With an introduction read by Max Hastings. An exhilarating and uplifting
account of the lives of 16 '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 40 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 16
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 60 countries and 11 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 10
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.
