Book description
This book looks back to the time when an individual could change the
course of history in a single battle or engagement, and yet still be
forgotten. Here are the stories of the men who were regarded as heroes
at the time but have now been forgotten or eclipsed. Some were
honourable men and some not, but the actions of all were larger than
life and make for exciting reading. They were mostly professional
soldiers; one, Lieutenant Walter Hamilton, was a VC who fought the Kabul
mob to the death, and took 600 of the enemy with him. Another, Major
General Lew Wallace, primarily a lawyer and politician, commanded a
division at the Battle of Shiloh, but is remembered now only as the
author of Ben Hur. Bryan Perrett left the army as a successful career
officer to take up the pen as a full-time writer. Able to write to any
brief (he was captioning picture-strips for schoolgirl comics at one
point), he found his metier as a military historian and writer of good,
fast, episodic, narrative popular histories. His many books, all founded
on meticulous research from primary sources, find a wide popular
readership. He is the bestselling author in the bestselling Cassell
Military Classics series
