A unique work, combining military history and travel, studying the most fought-over area on earth.

" Enthralling information on everything from archery to fortification, and from strategy to ecology . . . Holmes presents each battle plan, its weapons, its fighting techniques, its architecture in the shape of forts, redoubts, trenches, its management, its results, and then takes the reader through the terrain as it exists today."
- Ronald Blythe
" Exceedingly well written . . . Richard Holmes is equally sure-footed when dealing with the human element, writing with equal conviction about Joan of Arc, Marlborough, Napoleon, Haig, Foch, Ludendorff, Montgomery, Eisenhower and many others."
- Martin Fagge

Richard Holmes is Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the Royal Military College of Science. He was educated at Cambridge, Northern Illinois, and Reading Universities, and carried out his doctoral research on the French army of the Second Empire. For many years he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. A celebrated military historian, Richard Holmes is the author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed Tommy and Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. His dozen other books include Dusty Warriors, Sahib, The Western Front, The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French, The Road to Sedan, Riding the Retreat, The Second World War in Photographs and Firing Line (also published by Pimlico). He is general editor of The Oxford Companion to Military History and has presented eight BBC TV series, including 'War Walks', 'The Western Front' and 'Battlefields', and is famous for his hugely successful series 'Wellington: The Iron Duke' and 'Rebels and Redcoats'.