Tras un desastroso fracaso al ser atacado en un fuerte portugués por tropas de élite napoleónicas, en el que ha perdido a buena parte de sus hombres, la carrera del fusilero Richard Sharpe parece al borde de un abrupto y deshonroso fin. La única posibilidad de evitarlo y de redimirse está en el campo de batalla. Y ahí es donde Sharpe tendrá su oportunidad. La tremenda batalla de Fuentes de Oñoro, que duró tres días y en la que se luchó por cada palmo de terreno, incluso puerta por puerta, será una prueba memorable para Sharpe y sus hombres, aun cuando no se contaría entre los combates que más le gustaba recordar a Wellington porque cometió en ella un error estratégico garrafal sobre el que la historia oficial británica ha pasado de puntillas, pero que Sharpe no deja de señalar.

Cornwell, Bernard. Sharpe’s Battle. Sharpe No. 12. Harper, 1995.
Once again, Richard Sharpe helps Wellington and the Portuguese resistance kick the French out of Portugal. This time there are some particularly gruesome scenes of massacre of innocents by sadists in uniform. The cross-dressing Spanish spy is a memorable character. Some readers complain that after twelve novels they can see a formula developing. Really? I felt I knew how to load a musket a lot earlier than that. But formula has its value. It means that if you like the first eleven (count ‘em) books in the series, you are probably going to enjoy the ride in this one. ( )

The usual fast-paced offering from Bernard Cornwall.
Sharpe makes a deadly enemy by offending a ruthless French officer and then finds himself facing British authorities and possible disgrace. All this is going on against the backdrop of Napoleon's attempt to regain control of Spain and Portugal in 1811. Great read. ( )

In which our hero encounters one of his most deadly enemies,Loup 'the wolf '. He also very nearly gets himself killed several times,but then that is nothing new is it ?
The battle of Fuentes de Onoro although exciting,does go on for an extremely long time,in fact most of the book is devoted to it.
Not I think one of Cornwell's best efforts. ( )

Sharpe’s Battle—a mid-series installment in Bernard Cornwell’s long-running series—is a long series of vignettes culminating in a thunderous battle scene that, with its preliminaries, occupies nearly a third of the book. It is easy to believe that dramatizing the battle was Cornwell’s reason for writing the book in the first place, and that everything else is there to make what would otherwise be a novella into a novel. If so, I forgive him: the Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro is among the most vivid and gripping narratives of nineteenth-century combat I’ve ever read. Napoleonic-era combat was a complicated business, but Cornwell makes the flow of events crystal clear without ever losing track of the smaller story (of Sharpe and his enemy du jour, Brigadier Guy de Loup) within the larger one.

The other two-thirds of the book has its share of action—a duel, a night reconnaissance of a walled town, and a second (fictitious) full-scale battle—but it is driven by plotlines involving French espionage and Anglo-Spanish politics. Threaded through all of these preliminaries are the consequences of Sharpe’s order to (carried out in the first pages) to summarily execute two captured French soldiers. Cornwell, staying true to the book’s 1811 setting, makes Sharpe’s impulsive act—amply justified, and, to modern readers, not only justified but righteous—a source of never-ending trouble for him with the French and his own army alike.

The book has (perhaps inevitably, given its structure) a slightly baggy quality. The concluding battle resolves all the threads put into play in the first two-thirds of the book, but it does so less by bringing them to a head than by simply wiping the slate clean. Teachers of good novel-writing practices will, doubtless, be affronted. Fans of historical military fiction will have a good time nonetheless. ( )