This comprehensive study explores the landscapes and heritage of past conflicts along with defensive and offensive structures. Throughout history, nature – its resources, landscape and terrain – has shaped the tactics of warfare and determined its outcomes. From the medieval English Fens to the 20th century Iraqi Marsh Arabs, landscapes have fostered resistance and dissention. Harnessed by people under threat the landscape has influenced strategies and tactics. Water and wetland halted campaigns in the Florida Everglades and in the Franco-Prussian War of the late 1800s. In the Second World War the Dutch flooded the drained polders to halt the Nazi advance and in 1938 the Chinese nationalist forces breached the flood-dykes of the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance. Mountain ranges and deserts have long provided landscapes for resistance fighters. From the former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan these gnarly battlescapes traverse time and space. Libyan fighters held off invading Italian forces by operating from the caves and valleys of the Green Mountains and the Welsh defended their mountainous principalities against the Angevin Normans. The landscapes and heritage of past conflicts, defensive and offensive structures, and much more are brough together in this comprehensive study.

A united Europe has been in existence for over 50 years, however before the European Union was formed the continent saw over 2 millennia of constant conflict. The battlefields where these wars were decided dot the landscape of Europe, bearing witness to the sacrifice paid by armies of the past, and acting as reminders to those who forget the dangers of conflict. This book collates the work of Alfred Buellesbach, who has spent years travelling around Europe to photograph battlefields. Some of the sites have a sad history, or host memorials and cemeteries. The beauty of other sites conceals the brutality that once played out over them. Battlescapes combines these images with details for visitors.

A classic of military thought that merits a place alongside the works of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, Battle Studies was first published in Paris ten years after the death of its author, French army officer Charles Ardant du Picq (1821–1870). Updated to provide a more complete and accurate biographical and historical framework for understanding its meaning and import, this edition—deftly translated, introduced, and annotated by noted military historian Roger Spiller—offers a new generation of readers the benefit of Ardant du Picq's unique insight into the nature of warfare. Nothing, Ardant du Picq asserts, can be prescribed wisely in an army “without an exact understanding of its ultimate instrument, man, and his morale at the defining instant of combat.” Accordingly, Battle Studies, the first systematic exploration of human behavior in the extremities of combat, focuses squarely on the tactical realm its author knew so well. Eschewing grand military theories and strategies, Ardant du Picq draws on his real-world experience, especially during the Crimean War and the Siege of Sebastopol where he was captured, to examine what motivates a soldier to fight, what creates cohesion or disorder, what gives a commander tactical control, and what makes reason give way to instinct: in short, “the essence of the science of combat.”

John Keegan's groundbreaking portrayal of the common soldier in the heat of battle -- a masterpiece that explores the physical and mental aspects of warfare The Face of Battle is military history from the battlefield: a look at the direct experience of individuals at the "point of maximum danger." Without the myth-making elements of rhetoric and xenophobia, and breaking away from the stylized format of battle descriptions, John Keegan has written what is probably the definitive model for military historians. And in his scrupulous reassessment of three battles representative of three different time periods, he manages to convey what the experience of combat meant for the participants, whether they were facing the arrow cloud at the battle of Agincourt, the musket balls at Waterloo, or the steel rain of the Somme. The Face of Battle is a companion volume to John Keegan's classic study of the individual soldier, The Mask of Command: together they form a masterpiece of military and human history.

Essays on the depiction of animals, birds and insects in early medieval material culture, from texts to carvings to the landscape itself. For people in the early Middle Ages, the earth, air, water and ether teemed with other beings. Some of these were sentient creatures that swam, flew, slithered or stalked through the same environments inhabited by their human contemporaries. Others were objects that a modern beholder would be unlikely to think of as living things, but could yet be considered to possess a vitality that rendered them potent. Still others were things half glimpsed on a dark night or seen only in the mind's eye; strange beasts that haunted dreams and visions or inhabited exotic lands beyond the compass of everyday knowledge. This book discusses the various ways in which the early English and Scandinavians thought about and represented these other inhabitants of their world, and considers the multi-faceted nature of the relationship between people and beasts. Drawing on the evidence of material culture, art, language, literature, place-names and landscapes, the studies presented here reveal a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters and objects were blurred and often permeable, and where to represent the bestial could be to holda mirror to the self. Michael D.J. Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University; Thomas J.T. Williams is a doctoral researcher at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. Contributors: Noël Adams, John Baker, Michael D. J. Bintley, Sue Brunning, László Sándor Chardonnens, Della Hooke, Eric Lacey, Richard North, Marijane Osborn, Victoria Symons, Thomas J. Williams

A splendid new edition of a modern classic, illustrated with paintings, prints, engravings, battle plans, and photographs, and featuring a new introduction by the author. Illustrated.

In the process of surveying nineteenth-century cultural history, Shi provides fascinating insights into the specific concerns of the realist movement - in particular, the nation's growing obsession with gender roles. Realism, he observes, was in part an effort to revive masculine virtues in the face of effeminate sentimentality and decorous gentility.