavy gun firing, but abruptly six other cannon joined the fight. The new guns were smaller and their round shot fell well short of the seven battalions.
Major Shee, the Irishman who commanded the 33rd while its Colonel, Arthur Wellesley, had control of the whole brigade, cantered his horse back, spoke briefly to Morris, then wheeled away towards the head of the column. ‘We’re going to push the bastards off the ridge!’ Morris shouted at the Light Company, then bent his head to light a cigar with a tinderbox. ‘Any bastard that turns tail, Sergeant,’ Morris went on when his cigar was properly alight, ‘will be shot. You hear me?’
‘Loud and clear, sir!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Shot, sir! Shot like the coward he is.’ He turned and scowled at the two half-companies. ‘Shot! And your names posted in your church porch at home as the cowards you are. So fight like Englishmen!’
‘Scotsmen,’ a voice growled behind Sharpe, but too softly for Hakeswill to hear.
‘Irish,’ another man said.
‘We ain’t none of us cowards,’ Garrard said more loudly.
Sergeant Green, a decent man, hushed him. ‘Quiet, lads. I know you’ll do your duty.’
The front of the column was marching now, but the rearmost companies were kept waiting so that the battalion could advance with wide intervals between its twenty half-companies. Sharpe guessed that the scattered formation was intended to reduce any casualties caused by the enemy’s bombardment which, because it was still being fired at extreme range, was doing no damage. Behind him, a long way behind, the rest of the allied armies were waiting for the ridge to be cleared. That mass looked like a formidable horde, but Sharpe knew that most of what he saw was the two armies’ civilian tail: the chaos of merchants, wives, sutlers and herdsmen who kept the fighting soldiers alive and whose supplies would make the siege of the enemy’s capital possible. It needed more than six thousand oxen just to carry the cannonballs for the big siege guns, and all those oxen had to be herded and fed and the herdsmen all travelled with their families who, in turn, needed more oxen to carry their own supplies. Lieutenant Lawford had once remarked that the expedition did not look like an army on the march, but like a great migrating tribe. The vast horde of civilians and animals was encircled by a thin crust of red-coated infantry, most of them Indian sepoys, whose job was to protect the merchants, ammunition and draught animals from the quick-riding, hard-hitting light cavalry of the Tippoo Sultan.
The Tippoo Sultan. The enemy. The tyrant of Mysore and the man who was presumably directing the gunfire on the ridge. The Tippoo ruled Mysore and he was the enemy, but what he was, or why he was an enemy, or whether he was a tyrant, beast or demigod, Sharpe had no idea. Sharpe was here because he was a soldier and it was sufficient that he had been told that the Tippoo Sultan was his enemy and so he waited patiently under the Indian sun that was soaking his lean tall body in sweat.
Captain Morris leaned on his saddle’s pommel. He took off his cocked hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that had been soaked in cologne water. He had been drunk the previous night and his stomach was still churning with pain and wind. If the battalion had not been going into battle he would have galloped away, found a private spot and voided his bowels, but he could hardly do that now in case his men thought it a sign of weakness and so he raised his canteen instead and swallowed some arrack in the hope that the harsh spirit would calm the turmoil in his belly. ‘Now, Sergeant!’ he called when the company in front had moved sufficiently