Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803
Bernard Cornwell
SHARPE’S
TRIUMPH
Richard Sharpe and
the Battle of Assaye,
September 1803
BERNARD CORNWELL
Sharpe’s Triumph is for
Joel Gardner,
who walked Ahmednuggur
and Assaye with me.
Map: The Battle of Assaye
Map: The Battle of Assaye
CONTENTS
E-BOOK EXTRA: Bernard Cornwell On:
I. The Origin of Richard Sharpe
II. Sharpe’s Adventures
III. Sharpe’s Trafalgar
MAP: The Battle of Assay, September 23, 1803
CHAPTER 1
It was not Sergeant Richard Sharpe’s fault.
CHAPTER 2
Sharpe sat in the open shed where the armory stored . . .
CHAPTER 3
Colonel McCandless led his small force . . .
CHAPTER 4
Sharpe followed McCandless into the gatehhouse’s high archway,
CHAPTER 5
Sharpe was curiously relieved when Colonel McCandless . . .
CHAPTER 6
Colonel McCandless excused himself from Pohlmann’s supper,
CHAPTER 7
Dodd called his new gelding Peter.
CHAPTER 8
General Wellesley was like a gambler . . .
CHAPTER 9
“There!” Dodd said, pointing.
CHAPTER 10
The redcoats advanced in a line of two ranks.
CHAPTER 11
Colonel McCandless had stayed close to his friend . . .
CHAPTER 12
Assaye alone remained in enemy hands . . .
HISTORICAL NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
BY BERNARD CORNWELL
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
HISTORICAL NOTE
The background events to Sharpe’s Triumph, the siege of Ahmednuggur and the battle of Assaye, both happened much as described in the novel, just as many of the characters in the story existed. Not just the obvious characters, like Wellesley, but men like Colin Campbell, who was the first man over the wall at Ahmednuggur, and Anthony Pohlmann who truly was once a sergeant in the East India Company, but who commanded the Mahratta forces at Assaye. What happened to Pohlmann after the battle is something of a mystery, but there is some evidence that he rejoined the East India Company army again, only this time as an officer. Colonel Gore, Colonel Wallace, and Colonel Harness all existed, and poor Harness was losing his wits and would need to retire soon after the battle. The massacre at Chasalgaon is a complete invention, though there was a Lieutenant William Dodd who did defect to the Mahrattas just before the campaign rather than face a civilian trial for the death of the goldsmith he had ordered beaten. Dodd had been sentenced to six months’ loss of pay and Wellesley, enraged by the leniency of the courtmartial, persuaded the East India Company to impose a new sentence, that of dismissal from their army, and planned to have Dodd tried for murder in a civilian court. Dodd, hearing of the decision, fled, though I doubt that he took any sepoys with him. Nevertheless desertion was a problem for the Company at that time, for many sepoys knew that the Indian states would pay well for British-trained troops. They would pay even more for competent European (or American) officers, and many such made their fortunes in those years.
The city of Ahmednuggur has grown so much that most traces of its wall have now been swallowed by new building, but the adjacent fortress remains and is still a formidable stronghold. Today the fort is a depot of the Indian Army, and something of a shrine to Indians for it was within the vast circuit of its red stone ramparts that the leaders of Indian independence were imprisoned by the British during the Second World War. Visitors are welcome to explore the ramparts with their impressive bastions and concealed galleries. The height of the fort’s wall was slightly greater than the city’s defenses, and the fort, unlike the city, had a protective ditch, but the ramparts still offer an idea of the obstacle Wellesley’s men faced when they launched their surprise escalade on the morning of August 8, 1803. It was a brave decision, and a calculated one, for Wellesley knew he would be heavily outnumbered in the Mahratta War and must have decided that a display of arrogant confidence would abrade his enemy’s morale. The success of the attack certainly impressed some Indians. Goklah, a Mahratta leader who allied himself with the British, said of the capture of Ahmednuggur, “These English are a strange people, and their General a wonderful man. They came here in the morning, looked at the pettah wall, walked over it, killed all the garrison, and returned to breakfast! What can withstand them?” Goklah’s tribute was apt, except that it was Scotsmen who “walked over the wall” and not Englishmen, and the celerity of their victory helped establish Wellesley’s reputation for invincibility. Lieutenant Colin Campbell of the 78th was rewarded for his bravery with a promotion and a place on Wellesley’s staff. He eventually became Sir Colin Campbell, governor of Ceylon.
The story of Wellesley deducing the presence of the ford at Peepulgaon by observation and common sense is well attested. To use the ford was an enormously brave decision, for no one knew if it truly existed until Wellesley himself spurred into the river. His orderly, from the 19th Dragoons, was killed as he approached the River Kaitna and nowhere is it recorded who took his place, but some soldier must have picked up the dragoon’s duties for Wellesley did have two horses killed beneath him that day and someone was close at hand on both occasions with a remount. Both horses died as described in the novel, the first during the 78th’s magnificent assault on Pohlmann’s right, and Diomed, Wellesley’s favorite charger, during the scrappy fighting to retake the Mahratta gun line. It was during that fight that Wellesley was unhorsed and surrounded momentarily by enemies. He never told the tale in detail, though it is believed he was forced to use his sword to defend himself, and it was probably the closest he ever came to death in his long military career. Was his life saved by some unnamed soldier? Probably not, for Wellesley would surely have given credit for such an act that could well have resulted in a battlefield commission. Wellesley was notorious for disliking such promotions from the ranks (“they always take to drink”), though he did promote two men for conspicuous bravery on the evening of Assaye.
Assaye is not the most famous of Arthur Wellesley’s battles, but it was the one of which he was most proud. Years later, long after he had swept the French out of Portugal and Spain, and after he had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington (as Arthur Wellesley became) was asked what had been his finest battle. He did not hesitate. “Assaye,” he answered, and so it surely was, for he outmaneuvered and outfought a much larger enemy, and did it swiftly, brutally and brilliantly. He did it, too, without Colonel Stevenson’s help. Stevenson tried to reinforce Wellesley, but his local guide misled him as he hurried towards the sound of the guns, and Stevenson was so upset by the guide’s error that he hanged the man.
Assaye was one of the costliest of Wellesley’s battles: “the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw,” the Duke recalled in later life. Pohlmann’s forces had 1200 killed and about 5000 wounded, while Wellesley suffered 456 dead (200 of them Scottish) and around 1200 wounded. All the enemy guns, 102 of them, were captured and many were discovered to be of such high quality that they were taken into British service, though others, mostly because their calibers did not match the British standard artillery weights, were double-shotted and blown up on the battlefield where some of their remna
nts still lie.
The battlefield remains virtually unchanged. No roads have been metaled, the fords look as they did, and Assaye itself is scarcely larger now than it was in 1803. The outer walls of the houses are still ramparts of mud bricks, while bones and bullets are constantly plowed out of the soil (“they were very big men,” one farmer told me, indicating the ground where the 74th suffered so much). There is no memorial at Assaye, except for a painted map of the armies’ dispositions on one village wall and the grave of a British officer which has had its bronze plate stolen, but the inhabitants know that history was made in their fields, are proud of it and proved remarkably welcoming when we visited. There ought to be some marker on the field, for the Scottish and Indian troops who fought at Assaye gained an astonishing victory. They were all extraordinarily brave men, and their campaign was not yet over, for some of the enemy have escaped and the war will go on as Wellesley and his small army pursue the remaining Mahrattas towards their great hill fastness at Gawilghur. Which means that Mister Sharpe must march again.
Bernard Cornwell On:
I. The Origin of Richard Sharpe (Memo to the Sharpe Appreciation Society, http://www.southessex.co.uk)
Richard Sharpe was born on a winter’s night in 1980. It was in London, in a basement flat in Courtnell Street, not far from Westbourne Grove. I had decided to marry an American and, for a myriad of reasons, it was going to be easier if I lived in America, but I could not get a work permit and so, airily, I decided to earn a living as a writer. Love makes us into idiots.
But at least I knew what I wanted to write. It was going to be a land-based version of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books. I wasted hours trying to find my hero’s name. I wanted a name as dramatic as Horatio Hornblower, but I couldn’t think of one (Trumpetwhistler? Cornetpuffer?), so eventually I decided to give him a temporary name and, once I had found his real name, I would simply go back and change it. So I named him after Richard Sharp, the great rugby player, and of course the name stuck. I added an “e” – that was all.
The book was finished in New Jersey. Now, eighteen years, innumerable battles and well over a million words later, he’s still going strong, and there are yet more books to write. I thought I had finished with Sharpe after Waterloo, but so many people wrote wanting more stories that he had to put on his green jacket and march again. Being a hero, of course, he has more lives than a basketful of cats, but maybe Sharpe’s greatest stroke of good fortune was meeting Sean Bean.
He has also been outrageously lucky in his other friends who, collectively, are the Sharpe Appreciation Society. He would not think there was that much to appreciate (“Bloody daft, really”), but on his behalf, I can thank you for being his friends and assure you that, so long as I have anything to do with him, he will not let you down.
And, finally, time for confession: Years and years ago I was a journalist in Belfast and I remember a night just before Christmas when a group of us were sitting in a city-centre pub getting drunk and maudlin, and discussing, as journalists are wont to do, how much easier life would be if only we were novelists. No more hard work, just storytelling, and somehow we invented the name of an author and a bet was laid. The bet was a bottle of Jameson Whiskey from everyone about the table to be given to whichever one of us first wrote the book with the author’s name. Years later I collected the winnings (long drunk) which is why, in second-hand shops, you might find the following: A CROWNING MERCY; THE FALLEN ANGELS; COAT OF ARMS – all by Bernard Cornwell, writing as Susannah Kells.
II. Sharpe’s Adventures
I thought, when I began writing Sharpe, that there could not possibly be more than ten novels in him, but there are now eighteen and more are on the way.
So who and what is he?
Richard Sharpe is a soldier, one of the thousands of Britons who fought against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France between 1793 and 1815. He shadows the career of Sir Arthur Wellesley, who becomes the first Duke of Wellington, and in so doing he takes part in some of the most extraordinary exploits of the era – from the storming of Seringapatam in 1799 to the bloodbath at Waterloo in 1815.
By 1814, when Napoleon is first defeated and sent into exile, the Duke of Wellington leads what is arguably the finest army that Britain ever raised. About one in twenty of its officers had come up from the ranks, and Richard Sharpe is one of them. Is he real? No, there was no Rifle officer called Sharpe, though there was a cavalryman whose rise from trooper to Lieutenant Colonel took the same amount of time that it takes Sharpe to be promoted from private to Lieutenant Colonel. Sharpe is also a Rifleman, a new breed of soldier in the British army who fought, not with a smoothbore musket, but with the much more accurate rifle. Above everything, though, Sharpe has adventures. That is the point of the poor man’s existence.
III. Sharpe’s Trafalgar (The book that directly precedes SHARPE’S PREY – SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR is also available as a HarperCollins e-book)
Sharpe’s Trafalgar is a bit of a cheat, for a soldier really does not have any business being at Trafalgar, which was, of course, the great triumph of Horatio Nelson and the Royal Navy. But Sharpe has spent four or five years in India, has to go home, and both the timing and the geography were such that he might well (with a bit of bad luck) have been off Cape Trafalgar on October 21st, 1805.
The battle was arguably the most decisive of the nineteenth century, even more so than Waterloo. After 1805 there is only one navy that counts: the British. The rest have been sunk or captured. Before that there were three navies in Europe that could have challenged the British: the French, Spanish, and Danish. The Danes have the second largest navy after Britain, but they are neutral so don’t fight (which doesn’t prevent them losing their whole navy to Britain in 1807). The French and The Spanish have the next two largest fleets and, in 1805, they combine their navies to protect the invasion of Britain by Napoleon’s Grand Army. That invasion, of course, never happened, mainly because the combined fleets could never reach the Channel – but they remain a threat until Admiral Nelson intercepts them off Cape Trafalgar.
What results is as spectacular as it is horrific. The largest fleet battle of the age of sail, when thirty-three French and Spanish ships carrying 30,000 sailors and 2,568 heavy cannon take on Nelson’s twenty-seven ships manned by 17,000 men with 2,148 heavy guns. It is a battle fought at incredibly close quarters, for the tactics of the age demand that you lay your ship close to an enemy and then try to rip the heart out of her with gunnery. It is butchery on a massive scale and at its end, when Nelson is dead and an Atlantic storm is brewing out of the west, the French and Spanish navies have been finished off. They will never again challenge Britain. The nineteenth century belongs to the winners, and Sharpe, slightly more than a spectator, is there to see it.
— BERNARD CORNWELL
(Material culled from http://www.bernardcornwellbooks.com and from The Sharpe Appreciation Society website, http://www.southessex.co.uk.)
CHAPTER•1
It was not Sergeant Richard Sharpe’s fault. He was not in charge. He was junior to at least a dozen men, including a major, a captain, a subadar and two jemadars, yet he still felt responsible. He felt responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared. Blood crusted on his face where a thousand flies crawled. There were even flies in his open mouth.
But he dared not move.
The humid air stank of blood and of the rotted egg smell made by powder smoke. The very last thing he remembered doing was thrusting his pack, haversack and cartridge box into the glowing ashes of a fire, and now the ammunition from the cartridge box exploded. Each blast of powder fountained sparks and ashes into the hot air. A couple of men laughed at the sight. They stopped to watch it for a few seconds, poked at the nearby bodies with their muskets, then walked on.
Sharpe lay still. A fly crawled on his eyeball and he forced himself to stay absolutely motionless. There was blood on his face and more blood had puddled in his right ear, though it was drying now. He blinked, fearing that the small motion
would attract one of the killers, but no one noticed.
Chasalgaon. That’s where he was. Chasalgaon; a miserable, thorn-walled fort on the frontier of Hyderabad, and because the Rajah of Hyderabad was a British ally the fort had been garrisoned by a hundred sepoys of the East India Company and fifty mercenary horsemen from Mysore, only when Sharpe arrived half the sepoys and all of the horsemen had been out on patrol.
Sharpe had come from Seringapatam, leading a detail of six privates and carrying a leather bag stuffed with rupees, and he had been greeted by Major Crosby who commanded at Chasalgaon. The Major proved to be a plump, red-faced, bilious man who disliked the heat and hated Chasalgaon, and he had slumped in his canvas chair as he unfolded Sharpe’s orders. He read them, grunted, then read them again. “Why the hell did they send you?” he finally asked.
“No one else to send, sir.”
Crosby frowned at the order. “Why not an officer?”
“No officers to spare, sir.”
“Bloody responsible job for a sergeant, wouldn’t you say?”
“Won’t let you down, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly, staring at the leprous yellow of the tent’s canvas a few inches above the Major’s head.
“You’d bloody well better not let me down,” Crosby said, pushing the orders into a pile of damp papers on his camp table. “And you look bloody young to be a sergeant.”
“I was born late, sir,” Sharpe said. He was twenty-six, or thought he was, and most sergeants were much older.
Crosby, suspecting he was being mocked, stared up at Sharpe, but there was nothing insolent on the Sergeant’s face. A good-looking man, Crosby thought sourly. Probably had the bibbis of Seringapatam falling out of their saris, and Crosby, whose wife had died of the fever ten years before and who consoled himself with a two-rupee village whore every Thursday night, felt a pang of jealousy. “And how the devil do you expect to get the ammunition back to Seringapatam?” he demanded.
