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Sharpe's Battle
I've been doing a lot of reading while the tooth has been bad. I started by watching the Sharpe TV movies and then moved onto the books.
'Sharpe's Battle' is the best so far and shows the advantage of a book over a TV show. The special effects are better on paper. The TV show had to miss out the second half of the book - they had no choice - the battle of Fuentes de Onoro http://www.britishbattles.com/peninsula/fuentes.htm is simply too large and complex to show on screen without a budget of millions and a total genius to do the script. They were right not to even make the attempt.
The book gives a fantastic feel for both the realities of the battlefield and the tactics of the period. The retreat of Crauford's light division is superbly written (Sharpe has little to do with this - he's merely an observer of much of the battle) and for the first time, I understand exactly why drill was so important to the army of the period. This was a retreat that was won by drill. (and the description, as far as I can tell with a quick check, is historically accurate).
Infantry and cavalry are a game of stone/scissors/paper. Infantry in a square are pretty well invulnerable to cavalry and massed musket fire makes mincemeat of the cavalry. However, broken infantry are a totally different story and cavalry can pick them off with ease.
However, infantry in a square are a perfect target for artillery fire...
Suddenly, the horse artillery skills I saw in a long-distant military tattoo make sense. You need to move that gun fast in order to load and fire it at moving infantry. They're short range guns, but they're mobile. It's always a trade-off.
Crauford had his men so well drilled that they could retreat in colum, but move rapidly into a square the moment the cavalry got close (just visualise the movements needed to get smoothly from square into column and you'll see why drill is so critical). The cavalry would charge, be broken by the square, retreat to rest the horses. While they recovered, the square marched back into column and retreated further. The French infantry with a slower marching pace never caught up, in spite of the occasional pauses to form squares by Crauford's men.
Skirmishers took care of the horse artillery and the retreat was accomplished with minimal losses. I'm not much of a military history buff, but this really is fascinating reading and wonderfully well written. (Cornwell wrote several books in order, then went back chronologically and wrote more in the gaps. This is one of the 'gap' ones and his writing skills - which were good to start with - have noticeably improved from his first novels.)
All of the Sharpe novels are worth reading, but this is the best yet of those I've read. (and it's dedicated to Sean Bean!)
'Sharpe's Battle' is the best so far and shows the advantage of a book over a TV show. The special effects are better on paper. The TV show had to miss out the second half of the book - they had no choice - the battle of Fuentes de Onoro http://www.britishbattles.com/peninsula/fuentes.htm is simply too large and complex to show on screen without a budget of millions and a total genius to do the script. They were right not to even make the attempt.
The book gives a fantastic feel for both the realities of the battlefield and the tactics of the period. The retreat of Crauford's light division is superbly written (Sharpe has little to do with this - he's merely an observer of much of the battle) and for the first time, I understand exactly why drill was so important to the army of the period. This was a retreat that was won by drill. (and the description, as far as I can tell with a quick check, is historically accurate).
Infantry and cavalry are a game of stone/scissors/paper. Infantry in a square are pretty well invulnerable to cavalry and massed musket fire makes mincemeat of the cavalry. However, broken infantry are a totally different story and cavalry can pick them off with ease.
However, infantry in a square are a perfect target for artillery fire...
Suddenly, the horse artillery skills I saw in a long-distant military tattoo make sense. You need to move that gun fast in order to load and fire it at moving infantry. They're short range guns, but they're mobile. It's always a trade-off.
Crauford had his men so well drilled that they could retreat in colum, but move rapidly into a square the moment the cavalry got close (just visualise the movements needed to get smoothly from square into column and you'll see why drill is so critical). The cavalry would charge, be broken by the square, retreat to rest the horses. While they recovered, the square marched back into column and retreated further. The French infantry with a slower marching pace never caught up, in spite of the occasional pauses to form squares by Crauford's men.
Skirmishers took care of the horse artillery and the retreat was accomplished with minimal losses. I'm not much of a military history buff, but this really is fascinating reading and wonderfully well written. (Cornwell wrote several books in order, then went back chronologically and wrote more in the gaps. This is one of the 'gap' ones and his writing skills - which were good to start with - have noticeably improved from his first novels.)
All of the Sharpe novels are worth reading, but this is the best yet of those I've read. (and it's dedicated to Sean Bean!)
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For the longest time the defence against cavalry was not so much massed musket fire as massed bayonets because musket fire was neither accurate nor lethal enough (which was why it had to be massed in the first place).
This changed in the second half of the 19th century as the British Army adopted rifling (an old idea but costly before manufacturing developed) with the Snider-Enfield rifle in 1866, breach loading with the .45 Martini-Henry in 1877 and finally improved propellants. The Lee-Metford was introduced in 1888 with a .30 cartridge but thanks to cordite, the small bullet flew further than ever.
This may not seem like rapid change today but the effect was that more improvement was occurring each decade than had in the century before. By the closing decade of the 19th century, the infantry could not only drive off cavalry with its firepower but could engage the artillery and pick off the gunners. In the Boer War when the square ran up against similarly equipped infantry and suffered heavy casualties. It had itself become too vulnerable to rifle fire and was abandoned in favor of dispersion.
Throughout the century, the cavalry was in steep decline and by the end of the century the British Army had almost given up on the idea of mounted action, retraining he cavalry to fight dismounted with carbines. Whether a cavalry charge could still work was the topic of heated debate. With the .303 Lee-Enfield introduced in the first decade of the 20th century the infantry and cavalry had a common, short, light rifle.
So too was artillery, despite Henry Shrapnel's invention and in the last quarter of the 19th century the arm looked even more obselescent than the cavalry. This was turned around in the last few years by a combination of improved metalurgy, better propellants and above all, the development of the recuperator, leading to the 18-pounder Quick Firing gun. Artillery could now engage from the safety of the reverse slope of a hill.
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If anyone knows of a book on how changes in technology forced changes in tactics I'd be very interested to hear about it.
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I produced an Australian version for my masters thesis which can be read online.
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I've been looking for a book that covers the past couple of millenia, really, and as far as I know no such volume exists. A couple of my military friends have suggested that I write one to fill what is clearly a gap in the market :) but I'm still a bit daunted by the idea.
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I started with one I had just seen on screen as I was curious as to whether it would fill in certain background gaps in what I had seen onscreen (which it did) and then I went back to the start of the Napoleonic ones and am working through in rough order.
Starting from scratch, I think I would start with either Sharpes Rifles or Sharpes Eagle. They are the first two of the Napoleonic ones. Sharpes Eagle was the one he actually wrote first; Sharpes Rifles is one he went back and added later although it actually comes first timewise.
After that, do what I am doing and use the Wikipedia entry for Richard Sharpe to find what order the books come in. I am reading them roughly in order, but with some variation depending on what the library has in stock.
It is the historical detail that I really love - he obviously knows his subject and by way of a bonus, Cornwell always puts a small section at the back to tell you which events in the book really happened and which details he added for the plot.