What about Death to the French - the book which quite obviously inspired the Sharpe series by Cornwell?
Rifleman Dodd has all these heroic adventures when cut off from the army - and basically everyone around him dies. He himself though gets back to his unit - and is neither rewarded nor punished; his life just continues as before as if nothing had happened. No-one even knows what he has done, and, as a matter of fact, his heroism changes absolutely nothing - he burns a bridge the French were laboriously making, and it turns out the French had orders to destroy it anyway!
What I liked was how Hornblower felt a sense of almost psychic kinship with both the psychotically insane El Supremo and that cultured French nobleman.
The scene where the Spanish show off the captured El Supremo - now totally mad, and chained to the deck in his own filth - as he transforms from imagining he is sitting on a golden throne to realizing where he is, is one of the most bizzare, horrible and moving scenes in the series.