There is no time completely free from conflict, in which war is not part of culture: we carry it with us in our past, and its shadow looms large in the future as a threat. But what is war for those who have not experienced it firsthand? And where does the wealth of images and stories that nourish and shape our understanding of the phenomenon come from? Are they impartial? Do they not obey certain codes and purposes? This is not a book about the nature of wars, but about the representations of them offered in literature, the visual arts, and the media, through which individual and collective memory are intertwined. More than a research topic, it is an intellectual challenge: how to think about and how to speak about war? Antonio Monegal addresses some of the questions raised by the treatment of war in our tradition, from epic to tragedy and elegy, in an attempt to define an ethics of representation capable of doing justice to the unspeakable.