This battle has a special meaning to me as it took place on my birthday. No, I’m not almost 200 years old – the day and month match that’s all. I only discovered that fact this year and simply for that reason I’ve been delaying reading this book until I’d read as many other Sharpe books as I could. It’s also the reason I would like to go and see the battlefield and learn more about what happened. War is vile, may it never be repeated now or in the future.

Sharpe arrives at Waterloo in the service of the Prince of Orange. He had retired from the last war with his wife into France and Napoleon’s return has put him into conflict with people he knew from his new home village. He is gallant as always, resourceful, take vengeance on his enemies (despite all you learn of Sharpe you learn never to become his enemy) and leaving the Prince of Oranges incompetence rescues his old regiment from definite destruction to turn the tide of the elite French troops about to end the redcoats time on earth.

Utterly well researched (I do like the historical detail Bernard Cornwell includes at the end of all his novels to separate fact from fiction) it still remains a tragic story of a time when tens of thousands of men killed tens of thousands of men. Superbly told, another high rootie rating book.

Just as I thought my interest in the Sharpe series was waning, I read this magnificent story. How can an adventurous military action be made from a period in time where Sharpe is sent back to England to find and return to Spain with his regiments reinforcements?

The story is the reinforcements don’t exist according to the War office and a corrupt politician. Sharpe doesn’t know the politician is corrupt and doesn’t care, all he wants are the reinforcements without which his regiments will be dissolved into other fighting units. Finding them leads him from Spain to the places of his childhood in London and into the stinking marshes of foulness in the 1800’s. It also links into the first chronological Sharpe adventure in how he is reunited with his Eagle Superbly written, one of my favourite Sharpe books so far.