From a lifetime studying war, correspondent and historian Max Hastings gathers 350 stories that vividly illustrate what it is like to live and die as a warrior. We meet such figures as King David, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Grant, and Patton, as well as writers who have fought: Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell. Here too are elite organizations like Napoleon's marshals, the ambulance drivers of the Great War, and the modern SAS.