Sharpe Author Bernard Cornwell Visits Waterloo

 

Bernard Cornwell, author of the Sharpe series and Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, visited the scene of the great battle.

 

I have walked all of Wellington’s battlefields. Assaye, in India, is the least changed - a place where you can still kick musket balls out of the furrows where the Highlanders of the 74th suffered so grievously. I have climbed the Arapiles of Salamanca in Spain, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Duke’s battlefields, and marvelled at the grim walls of Badajoz where so many were to die in a night of slaughter, yet none of those places is as evocative as Waterloo.

 

The field of Waterloo has not been well kept. The damage began early when the Dutch made the Lion Mound, that great decaying monstrosity which marks the spot where the young Prince of Orange was wounded. My favourite moment of all the Sharpe books comes in Sharpe’s Waterloo when our hero does so much for the British cause by shooting the Prince who was, by far, the least capable commander on the field, yet whose monument now dominates the landscape.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link to the British newspaper the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/battle-of-waterloo/11514684/Sharpe-author-Bernard-Cornwell-visits-Waterloo.html


You can read my Greathistory.com interview with Bernard Cornwell via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/a-q-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell.html

You can also visit Bernard Cornwell's web site at http://www.bernardcornwell.net/.