'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.