Prologue : May 10, 1940
Toy soldiers
"A barren and unhappy period of my life"
Sandhurst
A young man on the make : the Fourth Queen's Own Hussars
The jewel of empire : India, 1896-1897
A taste of war : the North-West Frontier, 1897
Soldier of fortune
Omdurman
David versus Goliath
The Boer War
The great escapade
"The red gleam of war"
Lessons learned
Star bright
The odd couple
"Alarm bells throughout Europe"
First lord of the admiralty
Lighting the bonfire
The architect of war
Churchill's private army
"Damn the Dardanelles! They will be our grave"
The reckoning
Penance
"In Flanders fields"
"Winston's folly"
"A hopelessly obsolete, old-fashioned warrior"
The shame of Munich
"Bring back Churchill"
"Winston is back"
Warlord in waiting
The Norway debacle
The loneliest man in Britain
"Action this day"
Minister of defense
The central war room
Disaster in Flanders fields
Deliverance
"Don't give way to fear"
"What a summer to waste on war"
"Set Europe ablaze"
London burning
Wavell on the hot seat
The president and the "former naval person"
Mediterranean misadventures
Disaster in Crete
- The endless desert war
"Colonel Shrapnel"
Chickens roosting in the Far East
The quest for generalship
Getting it right
Alamein : the turning point
Ike
Torch and Casablanca
Down the garden path
Amid the ruins of Carthage
The strategic air campaign
Stranding the whale
Overlord at last
Summer of discontent
Victory
Postscript
Epilogue : The last farewell
a look back.