| abstract | - It is the bitter winter on 1809. Britain's forces are retreating towards Corunna, with Napoleon's victorious armies in pursuit. Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and a detachment of Riflemen are cut off from the British army and surrounded by enemy troops. The story recounts Sharpe's exploits in the retreat to Corruna. Sharpe's battalion, acting as rearguard to the army, are cutdown by a squadron of French regular cavalry. From then on the story follows the small band of surviving riflemen, of the 95th Rifles, as they try to foment an uprising in the city of Santiago the compostela. Sharpe's Spanish ally is Major Don Blas Vivar and they are fighting the Don Blas Vivar's brother, the Count of Mouromorto. Which was killed in the end from his brother. Sharpes future friend and Sergant Patrick Harper is introduced as well as the core group of the surviving company for the first time. Running along in the background is the other Irishman in the series, the exploring officer and engineer Captain Michael Hogan, who appears for the first time at the very end of the novel. In this book, he sees Captain Murray's heavy Cavalary Sword as clumsy and cumbersome, yet in India he wishes he had such a heavy sword to butcher people with. During his time in India he used a claymore which he found less cumbersome than the cavalry sword. During the story Sharpe's making the recalcitrant Rifleman Harper a sergeant, winning the respect of his troops and, alas, losing a fair young English girl. Later on this English girl, Louisa Parker, marries Major Blas Vivar, instead of Richard, who wanted to ask her the same. This is the sixth episode, chronologically, in the adventures of Richard Sharpe, British infantryman during the Napoleonic Wars. This book was written ninth, which might seem fairly far along in the 24 book series, but it was still before the first five books that preceded it chronologically and the first movie in the tv series with Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe.
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