A stand-alone novel that inspired Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series
It is 1810, and the last French invasion of Portugal has penned Wellington's army behind the river Tagus with their backs to the sea. Separated from his regiment, Rifleman Dodd of the Ninety-Fifth stumbles on a band of undisciplined Portuguese guerrillas. With rough inventiveness he transforms this ramshackle group into an organised fighting force, continually harrying the infuriated enemy as he battles his way back to his own lines. Written by the author of the Hornblower series, DEATH TO THE FRENCH is a classic novel of the Peninsular War, and was the inspiration for Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books.
C.S. Forester was born in 1899, the son of an English school-teacher. He cut his teeth on a series of military and naval novels before being offered a Hollywood screen-writing job to pen a pirate movie. However when that project went belly up, he turned to writing again with the first of the series that was to make him a worldwide name - THE HAPPY RETURN starring one Horatio Hornblower. He eventually died in 1966.