A young soldier suffering from flatulence provides comic relief as a means of coping with the traumas of war while recounting his most recent battle against the Zulus.

After being offered a 100,000 pound advance to write a book on the twentieth century, a historian/writer struggling with depression takes to London to begin this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

A man attempting to write a book on the Iraq war has flashbacks of violence from his time with a group of marines he accompanied as a journalist. The book centers around a man who is a stand-in for himself, who later tells his stories to an Israeli business man who is actually an intelligence agent in a bar in Frankfurt.

A man reflects on his time as a newspaper boy during World War I. Overwhelmed by the horror of the headlines, he must confront harsh truths about morality during wartime.

When a Soviet state official attempts to coerce a celebrated poet into apologizing for a political joke he made, the official gets a taste of his own predatory medicine at the hand of the poet's vengeful wife.

In World War I era Britain, an Oxford University dean tells his colleague about the arm of war that stretched to his small English town and changed the life of the community stonemason. When the stonemason shares his idea for bringing down German planes, he doesn't expect to be so devastated by the death he causes.

A current university professor and former soldier sits serenely in his office until two students, who are actually his former army colleagues, enter for essay help. The three boys discuss a possible essay topic about a real attack that involved of the army lieutenants of their time.

Upon hearing about an upcoming wedding, a former American soldier reminisces about the time he met a young girl who gave him the recourse to survive the war.

A group of Marines recall their horrifying memories of fighting on the Pacific front of World War II, while a journalist attempts to glorify their experiences for his readers.