Sharpe's Eagle (37 page)

Perhaps the strangest feature of Britain's Napoleonic army, at least to modern readers, is the
purchase system. A rich man, as long as he had served a minimum period in his rank, could buy
promotion. Merit had nothing to do with his advancement, only the availability of cash. The
system was grossly unfair and led to great resentment, but it also enabled some soldiers, like
Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, to rise to high rank early enough in his career to
become Britain's most successful General. The French, of course, promoted purely by merit, yet
they were never to defeat Wellington.

There is no such place as Valdelacasa on the River Tagus, nor was there ever a South Essex
Regiment, but beyond those inventions the campaign of Talavera hap-pened much as described in the
novel. In the account of the battle only the adventures of the South Essex and the capture of the
Eagle are fictitious; there was a Dutch Battalion fighting with the French, and I took the
liberty of moving them from their position opposite the Spanish fortifications and offered them
as a sacrifice to Sharpe and Harper instead. The account of Cuesta's army, sadly, is true; they
did run away on the eve of the battle, frightened by their own volley, and within days General
Cuesta was to lead them to total defeat. Talavera was abandoned to the French, who, as Wellesley
predicts in the novel, treated the British wounded with kindness and consideration. The
ineffectiveness of the Spanish army was more than com-pensated for by the bravery of the
Gu?rilleros, the Spanish civilian `freedom fighters', who caused Napoleon to liken Spain to a
`running sore' on his armies.

Much of the detail in the book is taken from contempo-rary letters and diaries. Scenes like
the growing pile of arms and legs outside the convent in Talavera defy imagination and come
straight from eyewitness accounts. In addition to those I drew heavily on the scholarship of
Michael Glover's The Peninsular War, Lady Elizabeth Long-ford's Wellington: The Years of the
Sword, and the American historian Jac Weller's Wellington in the Peninsula. To those three
authors, and to the kind people of Talavera who showed me the battlefield, I acknowledge a
special debt.

Richard Sharpe and Patrick Harper are, sadly, inventions. I hope that today's Royal Green
Jackets, who once marched as the 95th Rifles (and as the Royal American Rifles), will not be
ashamed of them or their picaresque adventures that will, eventually, lead them to Waterloo and
Napoleon himself.

The End