A vivid retelling of the Battle of Waterloo, based on unpublished soldiers’ written accounts.There were fifty thousand casualties on the single bloody day of the Battle of Waterloo: killing on the scale of the First World War. In this electrifying account, Malcolm Balen combines extraordinary first-hand accounts of the battle with the story of William Siborne, an officer who wanted to capture the moment of victory by making the perfect model.Siborne gathered together eyewit...

History of the Boer War, by the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, first published in 1902. According to Wikipedia: "Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, plays, romances, poet...

As part of the Light Division created to act as the advance guard of Wellington's army, the 95th Rifles are the first into battle and the last out. Fighting and thieving their way across Europe, they are clearly no ordinary troops. The 95th are in fact the first British soldiers to take aim at their targets, to take cover when being shot at, to move tactically by fire and manoeuvre. And by the end of the six-year campaign they have not only proved themselves the toughest fighters in the ar...

The day after the Battle of Balaklava, the Russians attempted an armed reconnaissance of the Allied right flank aimed at the exposed Inkermann position, but the remnants of the British 2nd Division bloodily repulsed them.This book describes the Battle of Inkermann - an engagement which lasted for less than twelve hours, but was one of the bloodiest single engagements in Europe between 1815 and 1914.

Redcoat is the brilliant story of the common British soldier from 1700 to 1900, based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them.Delving into the history of the period – charting events including Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo, the retreat from Kabul and the Sikh wars – celebrated military historian Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of a fallible but extraordinarily successful fighting ...

On 1 July 1916, after a five-day bombardment, 11 British and 5 French divisions launched their long-awaited 'Big Push' on German positions on high ground above the Rivers Ancre and Somme on the Western Front. Some ground was gained, but at a terrible cost. In killing-grounds whose names are indelibly imprinted on 20th-century memory, German machine-guns – manned by troops who had sat out the storm of shellfire in deep dugouts – inflicted terrible losses on the British infantry.The ...

Through the first year of the First World War, Allied strategy had relied upon a series of small-scale assaults, which in reality achieved little or no ground gained. The Battle of Loos was to be different. Kitchener's Army was deployed in strength for the first time and an ambitious plan aimed to take ground over a 20-mile front.However, the battlefield was not the Allies' ideal site and the battle plans did not account for the lack of ammunition and artillery. It...

Unlike its near neighbour, working-class Salford, Manchester proved able to raise eight Pals battalions. Initially, these battalions were composed of middle-class men who experience before the war years was within the commercial, financial and manufacturing interests which formed the foundations of Edwardian Manchesters life and prosperity. Manchester was undeniably proud of its pals battalions; that the area was capable of raising. Seven months after their arrival in France the battle of ...

World War I did not end neatly with the Germans' surrender. After a dramatic week of negotiations, military offensives, and the beginning of a Communist revolution, the German Imperial regime collapsed. The Allies eventually granted an armistice to a new German government, and at 11:00 on November 11, the guns officially ceased fire -- but only after 11,000 more casualties had been sustained. The London Daily Express proclaimed it "the greatest day in history."Nicholas Bes...

The last untold story of the First World War: the fortunes and fates of 170,000 British soldiers captured by the enemy.On capture, British officers and men were routinely told by the Germans 'For you the war is over'. Nothing could be further from the truth. British Prisoners of War merely exchanged one barbed-wire battleground for another.In the camps the war was eternal. There was the war against the German military, fought with everything from taunting h...

The great retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in August 1914 is one of the most famous in military history, and it is justly celebrated. But not all the British soldiers who were forced back by the German offensive performed well. Two colonels, Elkington and Mainwaring, tried to surrender rather than fight on, and were disgraced. This is their story. In this compelling account John Hutton shows, in graphic detail, the full confusion of the retreat, and the dire mental stat...

" A n excellent account of the contribution of the newly formed (and short-lived) United Kingdom of the Netherlands to the Allied victory" ( HistoryO fW ar.org ).The Dutch-Belgians have been variously described as inexperienced, incompetent, and cowardly, a rogue element in the otherwise disciplined Allied Army. It is on...