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"You will see war not as a beautiful, orderly and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums… but war in its authentic expression―as blood, suffering and death." In April 1855, at the age of 26, Tolstoy was commanding an artillery regiment stationed on the front line of the besieged city of Sebastopol, under constant and brutal bombardment. Tolstoy's searing dispatches from Sebastopol, during what was the most devastating siege in history, would give the Russian people their first glimpse of the true horrors of war, uncensored by the state. His harrowing descriptions of splintered landscapes, rotting corpses, wounded soldiers and the never-ending roar of bombs and cannon fire propelled Tolstoy to fame and enabled him to discover his true calling: not as a soldier, but as a writer. The Sebastopol Sketches, which formed the basis for many of the episodes in Tolstoy's epic, War and Peace, is simultaneously poetic and savage, remains one of the most compelling and seminal works of the 20th century.