Humankind has always waged war. And people have been telling stories about war ever since they started fighting them. George Vlachonikolis reviews Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22, in which Christopher Coker aims “to grasp the essence of war as a cultural phenomenon through its existential codes instantiated by 25 literary figures.” Here are the stories in which those figures appear:
- The Iliad, by Homer
- Aeneid, by Virgil
- Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy
- The Aubrey-Maturin series, by Patrick O’Brian
- “Human Moments in World War III,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don Delillo
- The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
- The Complete Brigadier General, by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Her Privates We, Frederic Manning
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
- Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte
- The Duel, by Joseph Conrad
- The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville
- The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
- Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- Henry IV, Part I and Part II, by William Shakespeare
- The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek
- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
- The Sorrow of War, by Boa Nimh
- The Flashman papers, by George MacDonald Fraser
- Philoctetes, by Sophocles
- Colonel Chabert, by Honore de Balzac
- All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Sword of Honour Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
- Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Read our review of Coker’s Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22.
Image: Combined from Kate Ter Haar and Dennis Jarvis, CC
Michael Krogh 
John Allen Williams 
A very intriguing idea and a book I’ll read. However, he jumps from antiquity to the modern world while paying homage to the Middle Ages only with Shakespeare. Where is Roland and Turpin from the Song of Roland, or the Viking perspective with the Icelandic Edda? These would have provided rich literary material, much of which I would imagine WOTR’s readers are unfamiliar with.
Most interesting. I’m glad Flashman made the list!