This is the twenty-first novel in which Richard Sharpe’s career is recounted by a master story teller. As a teenager, Sharpe’s career started in India, but in these pages he is nearly forty, called once more into the breach.
The wife of an old friend solicits the assistance that only Sharpe can lend to find her husband, who has been lost in the fog of war in rebellious Chile in 1820-1821. He reluctantly leaves home and hearth in his farm in Normandy. It is a common set-up made fresh in Cornwall’s hands.
En route to distant Chile his ship calls stops for water at St. Helena. There Sharpe meets face-to-face the nemesis that has dominated his life from 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte. In the company of a group of a dozen Spanish officers with whom he is travelling, Sharpe is received by the Emperor. This scene is well realised. While everyone in the room is an officer, the Spaniards all decked out in grand uniforms for the occasion, there are only two soldiers in the room, and each recognises the other as that almost immediately. After some polite formalities Napoleon dismisses the gaudy Spaniards, so that he and Major Sharpe in a faded field jacket and he can talk about …,well, what else, Waterloo. For his part, Sharpe clearly sees in the sallow, pudgy little man, the inner warrior.
As well done as that is, at the time it seems window dressing, but read on.
In Chile Sharpe finds a mare’s nest. The Spanish officials range from incompetent to corrupt. The British consul is a useless. The rebels are not any better, back-biting and bak-stabbing.
Sharpe’s perception of the Spanish colonial administrator is insightful and amusing. He enters a room to find the governor surrounded by officials. Each is intense and focussed, none more so than the Captain-General Bautista.
“The Captain-General had resumed pacing up and down …stabbing more questions into his audience as he paced. How many cattle were in Valdivia’s slaughter yards? Had the supply ships arrived from Chiloe? Was there any news of Ruiz’s regiment? None? How many more weeks must they wait for those extra guns? Had the Puerto Crucero garrison test-fired their heated shot, and if so, what was their rate of fire? How long had it taken to heat the furnace from cold to operational heat? It was an impressive display, yet Sharpe felt unconvinced by it. It was almost as if Bautista was going through the motions of government merely so that no one could accuse him of dereliction when his province vanished from the maps of the Spanish Empire” (p. 88).
A few pages (p. 91) later the Captain-General outlines his strategy to defeat the rebels, which is to build ever larger fortifications and lure the rebels to their deaths before the cannons, if only Spain will send him more men, cannons, ammunition, and artillery men. It is, as Shape muses a strategy of doing nothing and shifting the blame for the result onto others, not enough cannons, not enough ammunition, poor artillerymen. In short, he has no strategy. The puff seems plausible because of the theatrical presentation. Why does this remind of briefings from some of my leaders? I could not possibly say.
The action scenes are so energetic that the reader suspends disbelief due to the momentum of the prose. Cornwall knows how to do this. The small rebel force succeeds by subterfuge, guile, surprise, and audacity and more audacity. It succeeds because the Spanish are poorly trained, poorly led, poorly equipped with rock bottom morale. While the Spanish have sturdy forts and many cannons, they have no reason to fight so far from home, being well aware of the corruption of their leadership. While the rebels are resilient, the Spanish are brittle. This, too, Cornwall does well.
Bernard Cornwell
In addition to Sharpe, Cornwall has also published another many other novels on a variety of other themes from the Saxon Trails to the Copperhead Chronicles. Then there is the non-fiction. Wow!
The idiom a ‘mare’s nest’ traces back to the Sixteenth Century where it meant something extraordinary and remarkable. Indeed too remarkable to be a true, a hoax. By misuse, that god of idiom, came to mean something extraordinarily complicated and confused.
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