Okay, so here is where Sharpe starts to lose me.
The arrow attack didn’t last long. Newport, our driver, stopped it with an automatic assault rifle. (…) With his single arm he wasn’t too precise with it, but didn’t have to be to get his point across. The particular wisdom of the assault rifle is the wisdom of abundance and speed. But any of our guns, really, seem gross and stupid compared to their lean and intelligent arrows, with the assault rifle earning the prize for the stupidest gun of all. It takes no intelligence or skill to use it, and it took not only no intelligence but a willful negation of intelligence to have invented it, though I do think it took a certain kind of imagination to invent it. (Johnny, p. 59)
This just makes no sense. First of all, to compare the gun to a bow and arrow is going to show the gun, when handled with skill, to be a far superior weapon. The "intelligent" arrows only appeared to be so because the archers had taken a stance to surprise the others, and, remaining hidden while they shot–like from a circle around the bus, hence no specific direction–the only option the men had was to shoot into the cornfields at invisible targets while they stood out in the open.
More importantly, I strongly doubt that Johnny Rolfe, who is well acquainted with violence, is in the middle of this battle thinking how wrong and awful it is that firearms had ever been invented. I would find it a lot more believable had he hied his ass into the safety of the bus and knelt down to thank God for fire and steel over wood and feathers.
What I take this to be then, is authorly intrusion into the narrative that professes personal beliefs rather than a realistic viewpoint of his character.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology