"Cornwell, Bernard - Sharpe 00 - Sharpe's Fortress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

battle of Assaye. He did not like the sabre much. It was clumsy, and
the curved blade was never where you thought it was. You struck with
the sword, and just when you thought it would bite home, you found that
the blade still had six inches to travel. The other officers carried
claymores, big, straight-bladed, heavy and lethal, and Sharpe should
have equipped himself with one, but he had baulked at the auction
prices.

He could have bought every claymore in the auction if he had wished,
but he had not wanted to give the impression of being wealthy. Which
he was. But a man like Sharpe was not supposed to have money. He was
up from the ranks, a common soldier, gutter-born and gutter-bred, but
he had hacked down a half-dozen men to save Wellesley's life and the
General had rewarded Sergeant Sharpe by making him into an officer, and
Ensign Sharpe was too canny to let his new battalion know that he
possessed a king's fortune. A dead king's fortune: the jewels he had
taken from the Tippoo Sultan in the blood and smoke-stinking Water Gate
at Seringapatam.

Would he be more popular if it was known he was rich? He doubted it.

Wealth did not give respectability, not unless it was inherited.
Besides, it was not poverty that excluded Sharpe from both the
officers' mess and the ranks alike, but rather that he was a stranger.
The 74th had taken a beating at Assaye. Not an officer had been left
unwounded, and companies that had paraded seventy or eighty strong
before the battle now had only forty to fifty men. The battalion had
been ripped through hell and back, and its survivors now clung to each
other. Sharpe might have been at Assaye, he might even have
distinguished himself on the battlefield, but he had not been through
the murderous ordeal of the 74th and so he was an outsider.

"Line to the right!" Sergeant Colquhoun shouted, and the company
wheeled right and shook itself into a line of two ranks. The ditch had
emerged from the millet to join a wide, dry riverbed, and Sharpe looked
northwards to see a rill of dirty white gunsmoke on the horizon.
Mahratta guns. But a long way away. Now that the battalion was free
of the tall crops Sharpe could just detect a small wind. It was not
strong enough to cool the heat, but it would waft the gunsmoke slowly
away.

"Halt!" Urquhart called.

"Face front!"

The enemy cannon might be far off, but it seemed that the battalion
would march straight up the riverbed into the mouths of those guns. But
at least the 74th was not alone. The 78th, another Highland battalion,
was on their right, and on either side of those two Scottish battalions
were long lines of Madrassi sepoys.