‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or daring figures in (roughly) modern warfare, offers many of the pleasures those deeds must once have stirred, now overlaid with a more considered, war historian’s interest in what drives the very few people who turn out to be exceptionally brave in harm’s way.
It is an old-fashioned book in other respects too. It expresses a nostalgia for the days, before the development of deadly modern technologies, when the business of war entailed huge risks and could proportionately reward individual bravery. Its heroes — 13 men and one woman, from the Napoleonic wars to Israel’s 1973 tank war on the Golan Heights — were from an age when war was more personal. Hastings’ concern here is, essentially, close-quarters combat: the aerial dogfight, the cavalry charge, the infantry battle in the trenches, the bayonet against the assegai at Rorke’s Drift. Some of the stories — though all, as he freely confesses, have been told elsewhere — are corking. Amazing are the factual details of the misery the soldier endures: cold, exhaustion, disease, fear, and in the days when weapons were still a bit rubbish, constant non-fatal wounding.
Thus the report of a ‘well-shot corps’ of Rifles in the Peninsular war:
Beckwith with a cork leg — Pemberton and Manners with a shot each in the knees, making them as stiff as the other’s tree one — Loftus Gray with a gash in the lip and minus a portion of one heel which made him march to the tune of dot and go one — Smith with a shot in the ankle — Eeles minus a thumb — Johnston, in addition to other shot-holes, a stiff elbow, which deprived him of the power of disturbing his friends as scratcher of Scotch reels upon the violin — Percival with a shot through his lungs — Hope with a grapeshot lacerated leg and — George Simmonds with his riddled body held together by a pair of stays, for his was no holiday waist.
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