Offering a powerful and often harrowing account of each campaign, the military historian Richard Doherty examines the degree to which Ulstermen and Ulster units were involved in battle. Here infantrymen, sailors, airmen and prisoners of war tell their stories in their own words, and a picture of their courage, ingenuity and selflessness, in spite of terrible suffering, emerges.

These are the men, for example, who survived the horrors of the First World War, where they squelched through thigh-high mud and saw men drown in mire, to speak of comradeships and a trust in adversity that surpassed political and religious bounds.