In 2017 the director Christopher Nolan brought Dunkirk back to cinema screens with Dunkirk, a film about the hurried and agonising retreat of the Allied armies from the European mainland in 1940. The German advance through France had been unstoppable, and the Second World War was only months old. That evacuation is the best-known episode […]

On 26 August 1346, English and French armies met at one of the most important battles of the Hundred Years’ War: Crécy. Edward III’s English army crushed the French army of Philip VI. The defeat was so complete that it allowed Edward to lay siege to Calais and tilt the whole war in his favour. […]

India calls it Haifa Day. The regiments that get the credit are the lancers of Jodhpur, Hyderabad and Mysore — cavalry units raised not by Britain directly, but by India’s semi-autonomous princely states, which supplied their own troops to the British war effort. Grouped into the 15th Cavalry Brigade and led into the final charge […]

In the first quarter of the 11th century, a force of Kievan Rus’ warriors sailed for Constantinople hoping to join the Varangian Guard — the Byzantine emperor’s elite personal bodyguard, foreign troops trusted precisely because they had no stake in local politics, not unlike Rome’s Praetorian Guard centuries earlier. The city turned them away at […]

“I have sent him a ribbon when, in fact, what he deserved was a rope.” This phrase is attributed to King George IV of England, and the ribbon in question would be that of the Order of the Bath, which had just been awarded to Edward Codrington, the admiral who had achieved victory in the […]