title: The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Modern War Studies)
author:  Earl J. Hess 
description: "Provides the single best example of what tactical and combat studies of our field should do."&#8212;<b><i>Journal of the Civil War Era</b></i>
zlib_text:   
  
  **Sharpe's Eagle**
  
   **Richard Sharpe and the Talavera campaign July 1809**
  
    
  
   **by Bernard Cornwell**
  
    
  
   _ _For Judy__
  
   _"Every man thinks meanly of himselfÂ_
  
   _for not having been a soldier_
  
   _\--Samuel Johnson_  
  
   **CHAPTER 1**  
  
  The guns could be heard long before they came into sight. Children clung to
  their mothers' skirts and wondered what dreadful thing made such noises. The
  hooves of the great horses mixed with the jangling of traces and chains, the
  hollow rumbling of the blurring wheels, and above it all the crashes as tons
  of brass, iron and timber bounced on the town's broken paving. Then they were
  in view; guns, limbers, horses and outriders, and the gunners looked as tough
  as the squat, blackened barrels that spoke of the fighting up north where the
  artillery had dragged their massive weapons through swollen rivers and up
  rain-soaked slopes to pound the enemy into oblivion and defeat. Now they would
  do it again. Mothers held their smallest children and poin