Sharpes Eagle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Talavera was abandoned to the French, who, as Wellesley predicts in the novel, treated theBritish wounded with kindness and consideration. The ineffectiveness of the Spanish army was more than compensated for by the bravery of the Guérilleros, the Spanish civilian ‘freedom fighters’, who caused Napoleon to liken Spain to a ‘running sore’ on his armies.

Much of the detail in the book is taken from contemporary letters and diaries. Scenes like the growing pile of arms and legs outside the convent in Talavera defy imagination and come straight from eyewitness accounts. In addition to those I drew heavily on the scholarship of Michael Glover’s The Peninsular War, Lady Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington: The Years of the Sword, and the American historian Jac Weller’s Wellington in the Peninsula. To those three authors, and to the kind people of Talavera who showed me the battlefield, I acknowledge a special debt.

Richard Sharpe and Patrick Harper are, sadly, inventions. I hope that today’s Royal Green Jackets, who once marched as the 95th Rifles (and as the Royal American Rifles), will not be ashamed of them or their picaresque adventures that will, eventually, lead them to Waterloo and Napoleon himself.