HOW can we talk about war?

The city of Sebastopol in Crimea, on the coast of the Black Sea, was surrounded. The Russian troops held out, bloodied, without much hope.

The story goes that during that 19th century European event—from October 17, 1854 to September 11, 1855—a 23-year-old Russian artillery officer wrote notes about the precarious days of the lead-up to their defeat against the allied Turkish, French and British force