Armed with only a telescope, a watch, and a notebook he retrieved from a dead soldier, William Howard Russell spent twenty-two months reporting from the trenches for the Times of London during the Crimean War. A novice in a new field of journalismwar reportingwhen he first set off for Crimea in 1854, the young Irishman returned home a veteran of three bloody battles, having survived the siege of Sevastopol and watched a colleague die of cholera. Russells fine eye for detail electrified readers and his remarkably colorful accounts of battles provided those at homefor the first time everwith a realistic picture of the brutality of war. The Crimean War, originally published in 1856 under the title The Complete History of the Russian War, presents a selection of Russells dispatchesas well as those of other embedded reportersproviding a ground-eye view of the conflict as presented in British newspapers.
