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After his father Darius was beaten at Marathon in 490 BC, Xerxes set out to absorb all of Greece. His engineers bridged the Hellespont with nearly 700 galleys and triremes lashed together with flax and papyrus cables, and dug a canal through the Mount Athos peninsula to protect his supply ships. Modern estimates put his land army at 120,000 to 300,000 men. Many northern Greeks gave earth and water, but at the Congress of Corinth in 481 BC Athens and Sparta formed an alliance. Themistocles proposed a dual blockade: the fleet would hold the straits at Artemisium while the infantry held Thermopylae, a pass in places barely 100 meters wide between Mount Kallidromo and the Malian Gulf.

Sparta's sacred Carneia festival barred campaigning, so King Leonidas marched north with 300 men who all had living sons and gathered about 7,000 Greeks. Persian arrows failed against bronze and wood hoplite shields, longer ash spears outreached the attackers, and even the Immortals broke on feigned Spartan retreats. Then Ephialtes showed Xerxes the Anopaea path, and Hydarnes led Immortals past the Phocian guard. Leonidas sent most of the army south and stayed with a rearguard closer to 2,000 men, who died under arrow volleys on a small hill. Athens burned, but Salamis and Plataea followed.

• An oracle at Delphi warned that Sparta would be laid waste or would mourn a dead king.
• Told Persian arrows would blot out the sun, the Spartan Dienekes said they would fight in the shade.
• The 700 men of Thespia under Demophilus refused to retreat, joined by about 400 Thebans and helots.
• Herodotus records the last defenders fighting with broken weapons, hands and teeth after Greeks recovered Leonidas's body in four charges.
• In 330 BC a shepherd guided Alexander the Great around Ariobarzanes's defense of the Persian Gates by a similar mountain path.

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At the Chantilly Conference in December 1915, Britain, France, Russia and Italy agreed on simultaneous offensives for 1916 so Germany could not shuttle reserves between fronts by rail. The Western Front plan was a joint push astride the Somme River led by the larger French army, though General Sir Douglas Haig preferred Flanders. Then in February 1916 Erich von Falkenhayn attacked Verdun to bleed France white, and the Somme became a British-led relief effort carried largely by the volunteers of Kitchener's Army. A days-long bombardment of more than a million shells was meant to destroy the German wire and trenches so the infantry could walk across.

German dugouts 20 to 30 feet deep, reinforced with concrete, sheltered the defenders, who climbed out and manned their machine guns when the guns lifted on July 1, 1916. Britain suffered 57,470 casualties that day, more than 19,000 killed, mostly north of the Albert-Bapaume road. The fight broke into local struggles for Bazentin Ridge, Delville Wood and Pozières, with creeping barrages and night attacks, and Mark I tanks debuted at Flers-Courcelette in September. Autumn rain ended the offensive in November after about six miles gained, and in early 1917 the Germans fell back 25 miles to the Hindenburg Line.

• Two disgruntled soldiers captured in trench raids revealed the attack's details, and a mine fired early added to the warning.
• White chalk dug from British assembly trenches made them easy targets for German artillery observers.
• The South African Brigade lost more than 2,500 men holding Delville Wood against repeated counterattacks.
• Early tanks crawled at three or four miles an hour, and many broke down before reaching the start line.
• For the 2016 centenary, 1,400 actors in First World War uniform silently handed out cards naming soldiers who died on July 1, 1916.

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Before the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Lord Wolseley sent Colonel Robert Baden-Powell to raise two regiments of mounted rifles as a mobile deterrent on the frontier. Politicians afraid of provoking the Boers denied him artillery and horses, and his secretly recruited men were mostly untrained civilians. Facing Boer commandos of mounted marksmen armed with Mauser rifles, he dug in at Mafeking, a border railway town on the line between Bulawayo and Kimberley with large stockpiles of supplies. When war came in October 1899 the Boers cut the rail and telegraph lines, and about 2,000 defenders faced a besieging force that peaked at roughly 8,000.

The siege lasted 217 days. On May 12, 1900, Field Cornet Sarel Eloff led 240 men through a gap between two forts, set huts on fire, took the police barracks and telephoned Baden-Powell to gloat. African police closed in behind the raiders and Major Alec Godley's squadrons cut them into isolated groups, while the main Boer army failed to advance, and Eloff surrendered by nightfall. A 2,000-man relief column arrived on May 17. London's celebrations coined the verb to maffick, but army commanders judged the siege a waste of resources, and in 1908 Baden-Powell published Scouting for Boys.

• Soldiers pantomimed stepping over barbed wire that did not exist, and buried empty boxes in view of spies as fake landmines.
• A homemade searchlight of an acetylene lamp in a biscuit tin was carried around the six-mile perimeter each night.
• Baden-Powell negotiated Sunday truces for cricket and plays, and told General Snyman his side was 200 days not out.
• Siege banknotes were signed by the local bank manager, and a stamp bearing Baden-Powell's face replaced Queen Victoria's.
• Lord Edward Cecil organized boys aged 12 to 15 into a cadet corps that carried messages on bicycles under fire.

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France and Spain began the Peninsular War of 1807 to 1814 as allies, but the joint fleet's destruction at Trafalgar in 1805 cut Spain off from its American colonies, and the royal favorite Manuel Godoy began looking for a way out. Napoleon sent Spain's best troops, the Division of the North, to Denmark and Swedish Pomerania, then in 1807 marched an army through Spain to invade Portugal. French troops seized Spanish fortresses and stayed. Napoleon summoned Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to France, forced both to abdicate, and gave the crown to his brother Joseph Bonaparte, expecting to be welcomed as an enlightened reformer.

Spain rose in the spring of 1808, and that summer General Dupont surrendered about 18,000 men at Bailén, the first open field defeat of a Napoleonic army in Europe. Napoleon then crossed the Pyrenees and scattered the Spanish regulars, and the survivors turned to the little war, the guerrilla. In Portugal, Arthur Wellesley and engineer Richard Fletcher built the Lines of Torres Vedras, which starved Marshal Masséna's army into retreat. With veterans pulled out for Russia in 1812, Wellington advanced and routed King Joseph at Vitoria in 1813. Napoleon abdicated in the spring of 1814.

• In 1808 Juana Galán fought off French soldiers in her hometown with a cast iron stewpan.
• By 1813 guerrillas, some of them former bandits and smugglers, were tying down an estimated 75 percent of the French occupying force.
• Semaphore masts on the hilltops relayed messages along the Lines of Torres Vedras in minutes.
• About 200,000 Portuguese civilians were moved behind the lines while crops, mills and livestock outside were destroyed.
• At Vitoria, allied soldiers stopped to loot Joseph's baggage train, and Wellington called his men the scum of the earth.

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Before Hiram Maxim, rapid-fire weapons such as the Gatling and Nordenfelt guns were hand cranked, and a panicked gunner could throw the mechanism out of sync and jam it. Working in Hatton Garden, London, Maxim took British patents in 1883 and showed a working prototype in October 1884. His toggle lock worked like a locked knee: recoil pushed the barrel back a fraction of an inch, a cam folded the joint to eject the case, and a spring straightened it to chamber and fire the next round. The prototype fired 600 rounds a minute, and a water jacket boiled off the heat. That November he won backing from Albert Vickers and founded the Maxim Gun Company.

European generals distrusted machine guns after hand-cranked models jammed in battle, and black powder smoke blinded the gunners, a problem eased by smokeless powder, which his brother Hudson Maxim helped develop in the United States. Maxim gave a gun to Henry Morton Stanley's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition in 1886 and toured Russia in 1887, winning an order for just 12 guns. At the Shangani in 1893, 700 colonial soldiers with five Maxims broke a charge by about 5,000 Matabele warriors. By 1914 the Vickers, the German MG 08 and the Russian PM M1910 were all Maxim descendants.

• Charles Callwell's 1906 manual Small Wars cited hand-cranked guns jamming at Ulundi, Dogali and Abu Klea.
• Switzerland bought 72 guns between 1891 and 1894 and had mountain gunners rest the rear on their knees in leather padded rings.
• An Iranian officer who mastered the gun was nicknamed Reza Maxim and later became Reza Shah.
• Rushed out against John Browning's air-cooled Colt in 1895, Maxim's 27-pound Extra Light overheated after about 400 rounds and only 135 were made.
• Ukrainian units fit century-old PM M1910s with modern mounts and red dot sights, valuing the water jacket for hours of sustained fire.

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English kings were sovereign at home but, as holders of the Duchy of Aquitaine, vassals who had to kneel to the French crown. When Charles IV died without a male heir in 1328, Edward III was his closest male relative through his mother, but French nobles and University of Paris lawyers revived Salic law to bar inheritance through a woman and crowned Philip VI of Valois. Edward paid homage, then claimed the French throne after Philip confiscated Gascony in 1337. At Sluys in 1340 the French chained their ships into a fixed wall, and the English waited for the tide and the sun at their backs before boarding them one by one. Crécy in 1346 and the capture of Calais followed.

The Black Death killed up to 60 percent of the French population, and English chevauchées targeted the tax base until John II was captured at Poitiers in 1356, which plunged France into the Jacquerie. Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin refused pitched battles, and Charles V used Gascon appeals against the Black Prince's hearth tax. Under the mad Charles VI, civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians opened the way for Henry V's Agincourt in 1415 and the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. Joan of Arc had Charles VII crowned at Reims, and Burgundy changed sides at Arras in 1435.

• English longbowmen at Sluys fired into a French fleet that could not move and whose crossbowmen were blinded by the sun.
• At Crécy, French knights charged uphill over their own retreating Genoese crossbowmen.
• Charles VI attacked his own knights and believed he was made of glass.
• Henry V died of dysentery at 35, leaving the dual monarchy to the nine-month-old Henry VI.
• At Castillon in 1453, Jean Bureau's artillery broke John Talbot's charge, and Charles VII went on to build a permanent paid army.

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In 376 two Gothic groups fleeing the Huns reached the Danube, and their leaders Fritigern and Alavivus asked Emperor Valens for asylum. Valens saw farmers, taxpayers and foederati recruits and let them cross, but the local commanders Lupicinus and Maximus withheld the authorized food and extorted the refugees. Ammianus Marcellinus records Roman guards trading dead dogs for Gothic children sold as slaves. The Goths rose in revolt and spent two years raiding the Balkans. In 378 Valens took command himself, and after his general Sebastianus won small ambushes in Thrace and his nephew Gratian beat the Alemanni in the West, he chose to fight without waiting for Western reinforcements.

Scouts reported only about 10,000 Goths, missing cavalry out foraging far from camp. Valens rejected Fritigern's peace offer and ignored Richomeres and his cavalry commander Victor, who urged him to wait. On August 9, 378, an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 Romans marched eight miles in the heat to a wagon fort on high ground near Adrianople. Fritigern stalled with talks while the Goths fired the brush. Shield archers under the Iberian prince Bacurius attacked without orders, and the returning cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax hit the Roman flank. About two thirds of the army died, along with 35 tribunes, Sebastianus and Valens.

• Roman soldiers were packed so tightly in the crush that they could not draw their swords.
• Valens's body was never found, and one account says Goths burned him alive in a cottage without knowing who was inside.
• On August 10 the victors failed to take Adrianople, where Valens had left his treasury.
• Theodosius I later signed a treaty settling the Goths permanently inside the empire as allies.
• Charles Oman's 1885 claim that the battle began the age of cavalry ignores that stirrups only reached Europe in the 6th century.

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Before the French Revolution, Europe fought cabinet wars with small professional armies, and French peasants hated the royal militia, which made parishes draw lots to send men. The National Assembly abolished it in 1789. That December, Edmond Louis Alexis Dubois-Crancé argued for a people's army raised by universal conscription: a subject owed the king nothing, but a citizen owned the nation and had to defend it. By 1793 France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont and the Dutch Republic. A February levy of 300,000 men set off revolt in the Catholic Vendée, and the fall of Mainz in July left the road to Paris open.

The decree of August 23, 1793, drafted by men including Bertrand Barère and Lazare Carnot, placed all French people in permanent requisition. Unmarried men aged 18 to 25 went to battle, married men forged weapons and hauled food, women made tents and uniforms, and old men were sent to public squares to preach hatred of kings. Against roughly 87,000 coalition troops France authorized 450,000 men, and realistic estimates put about 800,000 available. Untrained conscripts attacked in massive columns, while battlefield promotion built the officer corps Napoleon later inherited.

• Citizens were ordered to wash cellar soil in lye to extract saltpeter for gunpowder while British ships blockaded imports.
• Army ledgers were padded with the hospitalized, the captured, deserters and dead men kept on the payroll.
• Article 6 banned substitutes, yet wealthy men paid poor men to serve and literate officials won exemptions.
• Carnot reported 175,000 known deserters in 1800, and some regions saw desertion near 60 percent.
• In 1945 Hitler raised the Volkssturm of boys and old men over Albert Speer's objections, with Joseph Goebbels in support.

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The French Foreign Legion, drawn from about 140 nationalities, began in 1831 as a practical fix for King Louis Philippe. After the July Revolution, Paris was full of unemployed foreign mercenaries and refugees, so the king enlisted them on condition that they serve only outside mainland France, starting with the conquest of Algeria. Recruits arriving at Aubagne today can still take a declared identity with a new name, birthdate and parents' names. After a year they may regularize their real identity, after three years of honorable service they can apply for citizenship, and a legionnaire wounded in action can claim citizenship at once as French by spilled blood.

The Legion's loyalty rests on the unit, not on France, and its founding story is Camerone on April 30, 1863, when Captain Jean Danjou's company held a hacienda in Mexico against about 3,000 soldiers until the last six men charged with bayonets. The model was tested when the rule against fighting in France broke in 1870, when legionnaires fought each other in Syria in 1941, and when former Wehrmacht soldiers joined for Indochina and Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Today the Legion makes up roughly 11 percent of France's operational ground troops and has served from the 1991 Gulf War to Mali.

• Danjou's wooden prosthetic hand is paraded down the Voie Sacrée at Aubagne each Camerone Day.
• French intelligence screened postwar German recruits for SS blood group tattoos and scars under the left arm.
• No single nationality may exceed about 25 percent of the force, to stop cliques from forming.
• In the binôme system a French speaker is punished alongside a non-French partner who misunderstands an order.
• The Legion marches at 88 steps a minute, a cadence traced to the sand of Algeria, and its bearded pioneers carry axes and leather aprons.

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Almost no medieval longbows survived the damp European soil, so ideas about England's great war bow rested on legend until the Mary Rose. Henry VIII's warship sank in 1545, and its oxygen-free mud preserved 137 longbows and more than 3,500 arrows. The bows averaged about six feet six inches, some nearly seven feet, with a thick D-shaped cross-section. Each was a self bow cut from a single yew stave, with tension-loving sapwood on the back and compression-resisting heartwood on the belly. Demand was so heavy that the 1472 Statute of Westminster made wine importers deliver four bowstaves per ton, later raised to ten under Richard III.

Replicas suggest the Mary Rose bows drew 150 to 160 pounds, some up to 185, against 50 to 60 for a modern hunting bow. Archers laid their body into the bow, and their skeletons show enlarged left arms, bone spurs and twisted spines. Modern testing indicates arrows could not pierce the front of top quality plate, so the bow's power at battles like Agincourt came from killing horses, exhausting knights in mud and cutting down lighter infantry. Caught without stakes at Patay in 1429, archers were ridden down. Muskets that a peasant could learn in weeks replaced them, and Elizabeth I disbanded the longbowmen from the trained bands in 1598.

• In 1532 the Duke of Bavaria complained that yew cutting broke the forest canopy and let winds topple the remaining trees.
• By 1568 the yew monopolies collapsed because mature trees had nearly run out.
• At Shrewsbury in 1403, surgeon John Bradmore widened a wound with honey-soaked elder pith and pulled an arrowhead from Prince Henry's face with screw tongs.
• A skilled longbowman could loose about six heavy war arrows a minute and send light flight arrows 300 to 400 yards.
• In 1363 Edward III ordered able-bodied commoners to practice archery on holidays instead of playing sports.