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Major Charles W. Whittlesey was a polished East Coast lawyer commanding the 1st Battalion of the 308th Infantry in the 77th Division, the Metropolitan Division of poor and immigrant New Yorkers trained at Camp Upton on Long Island. In October 1918 they attacked into the Argonne Forest, ground the Germans had fortified for four years with trench networks, pre-sighted artillery and barbed wire hidden in streams, under orders to hold every gain and treat any retreat order as enemy deception. Whittlesey took his objective, but the units on his flanks were thrown back, and more than 500 men were cut off in a pocket on Hill 198.

Whittlesey banned further breakout attempts after Captain Holderman's costly try and dug in. On October 4 American artillery, misreading their position, shelled the trapped men, and the last pigeon, Cher Ami, was shot down, rose again and carried the message 25 miles in 25 minutes to stop it. The Germans then attacked, and later sent a captured 18-year-old with a written demand for surrender, which Whittlesey simply ignored. Private Abraham Krotoshinsky slipped through enemy lines to guide the relief force in.

• Runner George W. Quinn was killed carrying a request for mortar support after taking down three enemy soldiers.
• The men reused bandages taken from the dead and crawled under fire to reach water.
• German fake signal panels tricked Allied planes into dropping supplies into German positions.
• Of roughly 554 men who went in, only 194 came out unhurt.
• Whittlesey received the Medal of Honor and served as a pallbearer for the Unknown Soldier.

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On September 2, 1898, Herbert Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army of about 25,800 men met the Khalifa Abdullahi's 35,000 to 50,000 Mahdist warriors outside Omdurman, the culmination of a reconquest of Sudan fueled by the memory of Charles Gordon's death at Khartoum in 1885. Kitchener had laid railway across the desert and brought gunboats up the Nile, and at Egeiga he placed his back to the river behind thorn zaribas. At 6 a.m. Osman Azrak led 8,000 men at the British center, and artillery opened at 2,750 meters, followed by Maxim guns, section volleys and the new expanding Mark IV bullets from the Dum Dum arsenal. No attacker got within 50 meters.

Kitchener then advanced on the city, sending the 21st Lancers ahead. Their charge, with 23-year-old Winston Churchill leading a troop, plunged into a hidden dry riverbed holding 2,500 infantry. Wheeling south, Kitchener left Hector MacDonald's brigade of about 3,000 Sudanese and Egyptian troops exposed, and 15,000 Mahdists poured from Surgham Hill. MacDonald re-formed under fire into an L and then an inverted V and held until help arrived. By 11:30 roughly 12,000 Mahdists were dead against 47 or 48 on the Anglo-Egyptian side.

• An eyewitness wrote that it was not a battle but an execution, with bodies spread evenly over acres.
• Three Victoria Crosses went to Lancers who pulled comrades out of the riverbed melee.
• Ernest Bennett and Bennet Burleigh fought in print over reports that wounded Mahdists were killed on the field.
• Churchill toned down his criticism of Kitchener between the 1899 and 1902 editions of The River War.
• Theaters showed faked combat films, and Mahdist poets' writings were destroyed or burned by their own authors.

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By December 1914 as many as 10 percent of British officers and 4 percent of enlisted men were breaking down with tremors, mutism, amnesia and the thousand-yard stare, often with no visible wound. Charles Myers named it shell shock in The Lancet in 1915, assuming a link to bursting shells, but men who had never been under artillery showed the same symptoms. The army split cases by proximity to an explosion: W for wounded, with a pension and wound stripe, or S for sickness, with neither, a rule medics found nearly impossible to apply.

Officers such as Lord Gort called it weakness absent in good units. Lewis Yealland used electric shocks and lit cigarettes on a mute patient, and 346 British death sentences were carried out, 268 for desertion and 18 for cowardice, with pardons only in 2006. When 40 percent of casualties at the Somme were shell-shocked, the army kept men near the front and later banned the term. A century on, research at Johns Hopkins and the Uniformed Services University has found astroglial scarring from blast overpressure, a physical injury distinct from CTE.

• The episode opens with a lieutenant who clawed at the earth, then went limp and mute after a shell blew the roof off his dugout.
• About 10 percent of cases showed what is now called conversion disorder, such as blindness or paralysis without physical damage.
• By 1939 some 120,000 British veterans drew pensions for psychiatric disabilities, about 15 percent of all such pensions.
• Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen both spent time at Craiglockhart War Hospital.
• A 2023 report found US artillery crews in Iraq and Syria suffering brain damage from firing their own guns.

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The 369th Infantry Regiment began as the 15th New York National Guard, organized in 1916 after years of delay, and its men eagerly volunteered when the United States entered the war in 1917. Training at Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, put a Black New York regiment in the Jim Crow South: when a shop refused to sell James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle a newspaper, white soldiers of the 27th Division threatened a boycott, and Europe sent them away to avoid a riot. In France the US Army assigned the trained regiment to labor duties, then in April 1918 Pershing handed it to the French 16th Division.

Under French command, in American uniforms with French Lebel rifles and Adrian helmets, the regiment spent 191 days in the front line, the longest of any American unit, and never lost ground. In May 1918 Henry Johnson, a former rail porter from Albany, fought off a German raiding party with his rifle butt and bolo knife to save Needham Roberts, taking 21 wounds and becoming the first American awarded the Croix de Guerre. Europe's band introduced jazz to French and British audiences. Returning home, the men were barred from the USS Virginia, then marched up Fifth Avenue to Harlem on February 17, 1919.

• US headquarters pressed the French into issuing a memo warning against Black American troops, which the French ignored.
• German aircraft dropped English leaflets urging the men to desert their unequal country, and the effort backfired.
• Nicknames included the Black Rattlers and the Men of Bronze before Hellfighters stuck.
• The regiment suffered about 1,500 casualties, the highest of any US regiment in the war.
• The 369th received the Congressional Gold Medal in August 2021.

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By 208 AD the Han dynasty was a shell, Emperor Xian was a puppet, and the northern warlord Cao Cao ruled as chancellor with the imperial seal behind every campaign. Jing Province surrendered without a fight, handing him a fleet, and he wrote to Sun Quan of 800,000 men ready to hunt in the south. Zhou Yu put the real figure nearer 230,000, many of them reluctant new levies and northerners sick on the river. Sun Quan cut a corner off his desk and swore any advocate of surrender would share its fate, then sent 30,000 men to join Liu Bei's 20,000.

After a first clash Cao Cao chained his ships together to stop the seasickness. Huang Gai sent a false letter of surrender, then sailed capital ships packed with reeds and oil across the Yangtze on a southeasterly wind the southerners knew the river could raise in winter. The chained fleet burned, Cao Cao retreated through the mud of the Huarong Road, and Liu Bei seized four commanderies south of the river. The battle fixed the north-south split of the Three Kingdoms, yet its site is still debated after more than 1,350 years.

• Cao Cao later claimed disease alone made him burn his ships and denied Zhou Yu credit.
• On the Huarong Road, sick soldiers laid bundles of grass in the mud so the cavalry could cross, and many were trampled.
• Zhou Yu died of illness in 210 AD, weakening Sun Quan's hold on the recovered territory.
• The poet Su Dongpo set the battle at Huangzhou on the north bank, a site historians reject.
• Puqi, with Red Cliffs characters carved perhaps since the Tang, renamed itself Chibi City in 1998.

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The term false flag comes from ships flying friendly colors to close on a victim. Naval law long allowed it as a ruse of war, provided the true ensign went up before firing, a line between ruse and perfidy that survived into the 20th century. In 1942 HMS Campbeltown, disguised as a German torpedo boat under a German ensign, got within two miles of the St Nazaire docks before being spotted, and after the war Otto Skorzeny was acquitted at Dachau because his men had shed their American uniforms before fighting. In 1788 Gustav III of Sweden went further, having the Royal Swedish Opera's tailor sew Russian uniforms for a staged attack at Puumala to win war powers from the Estates.

The tactic grew darker with mass media. Japanese officers blew up their own railway at Mukden in 1931, the SS staged the Gleiwitz radio station raid in 1939 using murdered concentration camp prisoners, and the Soviets shelled Mainila to start the Winter War. Cold War cases include CIA agents posing as Iranian communists in Operation TPAJAX in 1953, Israel's Operation Susannah in Egypt in 1954, and Operation Northwoods in 1962, which President Kennedy rejected. Modern attempts collapse faster: Bellingcat used metadata to expose pre-invasion videos in February 2022.

• The German raider Kormoran posed as a Dutch merchant to ambush HMAS Sydney in 1941.
• Northwoods proposed faked hijackings, a sunken US ship and planes painted as Cuban MiGs.
• The Northwoods memo surfaced through the Assassination Records Review Board in the mid-1990s.
• An April 2022 FSB arrest video showed three copies of The Sims 3, likely a misread order for three SIM cards.
• A planted note in the same case was signed with the Russian for signature unclear, apparently copied from a script.

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By late September 1918 Germany was starving under the British blockade, sick with Spanish flu and losing its allies one by one. On September 29 at Spa, Erich Ludendorff told Kaiser Wilhelm II the front might not hold for two more hours and demanded a ceasefire on Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, while handing the surrender to civilian politicians who would, in his words, eat the broth they had prepared. Sailors at Wilhelmshaven mutinied against a final sortie, revolution spread, and the Kaiser abdicated on November 9 and fled to the Netherlands.

The civilian Matthias Erzberger was sent to Marshal Ferdinand Foch's railway car in the Compiègne forest, given 72 hours to accept harsh terms, and signed around 5 a.m. on November 11. The ceasefire took effect at 11 a.m., and commanders used the six hours to keep firing, leaving nearly 3,000 dead on a war's last day. Because the German army marched home intact with the front 450 miles from Berlin, Hindenburg and Ludendorff spread the stab-in-the-back myth and branded the signers the November criminals, undermining the Weimar Republic from its first day.

• The terms required 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns, 1,700 aircraft and all submarines, with the blockade kept in place.
• Some artillery units fired on simply to avoid hauling ammunition back to depots.
• US Navy 14-inch railway guns fired a last shell at 10:57:30 timed to land just before 11.
• French runner Augustin Trébuchon was killed at 10:45 carrying word that soup would be served after the ceasefire.
• American Henry Gunther charged a German machine gun at 10:59 as its crew tried to wave him off.

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The Varangian Guard grew out of the Rus, Norse traders and rowers from eastern Sweden who worked the rivers of Eastern Europe down to the Black Sea. In 988 Emperor Basil II, facing an aristocratic revolt, received 6,000 warriors from Vladimir I of Kiev in exchange for the hand of his sister Anna and Vladimir's conversion to Christianity. Foreigners with no Greek, no family in the Senate and no stake in palace feuds made ideal bodyguards: they swore to the throne itself, and when Nikephoros II was murdered in 969 the guards knelt to his killer, John Tzimiskes.

In battle they were reserve shock troops wielding the two-handed Dane axe, and at Beroia in 1122 they hacked through a Pecheneg wagon fort. Returning veterans were so rich that Snorri Sturluson told of a right to loot the treasury at an emperor's death, a claim historians doubt. Harald Hardrada fought 18 battles in imperial service before becoming king of Norway. After 1066, dispossessed Anglo-Saxons arrived on 235 ships and the unit became known as the Anglo-Varangians, sent to fight the Normans in Sicily. Up to 3,000 Varangians reportedly fought at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

• The Icelander Bolli Bollason came home in scarlet with 12 followers and a gold-hilted sword called Footbiter.
• Harald Hardrada is believed to have blinded the deposed Emperor Michael V.
• A Swedish law barred anyone from inheriting property at home while staying in Greece.
• Hundreds of Greece Runestones in Sweden commemorate men who served or died in the East.
• A Byzantine cross carved by Ulf of Borresta on the Risbyle Runestone is now a Swedish municipal coat of arms.

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In 1403 the 16-year-old Prince of Wales took an arrow six inches into his face below the left eye at the Battle of Shrewsbury. The royal physician John Bradmore built an expanding screw tool to draw out the arrowhead and cleaned the wound with white wine and honey, and the boy who survived with a sunken scar became Henry V. Born at Monmouth in 1386, he had been held as a ward by Richard II while his exiled father, Henry Bolingbroke, seized the throne as Henry IV, leaving the Lancastrians with a usurped crown and years of rebellion.

Crowned in a snowstorm in 1413, Henry ruled as an austere, priest-like king who crushed Lollard dissent, executed his old friend John Oldcastle, and became the first English king since 1066 to write government letters in English. He invaded Normandy in 1415, took Harfleur at a heavy cost to dysentery, and won at Agincourt in the mud, but his later war was a grinding conquest. At Rouen in 1418 he left expelled civilians starving in the ditch until the city fell in January 1419. The Treaty of Troyes made him heir to France in 1420, yet he died of dysentery at 35 in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son.

• A French observer said Henry looked more like a priest than a soldier.
• The French insult of tennis balls captured how little the French elite rated the young king.
• Even hostile French and Burgundian chroniclers did not condemn his order to kill prisoners at Agincourt.
• The murder of John the Fearless on the bridge at Montereau pushed the Burgundians into alliance with Henry.
• Historians call his legacy a damnosa hereditas, a harmful inheritance that fed the later Wars of the Roses.

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In 55 BC Caesar's fleet stalled off Britain until the aquilifer of the 10th Legion leapt into the surf with the eagle, and the troops followed rather than lose it. That reflex was centuries in the making. Early Rome armed its citizens by wealth under the Servian census, but after the Gauls sacked the city following the Allia in 387 BC it reorganized by age and experience: young hastati in front, principes behind, veteran triarii kneeling at the rear, spaced in a quincunx so lines could pass through each other. The professional legion of about 5,000 men was built from eight-man tent groups, centuries under 60 centurions, and immunes such as engineers, clerks and medics.

Each century's signifer carried both the standard and the unit's savings and burial fund, tying every soldier's money to the rallying point. Pay of 225 denarii a year, loot and a retirement of about 3,000 denarii or frontier land sat beside the fustuarium, death by beating at the hands of comrades, and decimation. Once Marius, Sulla and Caesar paid their own men, loyalty shifted from Senate to general, and Augustus answered with 28 legions on the frontiers, pay from the treasury and the imaginifer bearing his likeness. The legions also copied freely, from the Iberian gladius to a beached Carthaginian quinquereme.

• The Roman phrase ad triarios redisse, falling back on the triarii, meant reaching a last resort.
• Each tent group shared a leather tent, a millstone for grinding grain and a pack mule.
• The primus pilus, the senior centurion of the first cohort, often retired into the Roman nobility.
• After Arminius destroyed the 17th, 18th and 19th legions under Varus in 9 AD, those numbers were never used again.
• Montesquieu credited Rome's rise to its readiness to drop its own practices for better ones taken from enemies.