The following is from The Sinai Campaign by Moshe Dayan. Dayan had been Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces and in overall military command during this campaign of 1956—fifty-five years ago and only eight years after the founding of the state of Israel. The Sinai clash became inevitable after Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, closed it to Israeli shipping and then blockaded the straits of Tiran, bottling up the critical Israeli port of Eilat. The situation rapidly devolved into an international boondoggle as the armed forces of Britain and France became involved, seeking a pretext to force…

The following doesn’t really fit under the heading of War Stories, but it’s so great I’m compelled to make it today’s post anyway. I’m copying this piece now from a yellowing, typewriter-pecked page I’ve kept with me for years. If technically it isn’t about war, it’s certainly from a man who wrote masterfully about that subject and who struggled, suffered and bled to fight the internal “war of art.” From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon: When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there…

Here is one of the most poignant and tragic scenes (at least in its outcome, foretold but unstated here) in all of epic poetry. From Homer’s Iliad, in the Richmond Lattimore translation from the University of Chicago Press, this is the moment on the battlements of Troy, when the Trojans’ great hero Hector has left the fighting momentarily; his wife Andromache comes to speak with him, accompanied by a nurse and their infant son, Astyanax. First Andromache, foreseeing Hector’s death, pleads with him to withdraw from the fighting. “Dearest, your own great strength will be your death, and you have…

Xenophon was an Athenian nobleman, warrior and writer from the fourth century B.C. Here’s a story: When Xenophon was a young man, he chanced to enter a narrow lane from one end at the same time that Socrates was entering from the other. It was just the two of them walking toward each other. Though Athens was a big city, its citizens interacted constantly in the Assembly and the agora; it’s a safe bet that the philosopher (who was probably about sixty at the time) recognized the young aristocrat by sight, even if the two had never been formally introduced.…