SOLDIERS: Great Stories of War and Peace

In searing detail and immediacy, all the violence, grief, pathos, black humour and courage of conflict emerges in this collection of first-person accounts. Reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings's lifetime of studying war, his book rings the changes through the centuries. Nearly 350 stories illustrate what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, to a Vietnamese woman holding her child during conflict and SAS troops storming the Iranian Embassy. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Proust and Waugh, Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey, and heroic ambulance drivers of World War One, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: although nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. We enter now the 21st century which some are already calling 'the Post-Heroic Age'. 517 magnificent pages with a gallery of photographs in black and white and colour.