Sharpe's Havoc (Reviews)

THE TRUE SCENT OF BATTLE by Max Davidson
Sun 13 Apr 2003
The Sunday Telegraph

War is bloody. It is bloody in Iraq in 2003 and it was bloody in Portugal in 1809, when the latest of the Richard Sharpe novels is set. The weaponry may be different. For tanks and B-52s, read mortars and muskets. The warring sides may be different. For Iraq versus Britain and America, read the British and the Portuguese versus the French. But the raw emotions of combat – fear, anger, disgust – change not a jot. And it is Bernard Cornwell’s mastery of those emotions that marks him out as a superior writer. Sharpe’s Havoc is quintessential Cornwell, with the hero and his depleted squad of riflemen battling against the odds in hostile territory. Outnumbered in Oporto, which has been overrun by French troops, they flee southwards, hoping to meet up with the forces of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. The characterisation, as always with Cornwell, is first-class throughout. The instinctive hostility between the bluff, plain-speaking Sharpe and the upper-class twit of a colonel, Colonel Christopher, a British officer, ostensibly working for the Foreign Office, but with a devious hidden agenda, forever patronising him with quotations from Shakespeare, provides some fine comic moments, as does the French obsession with food. But it is the action sequences, perhaps inevitably at a time of war, that make the deepest impression: men huddled on hillsides, anxiously surveying the enemy gun trained against them and steeling themselves for some kind of counter-attack. They are beautifullly observed and, in their evocation of quiet heroism, pulse with rare humanity.