Dear Bernard, After just reading your post dated the 31st about the US should have been declaring war on the French. I had to write in because I am curious as to why you seem to dislike almost hate the French so much??? After living there for a few months I found France a lovely place to live and the people quite nice and helpful albiet a bit rude on the road and just wondered what a French man had done to you to make you hate them??? And while I appreciate that you live in the US and as such would have attachment to them is that the reason why generally with the exception of Redcoat (during which anyway all Brits who attempt to fight the US are pyscho madmen and all who do not are saints) you have generally stayed clear of the Anglo/American wars and kept Sharpe out of the war in Canada? Indeed in Sharpe’s Siege Sharpe who hates deserters does not seem to have a problem for them running off to the US navy! I should point out that United states did declare war in those day but on the UK not France as Monroe rufelly admitted after the war of 1812 if they had known Napoleon was going to lose they would not have declared war. And even the French invasion of the Revolutionary wars of South Wales was led by a US general and during the Crimean war US riflemen enlisted to fight with the Russians and the American ambassador to England declared that although he liked some individual Englishmen he hated them as a whole and in their Civil war one of Lincoln’s cabniet memebers thought a war with the UK would end their own civil war. Not counting all the covert attempts on Canada that were based from the US to which even a young officer called Winston Churchill thought he was going to be sent to fight the Americans at one stage. And of course Mel Gibson’s attempts to wipe out the English nation on screen. Anway I will continue to read your books and look foward to the next viking novel I just felt recommending declaring war on a nation seemed a bit harsh. Tony