Given the dramatic nature of warfare and the inherent tragedy within it, it is not surprising that the military has been the subject, direct or indirect, of a vast amount of literature whose sheer size and scope means that only a cursory survey, concentrating on the western literary tradition, is possible here. Although ancient Greece is often considered the cradle of western civilization, the Greek city states were constantly at war with each other or outside powers, and their literature is full of violence and tragedy. Indeed the two most famous pieces of classical Greek poetry, Homer's two epics The Iliad and The Odyssey (probably mid-8th century bc), both concern the Greek military élite. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan wars and addresses the important themes thrown up by warfare: life and death, victory and defeat; the nature of heroism and honour. To quote The Oxford History of the Classical World, ‘The Iliad is not so much concerned with what people do, as with the way they do it, above all the way they face suffering and death.’ As Hector says before his death in combat with Achilles: ‘Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it.’ As an antidote to this, Aristophanes' (c.445-385 bc) play Lysistrata shows the warring Greeks as buffoons finally brought to their senses by a sex strike by the Athenian women.

The Greek historians also created the western tradition of history writing. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c.484-424), ‘the father of history’, produced the earliest Greek book in prose on the wars between the Greeks and Persians. His work was a memorial to that generation of Greek warriors, ‘so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time’. The Romans' major contribution to literature concerning the military was also in the field of history rather than fiction. Historians of Rome such as Polybius, Julius Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus paint a full picture of what Tacitus felt ought to be the subject matter of historians: ‘vast wars, the sack of cities, the defeat and capture of kings, or in domestic history conflicts between consuls and tribunes … the struggles of the aristocracy and plebs.’ Virgil was an epic poet in the Homeric tradition, with his Aeneid telling the story of a survivor from Troy. Horace, who had himself fought at Philippi and had seen death on the battlefield, nevertheless coined what the WW I poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the old lie’: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one's country).

In the Dark Ages, the northern European élite remained a warrior caste. Therefore much of the little literature that emerged was tailored to their beliefs and ideals. The most important old English poem, Beowulf, completed in the 8th century ad, is a monument to a great and perfect warrior hero. The warriors in the poem are either feasting or fighting and the epic heroism of Beowulf in his glorious life and tragic death provided an example of the perfect fighting king. This type of behaviour is mirrored in the Viking sagas, which are of a similar age although written down much later. The men depicted in the Egil's Saga, written in 1230, probably by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), are also happiest when fighting, usually showing considerable nonchalance when meeting their violent ends. As Christianity established itself in Europe, the main protagonists remained heroic idealized warriors, but they had a new and worthwhile cause. This is probably best illustrated by the 12th-century French Song of Roland, where Roland is the last to fall fighting hordes of savage infidel Saracens (even though Roland had in reality died fighting the Basques at Ronceval).

The idealized view of the soldier survives into the 14th century with Geoffrey Chaucer's (c.1340-1400) depiction of the Knight ‘as a verray, parfit gentil knight’ in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and into the 16th century with Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Liberated, 1581) which deals with the Crusades. The knight has been traditionally viewed as the perfect Christian soldier who had ‘fougten for oure feith’ in the Crusades. About two hundred years later a far more complex and rounded picture of the military appears in the work of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Probably his best-known play with an explicitly martial theme is Henry V (1598). Quite apart from some of its stirring speeches, the play provides some of the most convincing scenes of the eve of battle capturing the tension and fears of both the common soldiery and highest generals before Agincourt. While King Henry remains a largely heroic character (scarcely surprising given the play's nature as propagandist history), not all Shakespeare's military characters are quite so admirable. Indeed, the contrast between public rank and private flaws makes them apt subjects for tragedy. In Othello (1604), an excellent and intelligent soldier is brought down by jealousy of his wife and in Coriolanus (1609), the eponymous hero, quite possibly Shakespeare's most formidable military figure, brings destruction on himself and the Romans through his intolerant pride. Shakespeare's military observations are so acute that one commentator suggested that he had been a soldier—‘Sergeant Shakespeare’—and A. D. Harvey's penetrating survey of the literature and art of war took, from Henry V, the fitting title A Muse of Fire.

If the British civil wars generated little in the way of literature (though, in the shape of Richard Lovelace, at least one swashbuckling poet) the nearly contemporary Thirty Years War inspired Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, a largely autobiographical account of the horrors of campaigning. Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760) waxed eloquent on the difficulties of the hero's Uncle Toby in recalling the details of his experiences at the siege of Namur. Sterne elaborated on ‘the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counterscarp—the glacis and the covered-way—the half-moon and ravelin—as to make his company fully comprehend where and what he was about.’

In the early years of the 19th century while Europe was in the throes of the Napoleonic wars, Romantic authors such as Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) craved the apparently more honourable and chivalrous days of warfare in the past. Scott, arguably the creator of the historical novel, produced books such as Rob Roy (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820) whose characters were impossibly heroic. Dumas père was another important exponent of the historical novel with works such as The Three Musketeers, and La Reine Margot includes a graphic description of the Massacre of St Bartholomew (see French wars of religion). The Napoleonic wars were the subject of what is regarded by some critics as the best novel ever written. Tolstoy served as an officer with the Russian army during the Crimean war which provided him with the experience which so informs the extraordinary battle scenes of the Napoleonic campaigns against Russia in War and Peace (1864). Henri Beyle, writing as Stendhal, had served in the French commissariat in the Napoleonic wars, and balanced military (scarlet) against clerical (black) life in Scarlet and Black (1831). That direct military experience is no hindrance to writing well about the experience of warfare is illustrated by Stephen Crane's seminal novel of the American civil war The Red Badge of Courage. Émile Zola (1840-1902) set new standards for research on weapons, tactics, and the experience of the French soldier in the only strictly historical novel of his Rougon-Macquart series, La Débâcle (The Downfall, 1892), set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 which includes a vivid description of the battle of Sedan. The Dreyfus affair was transformed into fiction in Zola's Vérité.

The best chronicler of the British army in India in the later part of the 19th century was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who knew it as a journalist who was prepared to listen to soldiers. His collections of short stories Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three sometimes catch the very essence of military life, with its snoring barrack rooms and scorching parade grounds. His feel for the ground is deft: ‘the turn of the pass [see Khyber Pass] fornist Jumrood and the nine-mile [14.4 km] road on the flat to Peshawar.’ He captured the experience of marching (in the Second Boer War) remarkably well in his poem ‘Boots’. George MacDonald Fraser credits Kipling with producing the ‘best comment on infantry war, the best philosophy and above all the best advice’ in four lines:

When first under fire and you're wishful to duck,
Don't look nor take heed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful you're living, and trust to your luck,
And march to front like a soldier.

MacDonald Fraser's own Flashman series of novels, based on the supposedly discovered papers of Harry Flashman, a notorious bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays, provides an entertaining and informative account of most of Britain's Victorian wars and numerous other conflicts.

WW I put an end to any notions of the honour and glory of war. The experience of the western front produced perhaps the best wartime literature of the English language. Although the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell saw war in rather conventional heroic terms, the most famous wartime British poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen produced images of such horror and disgust at the waste of war that they have become embedded in the British consciousness. Graves and Sassoon also wrote two of the definitive prose accounts—both at least part-fictionalized—of the experiences of WW I in Goodbye to All That and Memoirs of Infantry Officer respectively. The German experience of the western front inspired both Remarque's profoundly anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front and the ‘patriotic realist’ works of Ernst Junger. Henri Barbusse's Under Fire and Frederic Manning's Her Privates We both, in common with so many books inspired by the war, concentrated on the experience of the group—not a group, like Kipling's three heroes, of professional soldiers, but of ordinary men projected into an extraordinary situation.

WW II did not produce the same flowering of British literature as WW I, probably because it did not prove quite such a traumatic experience for the British people. Perhaps the best novels to come out of the British war were Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour series (1952-61). Yet somehow the experiences of the trilogy's hero, a 35-year-old member of the Catholic aristocracy, did not really speak for a generation in the way WW I authors had. In fact the best English-language literature of WW II came out of the American experience, notable American war novels being Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1952), Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (1955) which captured the insanity of war and gave a new phrase to the English language, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969). The infinitely more bitter German experience was reflected in characters like Hans Helmut Kirst's cynical Gunner Asch, and the experience of the war helped Alexander Solzhenitsyn address an earlier conflict in August 1914.

The wars of the 20th century have provided a fruitful source for contemporary authors. The Vietnam war provided writers—commentators as well as veterans—with a rich seam to mine, and at least two books about it, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (1977) and Michael Herr's Dispatches (1978), are of lasting importance. As the century neared its close, however, several authors looked back to what seemed its defining conflict. Pat Barker's prize-winning Regeneration (1991-5) used fictional and real protagonists such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; Sebastian Faulk's Birdsong (1994) produced a harrowing portrayal of life in the trenches and was especially evocative of the subterranean war of mine and counter-mine. On a somehow more cheerful note, despite the grimness of so much of its subject matter, an Axis-occupied Greek island in WW II was the setting of Louis De Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), which became obligatory British holiday reading.

Bibliography

• Boardman, John, Griffin, Jasper, and Murray, Oswyn, The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford, 1986).
• Harvey, A. D., A Muse of Fire (London, 1998).
• MacDonald Fraser, George, Quartered Safe Out Here (London, 1993)

— Chris Mann/Richard Holmes