Armstrong, his serjeant when Collins was still a corporal, spoke first – just a simple ‘Colonel, General’ to accompany the salute.

Hervey’s face softened.

‘For Captain Worsley’s troop, Colonel,’ said Collins, indicating the boxes separated from the rest. ‘They’re marching at three.’

Hervey nodded in satisfaction. Worsley must have sent word at once. But then, they’d been in the field a good many weeks now; no one wasted any time.

‘How much corn are they taking?’

‘Captain Worsley wants a day’s worth on the saddle, and two on packs, Colonel.’

Hervey nodded again. Supply would be the deciding factor after a couple of days. The Sixth of late months had lost fewer horses than usual. Since returning from Coorg they’d cast forty-six and received by return sixty-five from the remount depot, all of them New South Walers.

‘All but a dozen passed fit this morning by the vet’nary, Colonel,’ said Armstrong.

There was plenty of grass where they were going, but even Walers, the best of doers, needed hard feed for real work. As for his soldiers and sepoys, he’d ordered the whole field force onto biscuit for the first three days, for he didn’t want the advance tied to the pace of the commissary waggon. They’d have plenty of meat tonight, and bacon tomorrow morning, and they’d be at Chintalpore in two days if they marched fast and long and slept out, making no camp (and if they met no opposition) – and then the baggage trains could catch up. And there’d be plenty of good victuals in the city too.

If they met no opposition: it was a bold assumption. He knew he was trusting to a lot, not just his waggoners. But he’d supposed the insurgents’ instinct would be to defend Chintalpore close rather than hazard a battle at arm’s length as a seasoned soldier would. Besides, he still didn’t know how strong Ashok Acharya’s army really was. His ‘Prussian mentor’, as he called the manuscript – the thoughts on war of one of Prince Blücher’s generals, which for the past three years he’d laboured in translating – held that men were always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy’s strength too high than too low. And yet he also knew it to be a sin to underestimate the enemy. Once, in the Peninsula when he’d been a galloper, his general concluded that the enemy had but two options, and had disposed his regiments accordingly; but the enemy had taken a third, and the brigade had been sorely pressed.

Here in India, though, there’d long been a saying that war was made with bullocks and gold. Before leaving Chintalpore, he’d told Bell and Fairbrother that if it came to a fight they could offer what inducement they thought best – gold, amnesty or both – to suborn any commander they thought fit. There was money enough in the mines in Chintal, as well as coin at Fort William, to buy off any mercenary army.

He chatted for a moment or two more with Collins about this and that – nothing of true consequence: the benefits of the supplementary dried pork, the additional rum ration, what and where they might spend the batta, the field allowance – and then took Armstrong aside.