One man, one world, against all comers.
It's obvious that Cletus Graeme - limping, mild-mannered, scholarly - doesn't belong on a battlefield. He's published three books on strategy and tactics, and is working on his fourth: doubtless a worthy pursuit, but hardly practical.
But Graeme has come to Bakhalla as a light colonel on assignment with the Allied forces there. And at that moment, Bakhalla has a lot more battlefields than it has libraries. There's a nasty little war going on, as Bakhalla fights for survival against the massed troops of its neighbor, the Coalition-backed colony of Neuland.
For Cletus Graeme, it's ideal. He commands a small force of Dorsai, soldiers of fortune who sell their lives in foreign wars to feed their families back home. Graeme sees in them a spark of greatness, a perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.
"In their day, Isaac Asimov's future of the Foundations and Robert Heinlein's of the 'Future History' seemed impressively complex and real. Quietly, Gordon Dickson has been building a future of his own that is far more logical, more humanly real, and with a stronger philosophical foundation than either of those classics." - Analog