Declarations of War - Softcover

‘As in all Mr Deighton’s books, the incidental detail is impeccable: as well as the hardware, military idioms, superstitions and attitudes are convincing.’ Financial Times

‘The stories are written with economy and grace. They’re highly readable and succeed in passing on to the reader... the fascination the author clearly feels for examining life lived at an extreme. His wars are often exciting, sometimes eerie, always sad.’ Evening Standard

‘They show an acute understanding of how men behave under stress, and when action is involved it comes across jabbingly and persuasively.’ Listener

‘Mr Deighton really is something special’ Sunday Times

A collection of thirteen stories that offer an inside view of fighting men poised at the edge of death. Includes a new fourteenth story which appears here for the very first time.

Len Deighton's only collection of shorter fiction, this dazzling array of stories spans twenty-three centuries of warfare.

From Hannibal's march on Rome - when strange, moving objects terrorise the troops of one of the toughest and most skilful armies in history - to the efforts of a belittled Civil War general to get his men to face the Confederate army; to the dawn skies above an artillery-blasted French battle-line where a dogfight unfolds, to Vietnam; where two lost American soldiers stumble across an abandoned military airfield. A bonus story, new to this edition, reveals a very different kind of war, played out in the present-day Mexican borderlands.

Each story in Declarations of War explores the effects of war upon man's character, how it pushes him to act in a dehumanized, machine-like way, often leading to extraordinary deeds, both good and ill. It portrays human conflict through a series of devastating experiences and shows how great deeds are often but the smallest thread in the large fabric of war.