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Julius Caesar is one of a very long line of soldiers who reported their own campaigns firsthand. Thucydides was a military officer and his "History of the Peloponnesian War" was informed by his experience in command of the Greek fleet at Thasos in 424 B.C. and his defeat by the Spartan general Brasidas. The professional independent war correspondent, the unarmed civilian whose pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword, does not arrive on the scene until the Crimean War (1853-55) in the persons of William "Billy" Howard Russell of The Times of London, Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the London Daily News and G.L. Gruneisen of the Morning Post. So it is as well to acknowledge that our perennial appetite for news of war has been served by "amateurs" from time immemorial, in oral history, in poem and song, in legend and myth, in drawing and painting and tapestry.