Partizan - Forlorn Hope

There is an early scene in Bernard
Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Company
where a clerk at the Horse Guards, the
Army's administrative headquarters,
informs the eponymous hero, with a
certain degree of malicious bureaucratic
satisfaction, that his previously mislaid
personal file reveals that a supposed
promotion to captain had never been
ratified.

Sadly, in real life no such personal files
existed during the Napoleonic Wars,
indeed the first of them would not be
opened until 1827, and consequently
tracing the career of an individual officer
in Wellington's Army - and distinguishing one Sharpe from another - can be a tedious business.

Hopefully, this is now no longer the case.