Eyewitness Accounts

By the time of the First World War, nursing had become vital. The quality of medical care available to British soldiers had improved immeasurably since the days of Florence Nightingale. This classic diary, written by an anonymous nurse, is an essential account of the Great War from an unusual female perspective. Through the pages of her carefully-kept diary we follow the author's experiences on the Western Front as she cared for the wounded. Much of her time was spent on the ambulance trains that collected the wounded from the front line and in Field Ambulance stations, bringing a vivid immediacy to her interactions with the wounded soldiers. In her diary she faithfully recounts her own everyday experiences of war, as well as those of the men whose lives she saved behind the scenes of the deadly battles at the front line.

The allied expeditionary force landed on the beaches of Calamita Bay, on the south-west coast of the Crimean Peninsula, in September 1854. The campaign that followed would create such iconic figures as the nurses Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, and iconic images such as the Thin Red Line of the 93rd Highlanders at the Battle of Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Reporting it all was William Howard Russell, special correspondent of The Times. Russell's articles, transmitted back to Britain by electric telegraph, shocked the public and made him world famous. This book reprints Russell's vivid accounts of the battlefields of the Alma, Sevastopol, Balaclava and Inkerman.

The journey that made Richard Burton famous as a traveller and explorer in the nineteenth century was a pilgrimage to Mecca, which he carried out disguised as a Pashtun tribesman from what is now north-western Pakistan or Afghanistan. Having spent seven years in India with the army of the East India Company, Burton was familiar with the customs and languages but the journey, travelling from Alexandria in Egypt south to the Red Sea and then from the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, was difficult and his caravan was attacked by bandits. After the conclusion of his journey, Burton briefly served in the Crimean War, was hired by the Royal Geographical Society to explore Africa's east coast and was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. Later in his life, he would join the Diplomatic Service, serving in Fernando Po, Santos and Trieste among others. This famous account describes a journey forbidden to non-Muslims made by one of the great travellers, adventurers, writers and linguists of the Victorian age.

As a young Army officer, Robert Baden-Powell was stationed in Malta as an aide to his uncle, General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. While there, he also served as intelligence officer for the Mediterranean for the Director of Military Intelligence and it was in this role that he had many of the adventures described in this book, travelling to investigate fortifications. Written in 1915, and including Baden-Powell's thoughts on German espionage before and in the first years of the First World War, My Adventures as a Spy describes such techniques as how to convey secret information using drawings of butterfly wings, how to quickly disguise yourself, how to safely produce plans of fortresses and observe troops and how to get past sentries.

Ryuji Nagatsuka did not know, when he made an application to become a pilot in October 1943, that by the following autumn Japan's situation in the war would be so critical that the role for which he was destined would be part of the most incomprehensible phenomenon of the hostilities – that of a suicide pilot, known to the world as a kamikaze. He and his fellow kamikaze pilots had to be highly trained to crash exactly on target and to evade dense anti-aircraft fire. In this way, thirteen US warships were sunk, and 174 damaged, in the Battle of Okinawa. Here, in this extraordinary document, Nagatsuka gives us a unique insight into what it was that enabled these young men to die for their country in such a way – and to do so willingly.

"It is hard to describe a nightmare adequately, unless you can say how the day had been before the night fell." In late 1945, John H. Noble was arrested by Soviet occupation forces on a trumped-up espionage charge. Ten years later, he found himself a prisoner in Vorkuta, part of the Soviet Gulag system. Situated 50 miles above the Arctic Circle, temperatures in Vorkuta drop too low for bacteria to survive. As an American prisoner during the Cold War, Noble's is a harrowing and unique story. Forced to work in the mines, his weight dropped from 150 to 95 pounds as he pushed 2-ton coal cars. He was also a key player in the 1953 Vorkuta Uprising, a peaceful protest violently ended by the Blatnois. Noble was eventually released in 1955, following the intervention of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Here, in this extraordinary document, he tells his unbelievable story. This is an unflinching look at the true face of Communism and a gripping account of one man's survival against seemingly impossible odds.

William Dampier – buccaneer, journalist, naturalist and explorer – once shocked and delighted the literary world with the scarcely credible tales of his voyages. These were produced from his own meticulous journals, miraculously preserved through years of adventures on the high seas. When not detailing the exploits of the bickering band of pirates with whom he sailed he provided startlingly clear descriptions of the lands, people and wildlife he encountered, many of which had never been heard of by his seventeenth-century readers. This edition includes some of William Dampier's most memorable exploits, selected from his wildly popular A New Voyage Around the World. The resulting collection is a fascinating insight into both the Golden Age of Piracy and the Age of Discovery.

'And, as [the tigress] turned her head back, gazing towards the bearers, I aimed at her neck … and fired.' J. Moray Brown introduces his experiences of shikar, or game hunting, one of the main pastimes for British officials in India during the days of the Raj. This could range from going out to take a pigeon or two for a junior official's cooking pot to a full ceremonial tiger hunt as organised for a maharajah or viceroy, involving beaters and elephants. Brown, an army officer stationed in India, describes Indian sporting incidents from hunting small game and wild fowl and the dangerous but exhilarating sport of pig sticking, to hunting a rogue elephant and close encounters with the tiger, the ultimate Indian wild animal.