Soldiers Tales 2

Soldiers' Tales #2 is a unique collection of personal accounts told by soldiers or relatives who have lived with their stories. Spanning the period from World War I through to the conflicts of the modern era, these stories are a mixture of the humorous and the intensely emotional. This collection is unmistakably Australian and is a combination of larrikin yarns and other more serious stories that tell of tragedy and often unspoken pain.

First published in 1988, The Radical Soldier’s Tale is both an introduction to and a transcript of his ‘Memoirs’, written after his retirement in 1881. In this autobiography he presents his life as a soldier during the Sikh Wars, his life as a policeman, and the ideologies which divided people from each other in the societies he had known and read about. Carolyn Steedman introduces the ‘Memoirs’ by placing the document in its textual context, as well as the context of history and politics, and shows how it directs fascinating light on popular political thought in the mid-Victorian years. In her introduction she looks closely at the kind of narratives people have access to in different social circumstances and the stories they tell themselves to explain who they are. This book will be of particular interest to students of Victorian history and politics.

Soldier Stories is a collection of short stories about British rule in India. Rudyard Kipling describes the various intricacies of British and Indian society. Contents: With the Main Guard, The Drums of the Fore and Aft, The Man Who Was, The Courting of Dinah Shad...

In their own words the Aussie diggers provide a fascinating glimpse of the many funny and touching moments that our Diggers often hold to their chest. The collection of stories in this book provides a taste of what a soldier's life is like both in war and peace.

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The Soldiers' Tale is the story of modern wars as told by the men who did the actual fighting. Hynes examines the journals, memoirs, and letters of men who fought in the two World Wars and in Vietnam, and also the wars fought against the weak and helpless in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and bombed cities. Interweaving his own reflections on war with brilliantly chosen passages from soldiers' accounts, he offers vivid answers to the question we all ask of men who have fought: What was it like? In these powerful pages the experiences of modern war, which seem unimaginable to those who weren't there, become comprehensible and real. The wide range of writers examined includes both famous literary memoirists like Robert Graves, Tim O'Brien, and Elie Wiesel, and unknown soldiers who wrote only their war stories. Using these testimonies, Hynes considers each war in terms of its special circumstances and its effects on men who fought. His understanding of the psychology of warfare—and of each war's role in history—gives this study its intellectual authority; the voices of the men who were there, and wrote about what they saw and felt, give it its powerful dramatic impact.