12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
WAR Wounds
Battlefield injury, military medicine, field hospitals, amputation in war.
Works
Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of the Trojan War for young readers, in nineteen short chapters. Although subtitled The Story of the Iliad, it begins long before Homer's poem and ends after it.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Villehardouin's chronicle is the eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade by one of its leaders. It opens in 1198-99 with the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly and the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, and with a tournament at Écry in Champagne where Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois take the cross, soon joined by Count Baldwin of Flanders.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
Henry V follows the young King Henry, once the tavern-haunting Prince Hal, as he leads England to war with France and wins the battle of Agincourt in 1415. A Chorus opens each act, asking the audience to let their imaginations fill the small wooden theatre with the vasty fields of France.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
Popular Scientific Lectures gathers fifteen lectures and addresses that the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach gave between the 1860s and 1897 to general audiences, learned societies and university gatherings. They were first collected in English, translated by Thomas J. McCormack for the Open Court Publishing Company of Chicago in 1894–95; the library text is the enlarged third edition of 1898, whose proofs Mach read himself.
Prince Caspian begins a year after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are waiting on a railway platform on their way back to school when they are pulled out of England and set down on a wooded island beside a ruined castle.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
Sam the Minuteman is an easy-to-read story of the first battle of the American Revolution, told through a boy who lives through it. Sam Brown lives with his mother and father on a farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1775.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
The Bronze Bow is set in Galilee in the years of Jesus' public ministry, under Roman rule. Its hero, Daniel bar Jamin, is eighteen and has lived for five years with an outlaw band in the hills above his village of Ketzah, near Capernaum.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 is Steven Runciman's narrative of the siege and capture of the Byzantine capital by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, published by Cambridge University Press in 1965 to mark more than five centuries since the event. In about 250 pages it sets the background, narrates the siege of spring 1453 day by day, and follows the consequences for the Greeks, the Turks and Europe.
This record surveys the eyewitness and near-contemporary narratives of the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople, from 6 April to 29 May 1453, and the perspectives each brings. The library does not include a full text: the accounts were written in Italian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and the standard English translations (Barbaro by J. R. Melville Jones, 1969; Sphrantzes by Marios Philippides, 1980; Doukas by Harry J. Magoulias, 1975) are under copyright, so no quotations are given.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
Hugh Kennedy's book narrates the conquests by which Muslim Arab armies, within about a century of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, came to rule lands from Spain and Morocco to Central Asia and the Indus valley. It opens with a chapter on the sources, chiefly Arabic histories such as those of al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari, written down some two centuries after the events, and on how to use their mix of genealogy, heroic tale and administrative memory.
The Histories is Tacitus's narrative of the Roman Empire from 1 January AD 69 onward. It originally ran to Domitian's death in 96, but only Books I-IV and the first part of Book V survive, covering about eighteen months.
Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens during the Second World War, when Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are sent away from London because of the air raids to stay in the great country house of an old Professor. On a rainy day of hide-and-seek, Lucy, the youngest, climbs into a wardrobe in an empty room and comes out in a snowy wood beside a lamp-post.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Song of Roland transforms a historical rearguard action in Charlemagne's Spanish campaign into a sacred and feudal epic of loyalty, betrayal, martyrdom, and judgment. The plot turns on Ganelon's resentment.
The St Crispin's Day speech is King Henry's address to his nobles in Act 4, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Henry V, first performed in 1599. It is set on the morning of 25 October 1415 at Agincourt in northern France, where a small English army, worn down by sickness and a long march, faces a much larger French host.
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights is the first of Howard Pyle's four Arthurian volumes, drawn chiefly from Malory and told in a deliberately antique English with Pyle's own illustrations. It has two books.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Three Musketeers follows a poor young gentleman from Gascony through three years of duels, court intrigue and war under Louis XIII, from 1625 to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628. D'Artagnan, eighteen years old, rides to Paris on a comic yellow pony with fifteen crowns, his father's advice and a letter of introduction to M. de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Tibeats episode
Northup is nearly hanged and left in prolonged bodily torment after resisting Tibeats.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book I, Chapters IX-X
The trench-mortar shell in the dugout, Passini's mortal wound, the dressing station and the haemorrhaging soldier on the stretcher above Frederic.
- Across Five Aprils, 1863
Shad is badly wounded at Gettysburg and Jenny travels east to nurse him.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter IV
The gas attack in the graveyard, the struggle to get a mask onto a recruit, and the recruit with the smashed hip whom the veterans think it would be kinder to shoot.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter IX
Paul tends the French soldier he has wounded, bandaging him and giving him water through hours of dying.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter XI
Staff surgeons pass half-recovered men as fit; hunger and dysentery in 1918; Kat's shin wound and death from a splinter in the head.
- As You Like It, Act 4, Scene 3
Oliver tells how the lioness tore Orlando's arm, how he bled and fainted and had the wound bound; Rosalind swoons at the bloody napkin.
- Beowulf, Heorot under terror
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad, Chapter 17, Poisoned Arrow
Philoctetes, left on Lemnos with a wound that would not heal, is brought to Troy with the bow of Heracles; Paris dies of a poisoned arrow.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 3
Battle between Bulgars and Abares; heaps of dead and dying, mutilated villagers.
- Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War, Catiline's War, ch. LIX and Watson's note 298
Antonius absent from the battle through lameness of the feet; the translator weighs whether it was gout or a pretext.
- Ceremony, Flashbacks to the Philippines
The Bataan march, Rocky's wounds and death, and the execution of Japanese prisoners.
- Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, Retreat of the Crusaders
The host leaves Adrianople by night, taking all its wounded with it.
- Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, Boniface Is Killed in a Battle Against the Bulgarians
Boniface's arrow wound beneath the shoulder and his death from loss of blood.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The War for the Bull of Cuailgne (Lugh's watch at the Lerga)
Exhausted after fighting since Samhain with only brief rests on his spear, Cuchulain sleeps three days and nights while Lugh heals his wounds with Druid herbs.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The Awakening of Ulster (Fingan and Cethern)
Fingan examines each of Cethern's wounds in turn and names the warriors who dealt them from the wounds alone.
- Cybernetics, Wartime prediction background
The anti-aircraft context ties theories of cognition and control to the injuries and decisions of modern war.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 4, final scenes
Christian is brought back mortally wounded and dies in Roxane's arms as the Spanish attack.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 5, Scene 3
Ragueneau tells Le Bret of the falling wood, the head wound, the loss of consciousness and the doctor's words about fever and meningitis.
- Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, OODA loop briefings
Observation, orientation, decision, and action model adaptive response under pressure and conflict.
- East of Eden, Part Four (final chapters)
News of Aron's death in France; Adam's stroke and deathbed blessing.
- Heart of Darkness, Part II (the attack)
The helmsman is speared and dies on the deck, his blood filling Marlow's shoes.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3
Hotspur mocks the perfumed lord who told him the sovereign remedy for an inward bruise was parmacety and that guns alone kept him from soldiering.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2
Falstaff's ragged pressed men, whom he calls food for powder fit to fill a pit.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scenes 1, 3 and 4
The catechism on honour and surgery, Blunt's death, Falstaff's ragged men peppered, and Hal wounded but refusing to leave the field.
- Henry V, Act 4, Scenes 6 and 7
The deaths of York and Suffolk, the slaughter of the boys with the baggage, and the order to kill the prisoners.
- In Flanders Fields, Lines 1-5
The graves and guns of the field near the dressing station, written in the midst of the battle the poet was treating casualties from.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on battle and on winter campaigns
Losses in attack, the case for short wars, and the strain of winter operations on men and horses.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXVIII
Scott's account of Jewish physicians in medieval England, Rebecca's training under Miriam, her balsam for Ivanhoe's wound and her sedative draught.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXX
The wounded Front-de-Bœuf lies dying in remorse while Ulrica taunts him and sets his castle ablaze.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 12
Rab dies of his Lexington wound; Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar.
- Kalevala, Runes VIII-IX
Väinämöinen's axe slips and gashes his knee; an old man stops the bleeding by singing the origin of iron and then applies salve and bandages.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book VIII, Chs. VIII-IX
Marhaus dies of a sword fragment no surgeon can remove; Tristram's poisoned spear wound is healed by Isoud, a noble surgeon, in Ireland.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XIX, Chs. X-XII
Sir Urre's enchanted wounds are searched by a hundred and ten knights in vain and healed when Launcelot prays over them, after which Launcelot weeps like a beaten child.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XXI, Ch. V
The mortally wounded Arthur is borne away by barge, saying he goes to Avilion to heal him of his grievous wound.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The Battle of Roncesvalles
Orlando, spent with toil and fever, rides to a fountain where his dying horse kneels and falls; he strikes the rock with Durindana, receives Turpin's absolution and dies, and Charlemagne grieves over the field of slain.
- Les Misérables, Volume V, Book 5
Marius's wounds, fever and months of recovery at his grandfather's house.
- Letters of Napoleon, Imperial correspondence on conscription and supply (1805–1809)
Orders on bread, boots, hospitals and conscripts that treat the army's health as a matter of administration.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 15
A telegram reports Mr March seriously ill in Washington; Marmee leaves to nurse him and Jo sells her hair.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Acharnians, finale
Lamachus returns wounded and calls for the doctor Pittalus while Dicaeopolis revels.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. IX (Bull Run report)
Close-range fire breaks the brigade; wounded stream toward buildings used as hospitals and the retreat becomes a spontaneous rout.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. X (Pittsburg Landing, March–April 1862)
Sick soldiers shipped to Savannah for want of any building for a hospital; Sherman's postscript rejects floating hospitals in favour of regimental surgeons; his Shiloh report praises surgeons who treated wounded of both armies.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 9
A man faints at gushing blood, another at bloodletting; a man saws his own leg; a dropsy case relieved by a wound to the abdomen.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 41
The history of Ahab's injury and the growth of his monomania during the long voyage home.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scene 5
After a battle the chaplain demands linen for bandaging wounded peasants.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scene 6
Kattrin returns with a wound over the eye that will leave her disfigured.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, The Hunted, Acts Two and Three
Orin, bandaged from a head wound, tells of being out of his head and of the killing and charge at Petersburg.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim XII, Note
Montecuccoli quoted on the need for secure magazines, hospitals, arms depots and supply places along the line of communication.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim XXI
Convoys of sick and wounded require the shortest possible line to depots.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 4, Of Danger in War
A guided walk from the staff to the firing line: shells, the fall of an acquaintance, pity for the maimed, and the loss of the power of instantaneous decision in the novice.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXIV
Shiloh: bruised and sleepless after his horse falls, Grant takes refuge in a log-house used as a hospital, where amputations go on all night, and returns to the rain.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, On Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles, opening
Ironic opening on the duty both to inflict bullet wounds and to make and stop them as small as possible, before the physics of supersonic flight.
- Prince Caspian, Chapter 15
Lucy's cordial heals Reepicheep's wounds, but his lost tail is restored only by Aslan.
- Richard III, Act 5, Scenes 4-5
Richard fights on foot after his horse is killed and dies in single combat with Richmond.
- Saint Joan, Scene IV
De Stogumber tells how at Orleans an English arrow pierced Joan's throat and she wept with the pain yet fought on all day.
- Sam the Minuteman, The battle on Lexington green
Eight minutemen are killed and Sam's friend John is wounded in the leg.
- Second Inaugural Address, Paragraph 4
The charge to bind up the nation's wounds and care for the wounded soldier, his widow, and his orphan, later the motto of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)
Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Tafas, September 1918)
A village massacred by retreating Turkish troops, followed by the order to take no prisoners; a key passage on reprisal and moral injury.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Christmas challenge
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Chapter XII
Trench fever and hospital at Le Tréport, and the wound received at Mount Bernenchon in April 1918.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Camberwell)
First experiences as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, learning to dress wounds and confronting the realities of injury.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Roland's death)
Brittain learns that Roland has died of wounds, and later receives his returned kit, still muddy and bloodstained.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Étaples)
Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Victor Richardson)
Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.
- The Aeneid, Books 9–12
Battle scenes linger over wounds, young deaths and grieving parents.
- The Black Arrow, Book II, Chapter I
The wounded archer Carter lies dying in the Moat House and refuses Dick the truth about his father's death.
- The Black Arrow, Book V, Chapter VII
Sir Daniel, struck by the last black arrow, dies in spasms of pain in Dick's arms.
- The Bronze Bow, Rescue of Joel
The ambush on the road in which Samson and Nathan are mortally wounded freeing Joel.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Knight's Tale, Arcite's death
Arcite's crushed chest festers and neither vomit upward nor laxative downward can help him.
- The Civil War, Book II.41–42
Curio's exhausted and wounded men cannot break out; Curio refuses flight and fights until killed.
- The Civil War, Book III.75–78
After the defeat at Dyrrachium Caesar delays only to care for the sick and wounded and sends them to Apollonia before retreating.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.35–40
Cotta wounded in the face by a sling during the ambush; in Cicero's besieged camp even the sick and wounded get no rest, and the ill commander works through the nights.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VIII.44
Defenders of Uxellodunum have their hands cut off; the captive Drappes starves himself to death.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Chapters IV–V
Marcus is wounded under the chariot charge at Isca and learns that the leg will keep him from serving again.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto V, stanzas 17 and 36-44
Leeches wash Sansjoy's wounds with wine and oil; Night carries him to Aesculapius in hell, whose story of healing Hippolytus is told.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, Narrative of 29 May 1453
Giustiniani is badly wounded on the walls and is carried to a ship; his departure disheartens the defenders.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, Narrative of the siege, April-May 1453
Bombardment by the great cannon and the repair of the walls each night under fire.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453: Eyewitness Accounts, Barbaro, diary entry for 29 May 1453
Giustiniani's wound and withdrawal during the final assault.
- The Giver, Chapter 15
Jonas receives the memory of a battlefield where a wounded boy dies asking for water.
- The Histories, Book III, ch. 25 and 33
After the second battle at Cremona a son is found to have killed his father; Cremona is then sacked and burned.
- The Histories, Book VI, Book VI, chs. 37–39
Military punishments (flogging, fustuarium, decimation with barley rations) and the civic crown for saving a citizen in battle.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Chapter LXVIII, Part IV, and notes 58–59
Justiniani's wound, his withdrawal to seek a surgeon, the varying accounts of the injury, and the death of Constantine Palaeologus.
- The Hobbit, Chapter 18: The Return Journey
Thorin lies wounded in a tent after the battle and makes peace with Bilbo before dying.
- The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 10
The Hermit tends the lion's scratches on Aravis's back and rests the horses.
- The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 13
The battle at Anvard, seen in the Hermit's pool.
- The Iliad, Book 4.190–219
Machaon is summoned to treat Menelaus' arrow wound: he draws the arrow, sucks out the blood and applies healing herbs.
- The Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes' rampage: detailed anatomical wounds, and the healing of the wounded gods by the divine physician Paieon.
- The Iliad, Book 11.504–520
Machaon is wounded and carried from the field; the healer is said to be worth many men.
- The Jewish War, Book 3, siege of Jotapata
Roman siege engines, wounds, exhaustion, fear and Josephus' survival after a collective death pact make the campaign a study in injury and combat psychology.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, burning of the Temple
The final fighting around the Temple brings fire, crush injuries, slaughter and mass death in a sacred precinct.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Guigemar'
The rebounding arrow wounds Guigemar in the thigh; the hind prophesies that only a woman's love can heal him.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Yonec'
The hawk-knight is impaled on the spikes at the window and bleeds to death.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Chaitivel'
The surviving suitor is wounded in the thigh, alive but unable to enjoy love.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. II, Chs. 1–5
Toby's groin wound at Namur, his long recovery, and his turn to the study of fortification to explain where he was hurt.
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Chapter 17
After the battle Lucy uses her cordial on the gravely wounded Edmund and then, at Aslan's urging, goes on to the other wounded.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book I, Chapters 11-12
Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop; the cold spreads from the wound until Elrond removes the knife-splinter at Rivendell.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter 9: The Grey Havens
Frodo falls ill on the anniversaries of his wounds and decides to sail West for healing he cannot find at home.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 10-12
After mutiny and storm, the survivors face wounds, thirst and starvation on the wreck before drawing lots for cannibalism.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The attack on Lancaster
Rowlandson is wounded in the side by a bullet that also wounds the child in her arms.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Third Remove
Nine days caring for her wounded daughter until Sarah dies at Wenimesset, and the remedy of oaken leaves for her own wound, learned from a fellow captive.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 16
Hagen kills Siegfried by striking the hidden vulnerable place while the hero drinks at a spring.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 33-39
The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.
- The Odyssey, Books 19 and 23
Odysseus's scar is recognized by Eurycleia, and the marriage bed confirms identity, joining wound memory to bodily recognition.
- The Persian Expedition, Book I, Chapter VIII
At Cunaxa Cyrus wounds Artaxerxes through his corselet; Ctesias the physician states he healed the wound. Cyrus is struck under the eye by a javelin and killed.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter IV
Eight surgeons are appointed; the army halts three days for its many wounded, and so many men are carrying the wounded that marching and fighting become impossible together.
- The Prince, Chapter XXVI
Italy pictured as beaten, despoiled and lacerated, waiting for someone to heal her wounds and cleanse her long-festering sores.
- The Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, Thor and Hrungnir
Fragments of Hrungnir's hone stick in Thor's head; the wise woman Groa chants spells over him until it loosens, and he distracts her with news of her husband so that the spell is left unfinished.
- The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning XXV and XXXIV
Tyr loses his hand in the Fenris-Wolf's jaws when the gods bind the wolf with Gleipnir.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Prussian Officer, III-IV
The orderly wanders feverish and hallucinating in the heat, collapses, and dies in hospital; the doctors notice the bruises and say nothing.
- The Quiet American, Phat Diem / war reporting chapters
Fowler's reporting confronts corpses, danger and the gap between military language and bodily suffering.
- The Quiet American, Place Garnier bombing
Civilian casualties after the bombing make Pyle's theory visible as wounds, blood and preventable death.
- The Ramayana, Book VI, Canto LXXIV (The Medicinal Herbs)
Jambavan describes four healing plants on a Himalayan peak; Hanuman carries the whole mountaintop back and the wounded army revives.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter VIII
The procession of walking wounded on the road to the rear: a man with a shoeful of blood laughing hysterically, a singing soldier, an officer carried by two privates, the spectral soldier with the gray seal of death on his face, and the tattered man with wounds to the head and arm.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter IX
Jim Conklin's death from a torn side, his fear of being crushed by artillery, and his final rigid convulsion in a field.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter XII
Henry is struck on the head by a retreating soldier's rifle and walks on dazed and bleeding until a stranger guides him.
- The River War, Chapter XII: The Battle of the Atbara
Wounded soldiers in high fever carried on a thirty-hour march back to camp without sleep.
- The River War, Chapter XV: The Battle of Omdurman
Field hospitals in the zeriba, the hospital-barge blunder, the wounded of the Lancers' charge trickling in, and the field of Dervish dead and wounded.
- The River War, Chapter XVI: The Fall of the City
Bombarded Omdurman: mangled civilians, houses crammed with wounded, decomposing bodies and animal carcasses.
- The Roman History, Book XXV, ch. 3
Julian is speared through the side, cuts his fingers trying to pull out the weapon, is treated by a physician, and dies after losing blood while discussing the soul.
- The Song of Roland, Ganelon's grievance
The Song of Roland gives this tag concrete force through its battlefield scenes emphasize wounds, exhaustion, hearing, breath, and the ritual handling of the dead more than inward psychology
- The St Crispin's Day Speech, Act 4, Scene 3 (the Crispian feast)
The imagined veteran strips his sleeve each year to show the wounds he received on Crispian's day and tells their story to his neighbors.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Book I, Part II, Chapter Second
Arthur, sorely wounded by the Sable Knight, is carried by Merlin to a forest hermit who tends his wounds.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Book I, Part II, Chapter Third
Merlin explains that the sheath of Excalibur keeps its wearer from losing a drop of blood.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Book II, Part II, Chapter Sixth
Pellias, wounded in the forest, is brought to a hermit and then healed by the Lady of the Lake.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter XII
Sigmund, mortally wounded on the battlefield, refuses Hjordis's offer of healing because his luck and Odin's favour have left him.
- The Three Musketeers, Chapters I-V
The mother's miraculous balsam and its use on d'Artagnan's own wounds after Meung, then its offer for Athos's wounded shoulder.
- The Trojan War, Chapters 23–24, The bow of Heracles; Oenone
The wounded Philoctetes and his bow are brought to Troy; the wounded Paris turns to the healer Oenone.
- The Trumpet of the Swan, Chapter 9: The Trumpet
The cob crashes through the music store window in Billings and is wounded by the storekeeper's shot.
- The Underdogs, Opening mountain fighting
Demetrio's band fights from rough terrain, foregrounding gunshot wounds, flight and bodily endurance.
- The Underdogs, Final battle
The circular return to combat emphasizes death, repetition and the exhaustion of revolutionary purpose.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VII
Wounds at San Juan, malaria and dysentery in the army before Santiago, and the round robin to General Shafter.
- To the Lighthouse, Part II, Time Passes
Bracketed reports of Mrs Ramsay's death, Prue's death after childbirth, and Andrew's death by a shell.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part I, Chapter XXIII, The Coral Kingdom
Aronnax, acknowledging his medical training, examines a crewman with a shattered skull and exposed brain and judges the wound fatal.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Campaign narratives
Wars and punishments imply wounds, pain and coercive bodily discipline at the edge of exemplary kingship.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part IV (Omori and Naoetsu)
Hunger, dysentery, beatings and forced labor in the prisoner-of-war camps.
- War and Peace, Book Three, Ch. XIX
Andrew, wounded at Austerlitz, is carried to a dressing station, probed, and commended by Napoleon to his surgeon Larrey, who judges him unlikely to recover.
- War and Peace, Book Ten, Ch. XXXVII
The surgeons' tent after Borodinó, where Andrew sees Anatole's leg amputated.
- Watership Down, Part I, the snare at Cowslip's warren
Bigwig is caught by a wire noose and nearly dies before the others dig out the peg.
- Watership Down, Part II, the Nuthanger raid
Hazel is shot by the farmer and lies wounded in a drain until Fiver, led by a dream, finds him.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter XVI
Dressing wounds at the field hospital on 18 June 1855 and on the field of the Tchernaya.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“A hospital alone shows what war is.”
“it was said of him that he could tell what a person's sickness was by looking at the smoke of the house he was in; and he knew by looking at a wound what sort the person was that gave it.”
“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses”
“The doctor put him in the dark of ether.”
Frequently cited
“Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word.”
“They worked day and night, and did not rest till all the wounded of our own troops as well as of the enemy were in safe and comfortable shelter”
“When an army carries with it a battering train, or large convoys of sick and wounded, it cannot march by too short a line upon its depôts”
“The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain”
“I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made”
“And anon the knights smote him, and one of them smote off the crown of his head, and another brake the point of his sword upon the pavement”
Frequently cited
“Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore”
“Why should he hazard the loss of any of his men, even in a successful battle? Why should he expose soldiers to be wounded; who had deserved so well of him? Why, in short, should he tempt fortune? especially when it was as much a general's duty to conquer by tactics, as by the sword”
“Accordingly he cut off the hands of those who had borne arms against him. Their lives he spared, that the punishment of their rebellion might be the more conspicuous”
“This, according to the statement of Ctesias the surgeon, who further states that he himself healed the wound.”
“appointed eight surgeons to attend to the many wounded”
“Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds”
“The doctors saw the bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.”
“Four plants, of sovereign powers possessed, Spring from the soil, and flashing there Shed radiance through the neighbouring air. One draws the shaft: one brings again The breath of life to warm the slain; One heals each wound; one gives anew To faded cheeks their wonted hue.”
Frequently cited
“He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”
“He had the bustling ways of an amateur nurse.”
“The columns were encumbered with wounded, most of whom were already in a high state of fever, and whose sufferings were painful to witness”
“hundreds of tiny white figures heaped or scattered; dozens hopping, crawling, staggering away”
“by a stupid and grievous mistake the three regular hospital barges, duly prepared for the reception of the wounded, had been towed across to the right bank”
“Women and children lay frightfully mangled in the roadway. At one place a whole family had been crushed by a projectile”
“a cavalry spear, grazing the skin of his arm, pierced his side, and fixed itself in the bottom of his liver.”
Frequently cited
“Nor, except the battle of Cannæ, is so destructive a slaughter recorded in our annals;”
“Many a man lives after hope has grown little; but my good-hap has departed from me, nor will I suffer myself to be healed”
Frequently cited
“Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it.”
“Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water.”
“And the grateful words and smile which rewarded me for binding up a wound or giving cooling drink was a pleasure worth risking life for at any time.”