In which Sharpe carries his sword (a 1796 pattern Heavy Cavalry sword, an ill-balanced butcher’s blade) to the extraordinary battle outside Salamanca where, to quote an enemy General, Wellington ‘destroyed forty thousand Frenchmen in forty minutes’. Sharpe also has to contend with the Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba (a bit of all right), a British spymaster and, at the very end, some unbroken French squares.
