What are the motifs in Sharpe's Waterloo: Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign by Bernard Cornwell?

The language of the story is restrained and objective. In the description of the horrors of hand-to-hand fighting the language is objective and almost unemotional but is brutally realistic in the details in depicting the wounds and mutilations inflicted on both men and animals without becoming lurid. The accounts of the cries used by combatants to conceal their own terror and by their officers to exhort their men into psychological preparation for the brutality of physical combat are described vividly but in a detached manner so the reader feels the author is merely reporting the facts and not trying to shock the reader.