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the one most likely to receive the Tippoo’s assault.
    â€œLoad!” Captain Morris shouted at Hakeswill.
    Sharpe felt suddenly nervous as he dropped the musket from his shoulder to hold it across his body. He fumbled with the musket’s hammer as he pulled it back to the half cock. Sweat stung his eyes. He could hear the enemy drummers.
    Handle cartridge!” Sergeant Hakeswill shouted, and each man of the Light Company pulled a cartridge from his belt pouch and bit through the tough waxed paper. They held the bullets in their mouths, tasting the sour salty gunpowder.
    â€œPrime!” Seventy-six men trickled a small pinch of powder from the opened cartridges into their muskets’ pans, then closed the locks so that the priming was trapped.
    â€œCast about!” Hakeswill called and seventy-six right hands released their musket stocks so that the weapons’ butts dropped toward the ground. “And I’m watching you!” Hakeswill added. “If any of you lilywhite bastards don’t use all his powder, I’ll skin your hides off you and rub salt onyour miserable flesh. Do it proper now!” Some old soldiers advised only using half the powder of a cartridge, letting the rest trickle to the ground so that the musket’s brutal kick would be diminished, but faced by an advancing enemy, no man thought of employing that trick this day. They poured the remainder of their cartridges’ powder down their musket barrels, stuffed the cartridge paper after the powder, then took the balls from their mouths and pushed them into the muzzles. The enemy infantry was two hundred yards away and advancing steadily to the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets. The Tippoo’s guns were still firing, but they had turned their barrels away from the 33rd for fear of hitting their own infantry and were instead aiming at the six Indian regiments that were hurrying to close the gap between themselves and the 33rd.
    â€œDraw ramrod!” Hakeswill shouted and Sharpe tugged the ramrod free of the three brass pipes that held it under the musket’s thirty-nine-inch barrel. His mouth was salty with the taste of gunpowder. He was still nervous, not because the enemy was tramping ever closer, but because he had a sudden idiotic idea that he might have forgotten how to load a musket. He twisted the ramrod in the air, then placed the ramrod’s flared tip into the barrel.
    â€œRam cartridge!” Hakeswill snapped. Seventy-six men thrust down, forcing the ball, wadding and powder charge to the bottom of the barrels.
    â€œReturn ramrod!” Sharpe tugged the ramrod up, listening to it scrape against the barrel, then twirled it about so that its narrow end would slide down into the brass pipes. He let it drop into place.
    â€œOrder arms!” Captain Morris called and the Light Company, now with loaded muskets, stood to attention with their guns held against their right sides. The enemy was still too far off for a musket to be either accurate or lethal and thelong, two-deep line of seven hundred redcoats would wait until their opening volley could do real damage.
    â€œâ€˜Talion!” Sergeant Major Bywaters’s voice called from the center of the line. “Fix bayonets!”
    Sharpe dragged the seventeen-inch blade from its sheath which hung behind his right hip. He slotted the blade over the musket’s muzzle, then locked it in place by twisting its slot onto the lug. Now no enemy could pull the bayonet off the musket. Having the blade mounted made reloading the musket far more difficult, but Sharpe guessed that Colonel Wellesley had decided to shoot one volley and then charge. “Going to be a right mucky brawl,” he said to Tom Garrard.
    â€œMore of them than us,” Garrard muttered, staring at the enemy. “The buggers look steady enough.”
    The enemy indeed looked steady. The leading troops had momentarily paused to allow the men behind to catch up, but