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From surf to turf for Officer Sharpe

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Special to The Times

Sharpe’s Escape

Portugal, 1810

Bernard Cornwell

HarperCollins: 358 pp., $25.95

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BERNARD CORNWELL’S 19 novels about Richard Sharpe, an infantry officer in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, have been popular in Britain and Canada. The last one, “Sharpe’s Havoc,” also did well in the United States. With his latest, “Sharpe’s Escape,” the publisher is obviously hoping to duplicate the American success of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series and the more recent phenomenon of Patrick O’Brian’s 20 novels, drawn on the Royal Navy and taking place roughly during the Napoleonic Wars.

Maybe the publisher will win his or her bet. But there are important differences between the two earlier series and this one. Maybe the most telling one is that others were sea stories, full of the romance and glamour and strangeness of that genre.

Footsore infantryman Sharpe is covered not with tingling salt spray but choking dust stirred up by endless lines of weary soldiers.

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And each of the two previous series had particular characteristics that defined them and fetched devoted readers. For Forester’s fans, it was the hero’s elan and the furious clash of battle and action. For O’Brian’s, it was the subtle play of relations between Capt. Jack Aubrey and his mordant ship’s physician, naturalist and spy, Stephen Maturin.

In addition, O’Brian wrote with a studied 18th and 19th century language that in diction and sensibility created the impression that the reader had entered not only the scenery but also the habits of mind of those who lived in the English-speaking world of two centuries ago.

In “Sharpe’s Escape,” Cornwell creates a simple action story and pours his characters into it.

Sharpe is surly. He is said to be fearless, a condition so rare among men that it may be better described as an absence of normal human emotion. Sharpe is, certainly, inarticulate.

Sharpe’s sidekick, Sgt. Patrick Harper, is cheerful. But he is no more reflective than his boss. In Cornwell’s hands, the interaction between these constant companions conveys no persuasive picture of their long relationship, of the tedium and the lethal danger of the infantryman.

This being an English story, there has to be a pompous officer who is less competent than Sharpe but gets his undeserved posting by birth and family connections. Cornwell presents us with Cornelius Slingsby, who is as ridiculous as his name.

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Cornwell deposits his cast, in the late summer of 1810, on the harsh ground of central Portugal. Napoleon, having beaten and intimidated his enemies to the east, is trying to capture the Iberian Peninsula.

All that stands between him and the command of all Europe’s coasts is an English-Portuguese army and its commander, Arthur Wellesley, Lord Wellington.

Wellington has established a series of three lines of defense just north of Lisbon between the mountains and the Atlantic, known as the Torres Vedras. Determined to bolster the morale of his Portuguese soldiers, Wellington makes a stand at a ridge north of Lisbon named Bussaco. He defeats the French but fails to block their escape route.

The French army is now in front of the bristling defense lines for the winter. Here Wellington has them, because the British have declared a “scorched earth” policy to deny all sustenance to the French. Farms are burned, food destroyed; the Portuguese themselves are driven from central Portugal. By campaign’s end, the French army is destroyed by hunger and disease.

The virtue of “Sharpe’s Escape” is that it presents to the contemporary reader an important part of history that Americans know little about. The peninsula campaign was part of the great struggle between Napoleon and England for mastery of Europe. Was Napoleon the voice and hammer of reason, human rights and liberation from the heavy hand of tradition and England the defender of the old aristocratic order? Or was it the other way around? Did not England speak in the end for the common hopes of the ordinary person, who wanted nothing more than to live out his life in peace?

These questions resonate with us today, but they are beyond Cornwell’s reach. He presents us instead with a simple tale of adventure, populated with thinly realized actors.

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