Sharpe's Fury

Bernard Cornwell published Sharpe's Fury in 2006, and it is the eleventh novel of the Sharpe series. The story belongs to the spring of 1811, when the Peninsular War appeared to have been lost by the British and their allies.

Cadiz is the only major Spanish town still holding out against the French, and from their winter quarters in Portugal the British send a small force to the River Guadiana to destroy a bridge that matters to the enemy. The mission is commanded by a young Brigadier General called Moon, who has no love for Sharpe, which is the sort of arrangement Cornwell likes to put his hero in.

Sharpe and his men run into a French colonel named Henri Vandal, and the bridge is duly blown up, though not before Moon is among the wounded. The novel moves between that kind of small action and the larger political argument going on among the Spanish, and it ends with the battle of Barrosa, which gives the book its subtitle and provides the set-piece engagement of the story.