Heyer, Georgette. An Infamous Army.

London: Heinemann, 1937.

Heyer is best known for her several dozen light and humorous romances set in Regency England, but she also was capable of far deeper and more complex historical writing. Before Heyer, the best known and most highly regarded fictional account of the Battle of Waterloo was in Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair. (Victor Hugo wrote about the battle, too, in Les Misérables, but he was writing from the French viewpoint.) More recently, Bernard Cornwell, justifiably famous for his rousing and highly accurate battle scenes, did a marvelous grunt’s-eye view of the battle in Sharpe’s Waterloo. So how does this novel fair, compared to those?

Cornwell, Bernard. Sharpe’s Devil.

NY: HarperCollins, 1992.

Awhile back, I read my way through the complete series of novels featuring rifleman Richard Sharpe and his adventures in the wars with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, from his apprenticeship as a private and sergeant in India, through Wellington’s Peninsular Campaigns, to his final battle at Waterloo as a lieutenant-colonel. But somehow I missed this “afterthought” novel. After twenty years in uniform, what does a professional soldier do when the war is over?