Sharpe’s Fortress: The Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803. Bernard Cornwell

a half-dozen men of number six company threw themselves aside as a cannonball bounced hard and low towards them. It whipped harmlessly through the gap they had made. The men laughed at having evaded it, then Sergeant Colquhoun ordered them back into their two ranks.

      ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the left of your company?’ Sharpe asked Venables.

      ‘You’re still thinking like a sergeant, Richard,’ Venables said. ‘Pig-ears doesn’t mind where I am.’ Pig-ears was Captain Lomax, who had earned his nickname not because of any peculiarity about his ears, but because he had a passion for crisply fried pig-ears. Lomax was easy-going, unlike Urquhart who liked everything done strictly according to regulations. ‘Besides,’ Venables went on, ‘there’s damn all to do. The lads know their business.’

      ‘Waste of time being an ensign,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,’ Venables said. ‘Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That’ll be the day.’ Venables gave a hoot of laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few officers in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship. ‘Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?’ he asked.

      ‘Urquhart told me.’

      ‘Fresh men. New officers. You won’t be junior any more.’

      Sharpe shook his head. ‘Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn’t it?’

      ‘Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain long before you got the jump up, eh? So you’ll still be the mess baby. Bad luck, old fellow.’

      Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten years older than Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no one had ever bothered to note down his birth date. Ensigns were youths and Sharpe was a man.

      ‘Whoah!’ Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that a round shot had struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced vertically upwards in a shower of soil. ‘Pig-ears says he once saw two cannonballs collide in mid-air,’ Venables said. ‘Well, he didn’t actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says they suddenly appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.’

      ‘They’d have shattered and broken up,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘Not according to Pig-ears,’ Venables insisted. ‘He says they flattened each other.’ A shell exploded ahead of the company, whistling scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and the files stepped round the smoking fragments. Venables stooped and plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat. ‘Like to have keepsakes,’ he explained, slipping the piece of iron into a pouch. ‘I’ll send it home for my sisters. Why don’t our guns stop and fire?’

      ‘Still too far away,’ Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a mile to go and, while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get really close so that their shots could not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel McCandless had always told Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you start slaughtering.

      A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first graze, still travelling at blistering speed, and the two men of the file were whipped backwards in a spray of mingling blood. ‘Jesus,’ Venables said in awe. ‘Jesus!’ The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered bones, tangled entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the file-closers, stooped to extricate the men’s pouches and haversacks from the scattered offal. ‘Two more names in the church porch,’ Venables remarked. ‘Who were they, Corporal?’

      ‘The McFadden brothers, sir.’ The Corporal had to shout to be heard over the roar of the Mahratta guns.

      ‘Poor bastards,’ Venables said. ‘Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.’

      Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess. Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as though the sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his first battle, for he had been sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye, but the Ensign was forever explaining that he could not be upset by the sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted his father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside, bent over and vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking. Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables’s retching.

      ‘Eyes front!’ Sharpe snarled.

      Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed that any order that did not come from himself or from Captain Urquhart was an unnecessary order.

      Venables caught up with Sharpe. ‘Something I ate.’

      ‘India does that,’ Sharpe said sympathetically.

      ‘Not to you.’

      ‘Not yet,’ Sharpe said and wished he was carrying a musket so he could touch the wooden stock for luck.

      Captain Urquhart sheered his horse leftwards. ‘To your company, Mister Venables.’

      Venables scuttled away and Urquhart rode back to the company’s right flank without acknowledging Sharpe’s presence. Major Swinton, who commanded the battalion while Colonel Wallace had responsibility for the brigade, galloped his horse behind the ranks. The hooves thudded heavily on the dry earth. ‘All well?’ Swinton called to Urquhart.

      ‘All well.’

      ‘Good man!’ Swinton spurred on.

      The sound of the enemy guns was constant now, like thunder that did not end. A thunder that pummelled the ears and almost drowned out the skirl of the pipers. Earth fountained where round shot struck. Sharpe, glancing to his left, could see a scatter of bodies lying in the wake of the long line. There was a village there. How the hell had he walked straight past a village without even seeing it? It was not much of a place, just a huddle of reed-thatched hovels with a few patchwork gardens protected by cactus-thorn hedges, but he had still walked clean past without noticing its existence. He could see no one there. The villagers had too much sense. They would have packed their few pots and pans and buggered off as soon as the first soldier appeared near their fields. A Mahratta round shot smacked into one of the hovels, scattering reed and dry timber, and leaving the sad roof sagging.

      Sharpe looked the other way and saw enemy cavalry advancing in the distance, then he glimpsed the blue and yellow uniforms of the British 19th Dragoons trotting to meet them. The late-afternoon sunlight glittered on drawn sabres. He thought he heard a trumpet call, but maybe he imagined it over the hammering of the guns. The horsemen vanished behind a stand of trees. A cannonball screamed overhead, a shell exploded to his left, then the 74th’s Light Company edged inwards to give an ox team room to pass back southwards. The British cannon had been dragged well ahead of the attacking line where they had now been turned and deployed. Gunners rammed home shot, pushed priming quills into touch-holes, stood back. The sound of the guns crashed across the field, blotting the immediate view with grey-white smoke and filling the air with the nauseous stench of rotted eggs.

      The drummers beat on, timing the long march north. For the moment it was a battle of artillerymen, the puny British six-pounders firing into the smoke cloud where the bigger Mahratta guns pounded at the advancing redcoats. Sweat trickled down Sharpe’s belly, it stung his eyes and it dripped from his nose. Flies buzzed by his face. He pulled the sabre free and found that its handle was slippery with perspiration, so he wiped it and his right hand on the hem of his red coat. Suddenly he badly wanted to piss, but this was not the time to stop and unbutton breeches. Hold it, he told himself, till the bastards are beaten. Or piss in your pants, he told himself, because in this heat no one would know it from sweat and it would dry quickly enough. Might smell, though. Better to wait. And if any of the men knew he had pissed his pants he would never live it down. Pisspants Sharpe. A ball thumped overhead, so close that its passage rocked Sharpe’s shako. A fragment of something whirred to his left. A man was on the ground, vomiting blood. A dog barked as another tugged blue guts from an opened belly. The