Sharpe's Fortress Part 88

Most of the buildings in the Inner Fort have vanished, or else are so overgrown as to be invisible. There is, alas, no snake pit there. The major gatehouses are still intact, without their gates, and a visitor can only marvel at the suicidal bravery of the men who climbed from the ravine to enter the twisting deathtrap of the Inner Fort's northern gate.

Defeat would surely have been their reward, had not Campbell and his Light Company found a way up the side of the ravine and, with the help of a ladder, scaled the wall and so attacked the gates from the inside. By then Beny Singh, the Killadar, had already poisoned his wives, lovers and daughters. He died, like Manu Bappoo, with his sword in his hand.

Manu Bappoo almost certainly died in the breaches and not, as the novel says, in the ravine, though that was where most of his men died, trapped between the attackers who had captured the Outer Fort and the ySth who were climbing the road from the plain. They should have found refuge within the Inner Fort, and bolstered its de fences but for reasons that have never been explained, the Inner Fort's gates were fast shut against the survivors of the Outer Fort's garrison.

Elizabeth Longford, in Wellington, The Years of the Sword, quotes the late Jac Weller as saying of Gawilghur, 'three reasonably effective troops of Boy Scouts armed with rocks could have kept out several times their number of professional soldiers'. It is difficult to disagree.

Manu Bappoo and Beny Singh made no effort to protect the Outer Fort's walls with a glacis, which was their primary mistake, but their real stronghold was the Inner Fort, and it fell far too swiftly. The supposition is that the defenders were thoroughly demoralized, and the few British casualties (about 150), most of them killed or wounded in the a.s.sault on the gatehouse, testify to the swiftness of the victory. A hundred and fifty sounds like a small 'butcher's bill', and so it is, but that should not hide the horror of the fight for the Inner Fort's gatehouse where Kenny died.

That fight occurred in a very small s.p.a.ce and, for a brief while, must have been as ghastly as, say, the struggle for Badajoz's breaches nine years later. Campbell's escalade up the precipice saved an enormous number of lives and cut a nasty fight blessedly short. Indeed, the victory was so quick, and so cheaply gained, that a recent biography of the Duke of Wellington (in 1803 he was still Sir Arthur Wellesley) accords the siege less than three lines, yet to the redcoat who was sweating up the hill to the plateau and who was expected to carry his firelock and bayonet across the rocky isthmus to the breaches in the double walls it was a significant place and his victory remarkable.

The real significance of Gawilghur lay in the future. Sir Arthur Wellesley had now witnessed the a.s.sault of the breach at Seringapatam, had escaladed the walls of Ahmednuggur and swept over the great de fences of Gawilghur. In Portugal and Spain, confronted by even greater de fences manned by determined French soldiers, it is claimed that he underestimated the difficulties of siege work, having been lulled into complacency by the ease of his Indian victories. There may be truth in that, and at Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Burgos and San Sebastian he took dreadful casualties. My own suspicion is that he did not so much underestimate the ability of de fences to withstand him, as overestimate the capacity of British troops to get through those de fences and, astonis.h.i.+ngly, they usually lived up to his expectations. And it was Scotsmen who gave him those high expectations: the Scots who used four ladders to capture a city at Ahmednuggur and one ladder to bring down the great fortress of Gawilghur. Their bravery helped disguise the fact that sieges were terrible work, so terrible that the troops, regardless of their commander's wishes, regarded a captured stronghold as their own property, to destroy and violate as they wished. This was their revenge for the horrors that the defenders had inflicted on them, and there was undoubtedly a vast slaughter inside Gawilghur once the victory was gained. Many of the defenders must have escaped down the steep cliffs, but perhaps half of the seven or eight thousand died in an orgy of revenge.

And then the place was forgotten. The Mahrattas were defeated, and even more of India came under British rule or influence. But Sir Arthur Wellesley was done with India, it was time to sail home and look for advancement against the more dangerous and nearer enemy, France. It will be four years before he sails from England to Portugal and to the campaign that will raise him to a dukedom. Sharpe will also go home, to a green instead of a red jacket, and he too will sail to Portugal and march from there into France, but he has a snare or two waiting on his path before he reaches the peninsula. So Sharpe will march again.

The End