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.