The battle Wellington called his finest

Late in his life, a friend named George Chad asked the Duke of Wellington to name the best thing he had ever done in the way of fighting. Chad had reason to expect Salamanca, or Waterloo. Wellington answered with one word. Assaye.

Not Waterloo. A village in Maharashtra, north of Jalna, that most Indians have never heard of.

He was thirty-four when he fought there and nobody in particular yet — Major-General Arthur Wellesley, whose chief qualification in the eyes of the East India Company was that his elder brother governed India. The reputation came afterwards. Assaye is where it began, and he spent the rest of his life quietly telling people it had been the hardest day of his soldiering.

The army he could not find

By September 1803 the Second Anglo-Maratha War was some weeks old and Wellesley had spent most of it chasing an enemy that would not stand still. Maratha cavalry moved faster than anything he had, and his intelligence was poor. On 23 September, marching to join a second British column under Colonel Stevenson, he came up on the Kaitna river and found the whole army he had been hunting drawn up on the far bank.

It was in the angle between two rivers, the Kaitna and the Juah, which is a strong position — an attacker has to come at you across water with no room to spread out. Wellesley's guides told him there was no crossing anywhere near.

Two villages and a river

He looked at the ground instead of at his guides. On his bank sat the village of Peepulgaon. Almost directly opposite, on the far bank, sat Waroor. Two villages facing each other across a river, and he reasoned that people who live opposite one another must have some way of getting across.

He rode down and found the ford. It is the single most quoted moment of his Indian career and it deserves to be, because it is not luck — it is a man reading a landscape and trusting the reading over the advice he was given.

What was waiting on the other side

Here the familiar story of the period falls apart. The army across the Kaitna was not a mass of irregular horsemen. Daulatrao Scindia's regular infantry brigades were drilled in the European manner and commanded that day by Anthony Pohlmann, a German who had once been a sergeant in the Company's own service. Their artillery train was first-rate, well laid and better served than Wellesley's own.

The proof came the moment he crossed. Seeing the British on their flank, the Maratha army changed front — pivoted the entire line to face a new direction under fire — with a speed the British officers who survived described with something close to disbelief. That is not a manoeuvre a rabble performs. It is one that professionals rehearse.

The guns then did what good guns do. Round shot, then grape and canister as the range closed. Wellesley's own artillery was knocked out early. He abandoned it, ordered the infantry forward, and sent them into the mouths of the Maratha batteries with the bayonet because there was nothing else left to try.

Maratha gunners stayed with their pieces and were killed beside them. That detail comes down through British accounts, which had no particular reason to flatter them.

The cost, and why the numbers move

Wellesley had two horses killed under him. The 74th Highlanders, advancing on the village of Assaye itself, were cut to pieces — most accounts put their losses above sixty per cent. Somewhere around a quarter of the force he took across the ford was dead or wounded by dusk.

Beyond that, be careful with figures, including ours. British losses are usually given as roughly 450 to 500 killed and about 1,200 wounded, because the Company kept returns and those returns survive. Maratha losses are quoted anywhere from 1,200 to 6,000 dead, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. No comparable returns were kept, or none that survived. Estimates of the Maratha army's size run from 30,000 to figures that are plainly guesswork. When a website gives you one confident number for the Maratha dead at Assaye, it is repeating someone else's guess.

The elephant

The British regiments that fought there were granted a battle honour, and with it the right to carry an elephant on their colours and badges — the Assaye elephant, still worn by their successor units today.

Think about what that means. British regiments spent the next two centuries carrying an Indian animal as a mark of distinction, because of one afternoon against an Indian army they had expected to brush aside. Wellington went on to beat Napoleon and never changed his verdict on which had been the harder day.

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Assaye 1803

The same story, as a ninety-second short film.

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