Sharpe might have been ordered to enjoy himself, but he soon discovered that being chief of staff to a brigade entailed enormously long days and seemingly endless problems. He worked wherever Nairn’s headquarters happened to be; sometimes in a sequestrated farmhouse, but more usually in a group of tents pitched wherever the brigade happened to bivouac. Sometimes Sharpe would hear the thump of guns to the east and he would know that a French rearguard was in action, but Sharpe had neither the time, nor the responsibility, to join the fighting. He only knew that every river crossed and every mile of country captured meant more work for the harried staff officers who had to marry men to food, weapons to ammunition, and Divisional Headquarters’ orders to a baser reality.

It was a salutary job. Sharpe had always expressed a combat soldier’s scorn for most staff officers, believing that such arrogant creatures were overpaid and underworked, but as Sharpe discovered the problems of organizing a brigade, so he learned that it was his job, rather than Nairn’s, to solve those problems. Thus one typical day, just two weeks after his arrival at the brigade, began with an appeal from the commander of a battery of horse artillery whose supply wagon had become lost in the tangle of French lanes behind the British advance. Retrieving the errant wagon was no part of Sharpe’s duties, except that the gunners were detailed to support Nairn’s forward positions and Sharpe knew that field guns without roundshot were useless, and so he sent an aide in search of the missing supplies.

At breakfast a patrol of the King’s German Legion light cavalry fetched a score of French prisoners to the farmhouse that was Nairn’s temporary headquarters. The cavalry commander bellowed for a competent officer and, when Sharpe appeared, the man waved at the frightened enemy soldiers. “I don’t want the buggers!” He and his men galloped away and Sharpe had to feed the Frenchmen, guard them, and find medical help for the half-dozen men whose faces and shoulders had been slashed by the German sabres.