"The hunters and the hunted were moving again, inching their intricate paths across a wintry land, and the hunted were seeking the miracle that might yet save Spain and snatch a glorious victory from defeat."
Prologue, p. 11

"The stranded riflemen might call him the new Lieutenant, and they might invest the word 'new' with all the scorn of soldiers, but that was because they did not know their man. They thought of him as nothing more than a jumped-up Sergeant, and they were wrong. He was a soldier, and his name was Richard Sharpe."
Chapter 1, p. 31

"In the short time that he had been with this Battalion, Sharpe had often noticed the Irishman, and he had seen the truth for himself the truth of Captain Murray's assertion that he was a natural leader. Men crowded to Harper's campfire, partly to relish his stories, and partly because they wanted...