With Clive in India; Or, The Beginnings of an Empire

by G. A. Henty

Having decided upon the position for a battery, energetic steps were taken to form it. A space large enough for the construction of the battery, and for the tents and stores of the artillerymen and two hundred infantry, was marked out; and the rajah ordered the whole population of Ambur, men, women, and children, to assist at the work. The troops, too, were all employed; and under Charlie's superintendence, a wondrous change was soon effected. The spot chosen was levelled, a strong earthwork was erected round it, and then the surrounding ground was removed. This was a work of immense labour, the ground consisting first of a layer of soil, then of debris which had fallen from the face of the rock above, stones and boulders, to the depth of some fifteen feet, under which was the solid earth.

The slope resembled an anthill. The soldiers and able-bodied men broke up the boulders and rock with sledgehammers; or, when necessary, with powder, and blasted the rock, when needed. The women and children carried away the fragments in baskets. The work lasted for a fortnight, at the end of which a position of an almost impregnable nature was formed. At the foot of the earthworks protecting the guns, both at the face and sides, the ground, composed of great boulders and stones, sloped steeply out, forming a bank fifteen feet deep. At its foot, again, the solid rock was blasted away, so as to form a deep chasm, thirty feet wide and ten feet high, round the foot of the fort. For a hundred yards on each side, the earth and stones had been entirely removed down to the solid rock.

Ten guns were placed in the battery, and the fire of these swept the slopes behind the town and castle, rendering it impossible, until the fort was carried, for an enemy to attack the town on that side; or to operate, in any way, against the only point at which an attack could be made upon the castle.

The rajah was delighted at this most formidable accession to the defensive power of his fortress, which was now in a position to defy any attack which could be made against it. A store of provisions and ammunition was collected there, and the command given to one of Charlie's Sepoy lieutenants, with a hundred trained artillerymen, and two hundred infantry. Numbers of cattle had been driven into the town and castle, and stores of provisions collected.

It was but two days after the battery was complete that the news arrived that the rajah's brother, with Murari Reo, had entered the rajah's dominions, and was marching up the valley to the assault. The rajah had, in the first place, wished to defend a strong gorge through which the enemy would have to pass; this having hitherto been considered the defensible point of his capital, against an invasion. Charlie pointed out, however, that although no doubt a successful defence might be made here, it would only be a repulse, which would leave the enemy but little weakened for further operations. He argued that it was better to allow them to advance to the point where the valley opened out into a plain, some two miles wide. He had no doubt whatever that the rajah's troops would be able to inflict a crushing defeat upon the invaders, who would be so disheartened, thereby, that they would be little likely to renew the attack.

Two bodies of troops, each three hundred strong, were sent down to the gorge, with orders to remain in hiding among the heights, to allow the invading army to pass unmolested, and then to inflict the greatest possible loss upon them, as they returned. These were under the command of another of Charlie's lieutenants, who received orders from him to erect breastworks of rock on the slopes above the entrance to the gorge, after the enemy had passed on; and to line these with a portion of his men, who should pour a heavy fire into the enemy as they came down the valley; while the rest were to line the heights above the gorge, and to roll down rocks upon those who passed through the fire of their comrades.

The uniforms were served out to the soldiers, and Charlie surveyed, with pride, the five battalions of trained troops which, with twelve guns, marched down into the valley and took up their post beyond it, at a point which he had carefully chosen, where the guns of the castle would be able to play upon an advancing body of troops. A body of trained artillerymen were told off for this service, and the last-raised levies were posted in the castle and on the walls of the town.

The position was so chosen that the flanks of the line rested on the slopes on either side. These were broken by inclosures and gardens; into which, on either side, half a battalion was thrown forward, so as to deliver a flanking fire upon an enemy advancing against the centre. Across the valley, two hundred yards in front of the position, the stream which watered it made a sharp turn, running for some distance directly across it, and several small canals for the irrigation of the fields rendered the ground wet and swampy. Across the line occupied by his troops, a breastwork had been thrown up, and in front of this rows of sharp-pointed stakes had been stuck in the ground. Altogether, the position was a formidable one.

An hour or two after the position so carefully prepared had been taken up, large bodies of Mahratta horse were seen dashing up the valley, and smoke rising from several points showed that they had begun their usual work, of plundering and destroying the villages on their way. A few discharges from the field pieces—those in the castle had been ordered to be silent until the raising of a white flag gave them the signal to open fire—checked the advance of the horsemen, and these waited until their infantry should arrive.

The force of Murari Reo was, at that time, the most formidable of any purely native army of Southern India. Recruited from desperadoes from all the Mahratta tribes, well disciplined by its leader, it had more than once fought, without defeat, against bodies of Europeans; while it had, in all cases, obtained easy victories over other native armies.