Combat

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The milieu of armed conflict has been a fertile setting for storytellers since the dawn of the written word, and probably before. The Iliad by Homer was a thousand years old before someone finally wrote down that oral epic of the Trojan War, freezing its form forever.

Since then war stories have been one of the main themes of fiction in Western cultures: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi was set during the Napoleonic Wars, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was set during the American Civil War, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was perhaps the great classic of World War I. Arguably the premier war novel of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, was set in the Spanish Civil War.

World War II caused an explosion of great war novels. Some of my favorites are The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line, War and Remembrance, From Here to Eternity, The War Lover, and Das Boot.

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