I have a few questions that you can hopefully help me with: 1. "knuckled his forehead"; you mention this several times in your books but I am not familiar with it. Is it a salute? how do you do a knuckle salute? 2. Sharpe is obviously fiction but how uncommon is he? do you have any idea how many people would have risen that far that fast as sticky as they were about common people moving in officer's circles? 3. if you had your back to the action (ie cannon fire) would you have held that position all day, even after moving the square or reforming lines and squares. 4. your books (I have them all but haven't read them all yet) don't mention the fascinating perspective of the black cymbal players. Were there any black soldiers that were not musicians; or any black musicians that were not cymbal players? where would they come from? thanks for all your writing. mark
'Knuckled his forehead' - You touch your knuckles to your forehead - it was very common. By the time of Waterloo about 7% of the officers in Britain's Army were up from the ranks, so it was not that uncommon. 'If you had your back to the action (ie cannon fire) would you have held that position all day, even after moving the square or reforming lines and squares' - I doubt it! The books don't specifically mention cymbal players, or black drummers, and they were fairly common. The most famous was captured by the French, managed to escape, somehow retrieved his bass drum and beat his own way back to the Army. Where did they come from? Mostly escaped slaves, or men who had been ships' crews (there were a lot of black guys in the Navy) and a few (very few) would have come from the small black communities in Britain's ports.