Sharpes Battle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

He made one of his rare mistakes when he allowed the Seventh Division to march so far from the rest of the army, but he was rescued by the brilliant performance of the Light Division under Craufurd on that Sunday morning. It was a display of soldiering that impressed everyone who witnessed it; the Division was far from help, it was surrounded, yet it withdrew safely and took only a handful of casualties. The fighting in the village itself was far worse, little more than a slaughterous brawl that left the streets glutted with the dead and dying, yet in the end, despite the French bravery and their one glorious moment when they did capture the church and the crest, the British and their allies held the ridge and denied Massйna the road to Almeida. Massйna, disappointed, distributed the rations he had been carrying for Almeida's garrison among his own hungry army, then marched back to Ciudad Rodrigo.

So Wellington, despite his mistake, was left with a victory, but it was a victory soured by the escape of Almeida's garrison. That garrison was being blockaded by Sir William Erskine who, sadly, did not have too many 'lucid intervals'. The letter from the Horse Guards describing Erskine's madness is genuine and shows one of the problems Wellington had in trying to prosecute a war. Erskine did nothing when the French blew up Almeida's defences and slept while the garrison slipped away in the night. The whole lot of them should have been made prisoner, but instead they escaped a feeble blockade and went to reinforce the vast French armies in Spain.

Most of those armies were fighting guerrilleros, not British soldiers, and in another year some of them would be fighting an even more terrible enemy: the Russian winter. But the British too have their hardships to come, hardships that Sharpe and Harper will share, endure and, happily, survive.