Leo Tolstoy then spent much of his time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle. He began writing during this period, including his first novel "Childhood", a fictitious account of his own youth, which was published in 1852. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the 11-month-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854–55, including the Battle of the Chernaya. During the war he was recognised for his bravery
War novel form of the novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires rather than truly realistic portraits of war. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's "Simplicius Simplicissimus", a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War. The war novel came of age during the nineteenth century, with works like Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma" (1839), which features the Battle of Waterloo, Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (1869), about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge