On 23 September 1803, a young major-general looked across an Indian river and made a choice that should have wrecked his career. Arthur Wellesley had about nine thousand men. On the far bank stood a Maratha army of forty thousand or more, with a hundred guns and, behind them, brigades of infantry drilled by European officers to fire and wheel like any force in Europe. His own officers thought a frontal attack was madness. He attacked anyway.
The next few hours were the worst he would ever live through. Grape and chain shot ripped his lines apart as they came on. The 74th Highlanders pushed too near the guns and were all but wiped out, the survivors packed into a square that shrank with every volley. A cavalry charge reached them just in time. Two horses were killed under Wellesley himself. When the firing died at dusk the field was his, and the officer who would one day be the Duke of Wellington had learned things about guns, ground and hard-won victory that stayed with him all the way to Waterloo. Years afterwards a friend asked him the finest thing he had ever done in the way of fighting. He gave a one-word answer. Assaye.
That war has been oddly hard to put on a tabletop. Fighting it in miniature used to mean months of gluing and painting before the first move, and plenty of armies never got finished at all. WoFun Games' printed plexiglass figures were built to skip all of that, and the range now covers the British and East India Company side of the Anglo-Maratha Wars. Each regiment turns up printed in full colour, ready to press off the sprue. No painting. No assembly. No glue.
Wellesley's enemy has been on the shelves for a while. His own army has just caught up with it: the Highlanders, the Company's sepoy regiments, the ragged frontier horsemen of the north, and the guns that decided the day. Here is who they were, where they fought, and how to field them.
The Enemy Across the River: The Maratha War Machine
The Marathas ran India in 1803, or most of it. From their base in the Deccan they had pushed north to Delhi and levied tribute across a huge slice of the old Mughal lands. Their oldest strength was the horse: raiders who could cover fifty miles between dawn and dusk and be gone before a heavier army caught up.
What worried British generals was newer. Daulatrao Scindia of Gwalior, strongest of the Maratha princes, had paid European soldiers of fortune, Frenchmen, Germans and a scattering of others, to raise regular battalions that manoeuvred by the drill book. One of them, Anthony Pohlmann, had started as a sergeant in the East India Company before selling his sword to Scindia for a better wage. His infantry stood behind rows of well-laid guns, and at Assaye those guns were worked with a coolness that unnerved Wellesley's veterans. This was no feudal rabble. It was a professional army, and it was waiting.
What made the Maratha army so formidable?
Speed, discipline and firepower in the same package. Clouds of light cavalry chose the ground, European-trained battalions held it, and heavy guns raked anyone who tried to cross. That mix had beaten every Indian rival for a generation, which is exactly why Wellesley studied it so carefully before he moved.
Wellington's Apprenticeship: Arthur Wellesley in India
India came long before Spain and Waterloo. Wellesley had sailed out as a colonel in the 1790s, a younger son whose critics muttered that his rise owed more to his brother Richard, the Governor-General, than to any talent of his own. India let him answer them. It also schooled him in the unglamorous half of soldiering: bullock trains, supply dumps and the slow arithmetic of keeping thousands of men fed on the march through country that wanted them gone.
The Second Anglo-Maratha War opened in 1803 on two fronts. General Gerard Lake drove for Delhi in the north. Wellesley took the southern command in the Deccan, shadowing the joined armies of Scindia and the Raja of Berar. Chasing a force that dwarfed his own, he walked onto the ground that would make his name.
The Bloodiest Hour: The Battle of Assaye
The Marathas were drawn up behind the River Kaitna, wedged into the angle where it met a second river, the Juah, with the village of Assaye anchoring one end of the line and the guns banked in front. Every guide swore the only crossing ran straight into the muzzles of those guns. Wellesley thought otherwise. Scanning the banks, he found two villages, Peepulgaon and Waroor, sitting opposite one another across the water. Villages on both banks meant traffic between them, and traffic meant a ford. He sent his chief engineer to check, and the ford was there, right where he had reasoned it must be.
He took his infantry and guns over the crossing under fire and came up on the Maratha flank. Pohlmann swung his whole line through ninety degrees to face the new threat, quick and clean, then opened up at close range. One officer remembered it as the Divil's own cannonade. At the front marched the two British regiments, the 74th and the 78th Highlanders, kilts traded for linen trousers in the heat, with the sepoy battalions and the Madras horse, the 7th Madras among them, filling out the line.
On the left the 78th tore open the Maratha front and the sepoys beside them poured through the gap. On the right it fell apart. The 74th drifted too close to Assaye village and its guns and were shot to ribbons, the pickets alongside them almost annihilated. What was left of the regiment threw up a rough square behind heaps of its own dead and clung on. Colonel Maxwell's cavalry saved them, crashing into the swarm and riding straight on into the guns and infantry beyond.
Even then it was not finished. Maratha gunners who had dropped and feigned death rose behind the advancing British and turned their pieces on their backs, while Pohlmann dragged his infantry into a fresh line. The fighting lurched back and forth for hours. By dusk Wellesley held the field and close to a hundred captured guns, but the bill was cruel: more than four hundred of his men dead, twelve hundred wounded, the 74th cut down to a remnant with barely an officer on his feet. He had ridden the whole day on borrowed luck, two horses shot under him and his orderly killed at his side.
Why did Wellington call Assaye his finest achievement?
He read a battlefield nobody handed him, found a ford his own guides denied, and beat a well-drilled army several times his size on the strength of that one judgement. He also never shook off what it had taken. The wreck of the 74th and the deadly accuracy of the Maratha guns nudged him towards the patient, careful commander of later years, the man who loved a reverse slope and a supply line he could trust.
Argaum and Gawilghur: Breaking the Deccan
Assaye gutted Scindia's regular army without ending the southern war. On 29 November Wellesley met the Maratha and Berar troops again at Argaum and won far more cheaply this time, then stormed the cliff-top fortress of Gawilghur in December. That assault went in over the walls by ladder, and the garrison, pinned against its own defences, was overwhelmed. That broke the southern chiefs' nerve. A single savage year had settled the Deccan.
The treaties signed as 1803 closed took great tracts of land from Scindia and the Raja of Berar and left the East India Company the first power in central India. Holkar, another of the Maratha rulers, fought on, and Lake's men would be bloodied under the walls of Bharatpur before the wider war sputtered out in 1805. But organised Maratha resistance was already broken, and people had started to speak about the young general in a different tone.
The War in the North: Lake, Delhi and the Yellow Boys
While Wellesley worked the Deccan, Gerard Lake carried the fight across the northern plains. He beat a Maratha army outside Delhi that September and walked into the old Mughal capital, then broke Scindia's last regular brigades at Laswari in November, a grinding, close-run action that went hard for him. Lake's campaign brought the Mughal emperor, and the symbolic heart of India, under Company protection.
The north also threw up the war's most colourful regiment. James Skinner, son of a Scottish officer and a Rajput mother, had been turned out of Maratha service as war loomed because of his mixed birth. He offered his sword to the British instead and raised a body of irregular horse under his own name. In their long yellow coats they became the Yellow Boys, and they would ride for the Company for the next century and more. They sit here beside the other frontier cavalry, Skinner's Horse alongside the Rohilla riders and the Company's light dragoons.
Who were Skinner's Horse, the Yellow Boys?
Irregular cavalry raised in 1803 by James Skinner, an Anglo-Indian officer thrown out of Maratha service over his parentage. Their yellow coats gave them the nickname, and they went on to become one of the most famous horse regiments in Indian history, still serving generations later.
The Army That Won a Subcontinent: Inside the Company's Ranks
The redcoats at Assaye were the tip of something far larger. Britain never held India with British troops alone. Every Company army rested on the sepoy, the Indian infantryman recruited and drilled by the East India Company across its three presidencies at Madras, Bombay and Bengal. Steadier and far more numerous than the King's regiments, these battalions carried most of the fighting and took most of the losses. The Bombay men in their native shakos matter to this army as much as any Highlander.
Two kinds of European marched with them. The Company kept its own white infantry, units such as the Bengal European Regiment, serving under Company colours rather than the Crown's. Britain's sprawling wars also scattered foreign corps through its pay: the Swiss battalions of De Watteville and De Roll's, light infantry like the 52nd Oxfordshire, the sort of troops that stocked garrisons from the Mediterranean to the East. All of it fed the establishment that India drew on.
And then the guns. Artillery won Assaye and nearly lost it, and in India just shifting a gun was its own ordeal. Bullock teams hauled the pieces and their limbers over rivers and sun-baked plains at the plodding pace of the slowest ox. Above the whole arrangement sat the officers, British and Indian, holding this odd coalition of Highlander, sepoy, European and frontier horseman together and aiming it in one direction.
How was the East India Company's army organised?
Around three presidency armies at Madras, Bombay and Bengal. Each fielded a few borrowed King's regiments, the Company's own European battalions, and a large majority of Indian sepoys, backed by artillery and by irregular horse hired on the frontier. That was the mixture Wellesley led across the Kaitna.
Bring the Anglo-Maratha Wars to Your Tabletop
The Maratha British and EIC Pack in 18mm puts the whole force on seven plexiglass sprues, four hundred and sixty figures in all: the guns and their ox-drawn limber, four regiments of horse from the Madras dragoons to Skinner's Yellow Boys, the sepoy and European foot, the Highlanders who bled at Assaye, and the officers to run them.
If you would rather your figures earn a place on the shelf, the same army comes in 28mm across fourteen sprues, with room for Darius Buraczewski's artwork to show. Buraczewski, a historian as well as an illustrator, drew both packs, and WoFun supporter Kevin Cunningham commissioned them to cover Wellesley's Indian years. Every figure is printed on both sides in full colour and drops into an MDF base. Press it off the sprue and it is ready to march. No painting. No assembly. No glue.
Which scale should you choose, 18mm or 28mm?
Take 18mm if you want bigger battles on a smaller table, which suits refighting Assaye at close to its real sprawl. Take 28mm if you want every detail visible and the figures looking their best off the table as well as on it.
Take Command on the Banks of the Kaitna
Set it up in your head. The ford is behind you, the Highlanders and sepoys are dressing their line under a sky full of round shot, and Pohlmann's guns wait across the plain with the infantry massed behind. One man looked at that ground and decided it could be beaten. The call is yours now, and so is the other side of it, because the Maratha, Muslim and Sikh armies Wellesley faced are already in the range.
Two armies, one river, and the fight the Duke of Wellington rated above every other he ever saw. Lay them out, take your force across the Kaitna, and find out whether you would have called it Assaye too.
Cross the Kaitna and field your Anglo-Maratha Wars army today.