1. Bernard Cornwell's 'Rifleman Sharp' appeared on Masterpiece Theatre... to date, two episodes, each of two hours. The first hour of the first story rated a 9 on a scale of 1-to-10, the second hour about a 3, and the entire two-hour second episode around a 7.
Sergeant Sharp received a field promotion granted by Arthur Wellesley (in the book, it occurred in India, while in the TV version, it occurred in Spain), after saving the commander's life. Of interest was the scene in which now-Lieutenant Sharp won the love and respect of his own new sergeant, Patrick Harper. There was a certain emnity between the men, but, like true warriors they settled it by, first, Harper kicking Sharp in the testacles, then Sharp kicking Harper in the testacles, then Harper repeated the action... until finally, both men ran out of either kicks or testacles, and became good buddies.
Sharp was in the 95th Rifles, which I thought was a rather small, elite brigade, in which all the men would know, or know of, the non-com staff. But here, Sharp was a complete unknown to his men; they had never heard of him, and so he had to prove himself... the first step of which, of course, turned out to be the rough-and-tumble kicking match with Harper. In the late '50's, I went to OCS at Newport, Rhode Island, and I can assure you that upon graduation, if any of the men in my unit had kicked me in the crotch, I would have limped away, handing in my resignation that very same day. Sharp is of tougher stuff.
The last episode, called 'Sharp's Eagle', was one in which our hero vowed to capture a French regimental standard-plus-eagle. Not a bad story, except that the problem was that the limited budget allotted for the series showed itself in the final battle scenes.
The action is at Talavera, and first we see Sharp, given command of a portion of the staunch British line, composed of the 22nd Sussex (?) Battalion, all 32 of them. Then we see the huge, the massive, French column, an entire regiment of around 45 troops, complete with eagle, advancing upon the line. Then we see the entire 95th, led by Sharp, all 12 of them, in a daring flank attack on the column, breaking it completely.
I noted that the series was based "upon" the book by Cornwell, and not "on" it (I discovered this distinction only recently). According to the credits, Cornwell had nothing to do with the writing effort, another writer scripted it.
2. I have, on occasion, been accused of excessive nit-picking at various published rules sets. And I do admit, I do, at times, get a wee bit overzealous in my criticism of the published word.
This happens when I see an author present what he purports to be a finished work, which actually turns out to either be (a) incomplete, or (b) illogical, or (c) just plain silly in its approach to incorporating the historical niceties which the author thinks should reflect the era of interest (I term this last item, the 'recognizable patternry' of the era). Here's a fellow, sez I, who wants the public to pay $10? $20? for the privilege of purchasing his book and following his directions, when, in fact, the directions may be incoherent, nonsensical, and may lead nowhere, i.e., the 'figure it out for yourself' approach.
In this issue, for example, I mention a set of Napoleonic rules called THE EBB AND FLOW OF BATTLE, which simply leaves too much to the reader's interpretation. Definitely no kudos for this set. In contrast, in another article, I mention a very simple and elegant set of rules... a bare-bones outline... which I found in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED. Here, we have an author with no axe to grind, who doesn't set himself up as an authority, who doesn't want to hawk his book, who simply laid out his thoughts in very brief fashion in an effort to share them with others in the hobby.
3. And, speaking of rules not-quite-ready-for-publication, there are my own efforts. In a fit of exuberancy, I sent Bruce MacFarlane (Alberta, Canada) a copy of a set of rules dealing with chivalry and knightly knights, thinking he'd be so overcome with their perfection, he'd adopt them for his Canadian cohorts.
Alas! Back came the rules, superbly annotated by Bruce... questions, questions, everywhere. For example, on Page 1, I speak of a "unit"... "What's a 'unit'?" says Bruce, "It's nowhere defined." One or two paragraphs later, he notes that I refer to a "contingent of units"... even I_ realized that it was obvious that if one didn't know what a unit was, one knew even less what a contingent was. And so it went.
After closely examining the MacFarlane analysis, I concluded that I knew 'zactly what the problem was. And I verified this by looking at other Simon rules. All these sets were written for the group that gathers around the Simon ping-pong table, a group that, for example, knows that when a 'die' is referred to, it's invariably 10-sided, rather than 6.
Over the course of years, the terminology is ingrained... 'unit', 'combat deck', 'contingent', 'kill dice', 'support deck' ... items we no longer have to define, but which mean nothing to the outsider ("... we also have lots of arguments about the intent of many of your terms." sez Bruce). If I'm to be ready for prime time, I definitely need a glossary.
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© Copyright 1993 Wally Simon
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