This magisterial history of the first modern war is on the scale of John Keegan's classics, A History of Warfare and The First World War. In his sweeping, unputdownable narrative he highlights geography, leadership and strategic logic at the heart of the conflict. John Keegan writes- The geography of the battlefield is to me a living reality. I know the appearance of the battlefields, I know the distances between them, I know the cemeteries in which the dead were buried. What constantly puzzles me, however, is to relate the landmarks of the war to its events, chronology, strategy and logic. That war went on for so long four years over such an enormous space the Confederacy covered an area as large as Europe west of Russia and involved so many battles 260 is the common reckoning and so many people that its events conform to no pattern at all. 'How to make sense of the war is the question. In recent years, this became the primary concern of historians, after nearly a century of writing concerned either with arguing the rights or wrongs or simply re-telling the story chronologically. 'The story of America is, in one of its dimensions, that of man and wilderness. The sto

Author Biography

John Keegan, who was knighted in the Millennium Honours List, is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), The First World War, Intelligence in War and The Iraq War.