Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

Description

An exhilarating and uplifting account of the lives of sixteen 'warriors' from the last three centuries, hand-picked for their bravery or extraordinary military experience by the eminent military historian, author and ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings. Over the course of forty years of writing about war, Max Hastings has grown fascinated by outstanding deeds of derring-do on the battlefield (land, sea or air) - and by their practitioners. He takes as his examples sixteen people from different nationalities in modern history - including Napoleon's 'blessed fool' Baron Marcellin de Marbot (the model for Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard); Sir Harry Smith, whose Spanish wife Juana became his military companion on many a campaign in the early 19th-century; Lieutenant John Chard, an unassuming engineer who became the hero of Rorke's Drift in the Zulu wars; and Squadron Leader Guy Gibson, the 'dam buster' whose heroism in the skies of World War II earned him the nation's admiration, but few friends. Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of people capable of courage beyond the norm. In this book Max Hastings investigates what this norm might be - and how it has changed over the centuries. While celebrating feats of outstanding valour, he also throws a beady eye over the awarding of medals for gallantry - and why it is that so often the most successful warriors rarely make the grade as leaders of men.

Max Hastings studied at Charterhouse and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards for his journalism. Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he now lives in Berkshire.

'With this collection, Hastings is back on home territory, where he can bring his unique blend of skills as war reporter, and social as well as military historian to bear!This is one of the best and most diverting of his shorter pieces' Evening Standard 'all (of the stories) are corking!opinions are stated firmly and with big bold swings of the pendulum. His virtues are clarity and decisiveness - greatly to be admired when it comes to making clear, for the lay reader, roughly what is going on in the fiendishly complex and bloody engagements he describes' Spectator 'a wonderfully eclectic selection!Hastings has written a marvellous book. Wry perceptive and engaging, it lays bare the curious mix of character traits - good and bad - that a successful warrior requires' Sunday Telegraph 'His brisk prose has the qualities of his warriors: clear, decisive, forceful!WARRIORS will enthral everyone' Daily Telegraph 'brilliant!Hastings combines his consummate skill as a writer with passages of descriptive brilliance to provide a book for the ordinary citizen!He captures the commitment of the fighting servicemen and women!in language that is powerful yet eminently comprehensible. This is a book to entertain' Sunday Times