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In January 1879, British High Commissioner Sir Henry Bartle Frere, acting without London's approval, sent King Cetshwayo an ultimatum to disband the Zulu military system, knowing it would be refused. Lord Chelmsford invaded with Martini-Henry rifles, seven-pounder guns and rockets, crawling about 10 miles in 10 days behind wagons loaded with officers' luxuries. He timed the invasion for the harvest, but Cetshwayo's army was already assembled for the first fruits ceremony. At the sphinx-shaped hill of Isandlwana, Chelmsford built no laager or trench, then took about half his force out to chase a decoy.

A patrol under Lieutenant Raw found some 20,000 Zulu warriors sitting silently in the Ngwebeni valley, and they attacked at once in the horns, chest and loins formation. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine's men held for over an hour, but his firing line stretched more than a mile from the ammunition wagons, and when Colonel Anthony Durnford's mounted troops ran out of rounds, the right flank collapsed. A solar eclipse darkened the field as the camp fell. Over 1,300 British and allied troops died, and between 1,000 and 3,000 Zulu warriors.

• The Zulu iklwa, a short stabbing spear, was reportedly named for the sound it made when withdrawn from a wound.
• Battlefield archaeology points to overextended lines, not rusted ammunition box screws, as the reason the firing slowed.
• Lieutenants Melvill and Coghill tried to carry the Queen's colour across the Buffalo River and were killed on the far bank.
• Chelmsford blamed the dead Durnford for failing to fortify a camp Chelmsford himself had chosen not to entrench.
• Cetshwayo had ordered his army not to cross into Natal, but Britain retaliated by burning Ulundi and splitting Zululand into 13 territories.

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Digging in is far older than 1914: Julius Caesar described flooded trenches at Alesia, and Thucydides recorded trench building in the fifth century BC. In the 17th century the French engineer Vauban turned siege trenches into a system of parallels linked by zigzag saps that blocked enfilade fire. Rifled muskets and better artillery at Vicksburg and Petersburg made trenches a defensive necessity, yet European armies entered 1914 committed to attaque à outrance, and the race to the sea left a line 400 miles long from Switzerland to the North Sea.

The Western Front trench had a fire step, parapet, parados, duckboards and traverses, while German dugouts on the Somme went 20 to 30 feet down with ventilation and lighting. Soldiers fought with clubs and sharpened shovels, and suffered rats, trench foot, trench fever and shell shock. Gas, tanks, tunneling and German stormtrooper infiltration all tried to break the deadlock. Later, the trench reappeared in Iwo Jima's tunnels, was buried by plow-equipped Abrams tanks in 1991, and returned in Ukraine as the only shelter from constant drone surveillance.

• Artillery caused about 75 percent of First World War casualties.
• More than 300 British soldiers, many showing symptoms of trauma, were executed for desertion or cowardice.
• The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps was left in the front line for up to six months without relief.
• British engineers packed 24 tons of ammonal into the Lochnagar mine, leaving a crater over 300 feet wide and 90 feet deep.
• An eight-day bombardment of more than 1.5 million shells before the Somme failed because shrapnel tangled the wire rather than cutting it.

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Publius Cornelius Scipio, born around 236 BC into the Cornelii Scipiones, reportedly saved his consul father at the Ticinus at 18, then survived Cannae in 216 BC and rallied survivors at Canusium. Livy claims he forced nobles planning to flee Italy to swear at sword point never to abandon Rome. Elected curule aedile at 24, well under the usual age, he was given proconsular command in Spain in 210 BC after his father and uncle were killed there, though he had never been consul.

In 209 BC he took New Carthage by sending men across a lagoon at low tide, telling them Neptune would help. He freed 300 Spanish hostages, won at Baecula and Ilipa, and as consul at 31 raised 7,000 volunteers when the Senate under Fabius Maximus's influence refused him an army for Africa. After defeating Hannibal he was named Africanus, but Cato the Elder attacked his Greek habits, and after the war with Antiochus III he tore up his account books in the Senate and retired to Liternum.

• After New Carthage fell, his troops reportedly cut even stray dogs in half before he halted the killing on the commander's surrender.
• At Ilipa in 206 BC he placed weak allies in the center and veterans on the wings, turning Hannibal's envelopment on Carthage.
• In Africa he used fake peace talks to scout Carthaginian camps, then burned them in a night attack.
• Asked to account for 3,000 talents, he answered that he had brought 15,000 into the treasury, on the anniversary of Zama.
• He reportedly ordered his tomb to read that his ungrateful fatherland would not even have his bones, and its location is still unknown.

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Centurions wore their helmet crests turned sideways so their own men could find them in the chaos of battle, making themselves deliberate targets. Despite the name, a centuria rarely held 100 men: early Republican units ran 30 to 60, and after the Marian reforms a standard century held about 80, with six per cohort and ten cohorts per legion. That gave each legion 60 centurions in a strict ladder, from the hastatus posterior at the bottom to the primus pilus, the first spear, who advised the legatus and ranked fourth in the legion.

Men reached the rank by rising from the legions, transferring from the auxiliaries, moving over from municipal magistracies, or, for stalled or ruined equestrians, resigning status to rebuild a reputation through military glory. Their gear signaled authority, from mail and muscled cuirasses to the red sagum, the cingulum belt and the vitis vine staff used to beat and punish soldiers. In the late empire they shifted to mass-produced mail and spangenhelm helmets, and in Luke and Acts, centurions appear repeatedly as admirable Gentile believers.

• Many officers preferred lorica hamata mail because a torn section could be repaired with spare rings and pliers by the campfire.
• Surviving muscled cuirasses stop high on the torso, because full-length metal abs would have kept the wearer from bending or riding.
• The mural crown went to the first man over an enemy city's wall alive.
• The centurions of Capernaum, the cross, Cornelius in Acts 10 and Julius in Acts 27 are all portrayed favorably.
• Luke addresses his work to Theophilus, likely a Roman official, which scholars read as an argument that the new faith posed no threat to Rome.

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On March 13, 1815, the powers of Europe declared Napoleon Bonaparte an outlaw, six days before he even reached Paris from Elba. Facing a Seventh Coalition of about 850,000 men, he assembled some 300,000 mostly veteran troops and drove into Belgium to split Wellington's Anglo-Allied army from Blücher's Prussians. He beat the Prussians at Ligny on June 16 but assumed they were retreating east, when they were actually marching north to stay within reach of Wellington. At breakfast at Le Caillou on June 18, he mocked a commander who warned about British infantry on a ridge.

Overnight rain turned the ground at Mont-Saint-Jean to mud, so French round shot buried itself instead of bouncing, and Napoleon delayed his attack until nearly midday. At Quatre Bras, Dutch generals Perponcher and Constant de Rebecque disobeyed Wellington's orders to hold the crossroads and stalled Marshal Ney. Hougoumont swallowed French infantry, British squares held against cavalry, and about 50,000 Prussians struck the French flank late in the day. When the Imperial Guard broke under point-blank volleys, the army dissolved, and Napoleon abdicated four days later.

• The general Jomini blamed the defeat on the Prussian arrival, British infantry firmness, the weather and the French reliance on deep columns.
• Records show the British heavy cavalry survived its first charge and spent the afternoon plugging gaps in the line.
• French losses reached up to 26,000 on the day, with another 15,000 deserting afterward, against about 17,000 Anglo-Allied and 7,000 Prussian casualties.
• Wellington and Blücher met that night near the inn called La Belle Alliance.
• Scavengers pulled teeth from the dead for dentures sold as Waterloo Teeth, and bones may have been ground into bone char for sugar refining.

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In 1521, with his gunpowder exhausted at Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés had his engineers build a trebuchet, and its first stone flew straight up and smashed the machine. That failure opens a history of the trebuchet as an engineering advance over Roman torsion engines like the onager, which slammed into a padded crossbeam and battered itself apart. The trebuchet's pivoting beam follows through freely, and its sling adds a second pendulum that multiplies projectile speed, allowing the machine to grow to enormous size.

The earliest versions, traced to the Mohists of China around the fourth century BC, were traction machines hauled by crews of up to 250 men. Counterweight designs replaced the crews with boxes of rock or lead, described by al-Tarsusi in a manual for Saladin in 1187, and the Mongols brought Muslim engineers to build them at Xiangyang in 1268. Rediscovered by modern engineers in the 1980s, the design now throws pumpkins and cars, and it has reappeared in Ukraine in 2014, Aleppo in 2013 and on Israel's northern border in 2024.

• The Mamluks reportedly brought up to 92 trebuchets to Acre in 1291 but still had to tunnel under the walls to take the city.
• Song dynasty defenders draped 34-foot ropes of straw soaked in wet clay down their walls to absorb impacts and smother incendiaries.
• Al-Tarsusi called the counterweight machine a Persian trebuchet, and Chinese records called it the Huihui Pao, the Muslim trebuchet.
• In 2015 a flaming shot from the 22,000 kg replica at Warwick Castle burned down a Victorian boathouse.
• Floating arm designs let the counterweight drop straight down, converting nearly all its potential energy into motion.

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On October 7, 1571, more than 400 oared warships met in the Gulf of Patras in the last great galley battle in Western history. The trigger was Cyprus: after Marco Antonio Bragadin surrendered Famagusta under promise of safe passage, Lala Mustafa Pasha, who had lost some 50,000 men and his own son in the siege, had him flayed alive. Pope Pius V answered by forming the Holy League, a quarrelsome alliance of Spain and Venice placed under John of Austria, the 24-year-old half-brother of Philip II.

John of Austria pushed six Venetian galleasses ahead of his line, and their all-around cannon fire broke up the Ottoman crescent before contact. A late wind shift blew gun smoke into the eyes of Ottoman composite bowmen facing Spanish tercios. Agostino Barbarigo died from an arrow to the eye, Ali Pasha was killed on the Sultana, and Uluç Ali drove through a gap left when Gian Andrea Doria's wing pulled south until Álvaro de Bazán's reserve closed it. Venice later made peace and surrendered Cyprus anyway.

• Galleys mounted their heavy guns only at the bow, since broadside recoil would capsize the ship or smash its oars.
• An estimated 37,000 to 41,000 enslaved oarsmen rowed the Ottoman fleet, and about 15,000 Christian rowers were freed after the battle.
• Out of arrows and powder, Ottoman soldiers threw oranges and lemons at armored Spanish boarders.
• Ottoman deaths ran from 20,000 to 40,000 in a fight of four or five hours, against about 7,500 to 10,000 on the Christian side.
• Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha said losing the fleet was a shaved beard while losing Cyprus was a severed arm, yet the veteran sailors and archers proved irreplaceable.

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Between September 5 and 12, 1914, the German advance through France under the Schlieffen Plan's 40-day timetable came apart east of Paris. After the Great Retreat had pushed the French and the British Expeditionary Force back more than 150 miles, German troops were exhausted, starving and outrunning their horse-drawn supply trains on wrecked railways. Helmuth von Moltke directed them from Luxembourg with slow, unreliable communications, while Joseph Joffre toured the front with a racing driver at the wheel and sacked more than 30 generals.

Alexander von Kluck's First Army ignored orders to shield Karl von Bülow's Second Army and swung southeast after the French, exposing its flank to Paris. When Joseph Gallieni attacked from the capital, Kluck turned west and opened a 30-mile gap that Joffre drove into on September 6. The decision was made not on the field but by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, a staff officer Moltke had empowered to order a general retreat. The Germans fell back to the Aisne, dug in, and the race to the sea produced a trench line from Switzerland to the Channel.

• Gallieni requisitioned about 600 Renault taxis at Les Invalides to carry roughly 6,000 troops to the front, and the state paid more than 70,000 francs in fares.
• Joffre is said to have spent an afternoon sitting silently under an ash tree before launching the counteroffensive.
• The British advanced only about 25 miles in three days through the gap, slowed by refugee-choked roads and fear of a trap after Mons.
• Hentsch found Bülow convinced his army was reduced to cinders, approved his retreat, then forced Kluck to withdraw as well.
• Combined casualties reached about 500,000, and Moltke reportedly told the Kaiser that Germany had lost the war.

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A single Wikipedia disambiguation page for the Battle of Orléans becomes a map of how one French city kept ending up on the front line. The reason is geography: Orléans sits at the northernmost bend of the Loire, the river crossing closest to Paris, so any army moving between northern and southern France had to take its bridge. The list opens in 451, when Attila's Huns besieged the Roman city and failed, and continues in 463, when the Visigoths, already settled in southern Gaul, fought the Roman general Aegidius there as the Western Empire collapsed.

Nearly a millennium later came the siege of 1428 to 1429, when the English ringed the city with bastilles and Joan of Arc broke the deadlock by leading direct assaults on the forts holding the bridge. In 1563 the threat came from inside France, as a royal Catholic army besieged a Huguenot stronghold during the Wars of Religion. In the Franco-Prussian War the city was fought over twice in a single season, and the name itself crossed the Atlantic to Orleans, Massachusetts, and New Orleans.

• The Loire acts as a natural moat across France, and Orléans guards its crossing nearest Paris.
• Aegidius operated as a Roman magister militum but behaved more like an independent warlord holding northern Gaul.
• Joan of Arc's attacks went against the advice of veteran commanders who were fighting a slow war of attrition.
• Prussian railways and Krupp breech-loading steel guns allowed battles at Orléans in both October and December 1870, with the French retaking the city in between.
• In 1918 a German U-boat shelled tugboats off Cape Cod near Orleans, Massachusetts, during the First World War.

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Guerrilla warfare rests on one rule: never meet a stronger force on open ground. The word, Spanish for little war, entered English through the Duke of Wellington around 1809 in the Peninsular War, but the methods are far older. Sun Tzu described them in the 6th century BC, the Han general Peng Yue starved enemy armies by raiding their grain convoys, and Quintus Fabius Maximus shadowed Hannibal, earning the name Cunctator, the Delayer. In the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins ran small urban cells in Dublin while Tom Barry's flying columns in County Cork fought ambushes that rarely lasted more than 15 to 30 minutes, ending before British reinforcements could arrive.

Mao Zedong's 1937 manual set out three phases: win the population, wear down the state, then switch to conventional war, a sequence Vo Nguyen Giap carried out in Vietnam. Che Guevara's foco theory worked in Cuba and failed in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed. T.E. Lawrence compared guerrillas to a gas, and Abdul Haris Nasution, who fought on both sides of the problem, argued that the real contest is for civilian support. The episode then turns to shadow states, the law of war and the line between guerrillas and terrorists.

• Insurgents arm themselves with captured weapons, taxes collected in areas they control and foreign state sponsors.
• In Myanmar's civil war, the National Unity Government runs its own schools, hospitals and police.
• The 1977 First Additional Protocol grants guerrillas combatant status only if they carry their weapons openly during operations.
• Posing as a civilian or wearing the enemy's uniform to launch an attack is the war crime of perfidy.
• Sir Robert Thompson's approach in the Malayan Emergency rested on outgoverning the insurgents rather than outshooting them.