Fire and Sword

Sometimes when picking up a book by an author with which one is familiar one is disappointed to find that the contents are not as anticipated. Having read all of Simon Scarrow's Roman novels I was taken aback when I found that Fire and Sword was about the Napoleonic wars. My momentary hesitation was overcome from the first page. I already knew that Mr Scarrow was a born writer and I was not surprised to be swept along by this narrative as I had been by his Roman stories. Fire and Sword is not just an adventure in the style of the Sharpe novels of Bernard Cornwell (another of my favourite writers) here Scarrow is dealing with characters whose lives and careers have been the subject of academic enquiry for near on two centuries and he shows us the men behind the uniforms with a sure hand. This book is the third volume of a quartet of novels which tell the story of the war between Britain and France as a conflict of two outstanding characters with remarkable similarities of background and personality. Napoleon Buonaparte cam from the minor nobility of Corsica and used the Revolution to force his way up the political ladder his ambition hardened by the real and perceived slights he had received at the hands of the old nobility. Arthur Wellesley was one of five children of a minor Anglo-Irish nobleman driven by a culture of duty and public service and a certainty that his destiny is to protect Britain from the threat of Napoleon. The book opens with Napoleon's coronation as Emperor of the French in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and follows him through the victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz, which many historians claim was the peak of his career, through to his disastrous decision to mire his forces in the Iberian peninsular. The recently knighted Sir Arthur Wellesley has just returned from conducting a brilliant campaign on the Indian sub-continent but is now caught up in the political attacks on his brother Richard who was Govenor General of India. The book the follows his struggle to convince the government that he can undermine Buonaparte by forcing him to divert men and material to fight a series of battles in Portugal and Spain and ends with his victory over Marshall Soult at Oporto. Napoleon is shown as falling into the trap of believing his own propaganda of invincibility. He is surrounded by a court of familly and old friends none of whom are willing or able to point out the flaws in his strategy and he strides confidently into a trap of his own devising and Sir Arthur Wellesley is there to close it on him. I really must obtain the first two volumes of this quartet prior to the publication of the fourth.