Day: March 4, 2005

Thanks to Anil Dash, I got to enjoy Michal Levy’s visual imagination of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (high bandwidth, Flash). You should, too.

The last of my trio of recuperation reads two weekends ago was Sharpe’s Havoc, set in the spring of 1809. I loved the calm before the storm of battle. Sharpe’s band of Rifles, about a score of men, are left on the wrong side of a river in Portugal as the British are retreating, and make their way to a rendezvous point off the beaten path. Through an improbable (but interesting) set of events, Sharpe and his troops are left alone on a large estate while French troops occupy the surrounding countryside and fight off the British and Portugese troops at other river crossings. In that incredible lull, Sharpe keeps his men busy reinforcing a hilltop as a haven in case of retreat. Of course, all their work is not in vain, and bravery is matched by foresight. And, later, revenge is well served when Sharpe pursues a traitor almost to the point of folly, in part to retrieve his prized telescope, a gift from Wellesley years ago in India. As always, parts of the tale verge on formulaic, but it’s a formula I enjoy like ice cream.

Time to ping the San Francisco Public Library for the next round.

Despite my intent, I read Sharpe’s Eagle out of chronological order. To keep the months and year marching along, I should have read Sharpe’s Havoc first. Oops.

Eagle was the first Sharpe book written, back in 1981, though it’s set in July, 1809. With this rip-roaring start, I understand why Cornwell kept writing about his rough-and-ready army officer for a score of books.

The Peninsular War is opaque to me, so I’m getting my history via my fiction. The one part which seems improbable — though I suppose it’s true — is how the French attacked at Talavera in massive columns of infantry, exposing themselves to withering musket and rifle fire without being able to properly bring to bear their own numerical advantage. The French did lose at Talavera, so I expect the basic facts are accurate, but I am curious to see if/when the French learned more effective tactics against the British army’s drill, and line fire. I’ve always considered that the French lost the Continent because (a) Napoleon burned his army out in Russia and (b) the economic/industrial might of Britain won through, just as the North defeated the South in the Civil War here in the United States. Without any real military knowledge, I didn’t consider that training and tactics could overcome numbers, if supplies and information were roughly equivalent. In all these books, castles and other fortifications of even recent vintage were no match for the artillery so integral to all these armies. Nothing like a game of leapfrog in the technology of war.

The only positive part about being sick two weeks ago was lots of reading time. I visited the library, picked up a trio of novels on reserve, and sank into the couch or bed the rest of the weekend.

Sharpe’s Rifles moved faster as a book than a television movie. Set in Spain in 1809, the strong, attractive female Spanish patriot from the television program didn’t completely match the young English woman from the book, who is slightly more than a sideshow. Surprise. The author, Bernard Cornwell, even notes that “This is the first of the TV programmes – and all the books that follow, except Sharpe’s Devil, are available on video or DVD.” By this point, though, I’m just glad to have Sharpe back in the thick of battle, even as I wonder what happened to the two years between the previous book and this one. I picked up a real history of Wellington at the library at the same time as the three novels, so I’ll have to dig a bit into the 1807-1809 timeframe.