This is another of my favourites, and it’s also another of the books where the action is entirely fictional. It describes a ‘commando’ raid on a French coastal fort. There were many such raids in the Napoleonic Wars, and somehow Sharpe missed out on them so I invented this attack on the fort in the Bay of Arcachon, an attack that goes disastrously wrong because of Pierre Ducos’s intervention. Sharpe finds himself stranded, surrounded and with only one very unlikely ally – Captain Cornelius Killick from Marblehead, Massachusetts.
