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The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme
The Face of Battle is military history from the battlefield: a look at the direct experience of individuals at 'the point of maximum danger'. It examines the physical conditions of fighting, the particular emotions and behaviour generated by battle, as well as the motives that impel soldiers to stand and fight rather than run away.
In his scrupulous reassessment of three battles, John Keegan vividly conveys their reality for the participants, whether facing the arrow cloud of Agincourt, the levelled muskets of Waterloo or the steel rain of the Somme.
In his scrupulous reassessment of three battles, John Keegan vividly conveys their reality for the participants, whether facing the arrow cloud of Agincourt, the levelled muskets of Waterloo or the steel rain of the Somme.
352 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1976
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About the author
John Keegan
131 books782 followersSir John Desmond Patrick Keegan, OBE, FRSL was a British military historian, lecturer and journalist. He published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime and intelligence warfare as well as the psychology of battle.
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April 26, 2016
The Face of Battle is John Keegan’s 1976 classic – at the time landmark – account of warfare from the perspective of individual soldiers. It is not concerned with grand strategy or tactics. It does not worry about the rulers and generals who made the decisions and hoarded the laurels. This is a book about the common soldier’s experience as a pawn on the most dangerous chessboard in the world.
The bulk of Keegan’s book is his bottom-up analysis of three decisive battles at different periods in history. Before we get there, however, Keegan begins with a rather lengthy – and fascinating – chapter on military historiography. This first chapter is more akin to a personal essay than anything else, and opens with a famous hook: “I have not been in a battle; nor near one, nor heard from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”
Following this admission, Keegan goes on to write about the different types of military-history writing, and their various utilities. The tension is between technical histories and battle narratives. The technical histories are “intended as a chronological record of military incident to provide, among other things, material for Staff College lectures.” This is the stuff of Staff Rides and West Point classes, but holds little interest for the general reader. The battle narrative, on the other hand, allows “the combatants to speak for themselves,” and are the bread-and-butter of the popular histories you buy your dad for Christmas. (Or, in my case, that I buy for myself all the time). These narratives are certainly evocative, but as Keegan shows through a variety of excerpts, they can tend towards hyperbole or be used to protect (or destroy) reputations.
As Keegan attempts to find the balance, he is also wrestling with the question of self-justification; that is, seeking reasons why this type of writing is necessary at all. Needless to say, since the book contains more than one chapter, Keegan decides there’s a good reason to explore the experiential aspects of battle.
The bulk of The Face of Battle is made up of discussions about three immortal encounters: (1) Agincourt, about which I knew nothing (it happened in Westeros, right? During the War of the Five Kings?); (2) Waterloo, about which I know next to nothing (I’ve read one book on the Napoleonic wars, which I’m told Napoleon eventually lost); and (3) the Somme, about which I’ve started to learn a little (as part of my continuing celebration of the centenary of World War I).
At its best, The Face of Battle approaches some faint idea of how battle must appear to the soldier in its midst. For instance, there is this description of the hand-to-hand combat at Agincourt that captures some of the physical realities of combat:
This is the kind of through-the-helm view I was hoping for when I picked up this book. And to be sure, Keegan provides them now and again. He gives, for instance, a gruesomely detailed comparison of the wounds caused by the weapons at Waterloo with the hideously refined methods employed at the Somme. On the whole, though, I wanted more of the tactile details: the exhaustion of men forced to march or charge before beginning a battle; the constricted viewpoints caused by dust or gun smoke; the clamor of a bladed battle verses the cacophony of modern war. I know that Keegan was attempting to break from stylized battle histories, but at times, this felt like a standard military history. Of course, this might be a function of Keegan creating the mold, the template that other authors I’ve read have scrupulously followed.
One of the reasons I dallied in finally reading such a seminal work – aside from the fact that I have a hundred unread books awaiting the day my children are in college and I am retired, in three decades or so, if I’m still kicking – is that I didn't love Keegan’s The First World War. At certain times, Keegan’s sentences tend to resemble Colin Firth talking in a Colin Firth romantic comedy. That is, Keegan has a knack for composing a sentence that is filled with stutters and digressions and clauses that loop and wind and pause before finally, blessedly, getting to the point.
This style drove me crazy while reading The First World War. Here, I don’t really recall the issue popping up. It helps, I think, that Keegan has structured this book so rigidly. He shows great focus in his writing, with two bookend chapters sandwiching a chapter on each of the three featured battles. Sticking with this format, with minimal digressions, allows for a lot of efficiency. Keegan covers a great deal of ground in only 343 pages. Aside from a few moments of existential doubt in his opening essay, he writes authoritatively and with confidence.
Keegan does a fine job in analyzing his three picked battles. Ultimately, though, this book’s resonance comes from its approach, more so than its content. At least, that’s why I’m glad I finally got around to reading this. Going forward, I’ll probably be more attuned, and appreciative, of Keegan’s influence on the numerous historical volumes that are right now sitting unread on a groaning and partially-collapsed IKEA bookshelf that I put together while drunk.
The bulk of Keegan’s book is his bottom-up analysis of three decisive battles at different periods in history. Before we get there, however, Keegan begins with a rather lengthy – and fascinating – chapter on military historiography. This first chapter is more akin to a personal essay than anything else, and opens with a famous hook: “I have not been in a battle; nor near one, nor heard from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”
Following this admission, Keegan goes on to write about the different types of military-history writing, and their various utilities. The tension is between technical histories and battle narratives. The technical histories are “intended as a chronological record of military incident to provide, among other things, material for Staff College lectures.” This is the stuff of Staff Rides and West Point classes, but holds little interest for the general reader. The battle narrative, on the other hand, allows “the combatants to speak for themselves,” and are the bread-and-butter of the popular histories you buy your dad for Christmas. (Or, in my case, that I buy for myself all the time). These narratives are certainly evocative, but as Keegan shows through a variety of excerpts, they can tend towards hyperbole or be used to protect (or destroy) reputations.
As Keegan attempts to find the balance, he is also wrestling with the question of self-justification; that is, seeking reasons why this type of writing is necessary at all. Needless to say, since the book contains more than one chapter, Keegan decides there’s a good reason to explore the experiential aspects of battle.
The bulk of The Face of Battle is made up of discussions about three immortal encounters: (1) Agincourt, about which I knew nothing (it happened in Westeros, right? During the War of the Five Kings?); (2) Waterloo, about which I know next to nothing (I’ve read one book on the Napoleonic wars, which I’m told Napoleon eventually lost); and (3) the Somme, about which I’ve started to learn a little (as part of my continuing celebration of the centenary of World War I).
At its best, The Face of Battle approaches some faint idea of how battle must appear to the soldier in its midst. For instance, there is this description of the hand-to-hand combat at Agincourt that captures some of the physical realities of combat:
At Agincourt, where the man-at-arms bore lance, sword, dagger, mace or battleaxe, his ability to kill or wound was restricted to the circle centered on his own body, within which his reach allowed him to club, slash or stab. Prevented by the throng at their backs from dodging, side-stepping or retreating from the blows and thrusts directed at them by their English opponents, the individual French man-at-arms must shortly have begun to lose their man-to-man fights, collecting blows on the head or limbs which, even through armor, were sufficiently bruising or stunning to make them drop their weapons or lose their balance or footing. Within minutes, perhaps seconds, of hand-to-hand fighting being joined, some of them would have fallen, their bodies lying at the feet of their comrades, further impeding the movement of individuals and thus offering an obstacle to the advance of the whole column.
This is the kind of through-the-helm view I was hoping for when I picked up this book. And to be sure, Keegan provides them now and again. He gives, for instance, a gruesomely detailed comparison of the wounds caused by the weapons at Waterloo with the hideously refined methods employed at the Somme. On the whole, though, I wanted more of the tactile details: the exhaustion of men forced to march or charge before beginning a battle; the constricted viewpoints caused by dust or gun smoke; the clamor of a bladed battle verses the cacophony of modern war. I know that Keegan was attempting to break from stylized battle histories, but at times, this felt like a standard military history. Of course, this might be a function of Keegan creating the mold, the template that other authors I’ve read have scrupulously followed.
One of the reasons I dallied in finally reading such a seminal work – aside from the fact that I have a hundred unread books awaiting the day my children are in college and I am retired, in three decades or so, if I’m still kicking – is that I didn't love Keegan’s The First World War. At certain times, Keegan’s sentences tend to resemble Colin Firth talking in a Colin Firth romantic comedy. That is, Keegan has a knack for composing a sentence that is filled with stutters and digressions and clauses that loop and wind and pause before finally, blessedly, getting to the point.
This style drove me crazy while reading The First World War. Here, I don’t really recall the issue popping up. It helps, I think, that Keegan has structured this book so rigidly. He shows great focus in his writing, with two bookend chapters sandwiching a chapter on each of the three featured battles. Sticking with this format, with minimal digressions, allows for a lot of efficiency. Keegan covers a great deal of ground in only 343 pages. Aside from a few moments of existential doubt in his opening essay, he writes authoritatively and with confidence.
Keegan does a fine job in analyzing his three picked battles. Ultimately, though, this book’s resonance comes from its approach, more so than its content. At least, that’s why I’m glad I finally got around to reading this. Going forward, I’ll probably be more attuned, and appreciative, of Keegan’s influence on the numerous historical volumes that are right now sitting unread on a groaning and partially-collapsed IKEA bookshelf that I put together while drunk.
April 5, 2012
As a just-get-to-the-fighting teenager I tried to read The Face of Battle and was baffled by the humanist erudition of Keegan’s introduction, a long historiographic essay that, I now see, echoes Virginia Woolf’s manifesto “Modern Fiction” and applies its prescriptions to historical prose. Keegan called to writers of military history as Woolf called to the novelists of her time – “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected or incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” Keegan wanted historians to turn away from the construction of tidy panoptic narratives of battle and acknowledge the horizonless confusion experienced by even the most well-informed participants of those battles; wanted them to understand that most soldiers don't even know when they are engaged in battle, or at least "battle" as it was understood by the Victorians: a national apotheosis or histrionic downfall; the Hinge of Destiny; and he recommended the historian read and take to heart the chaotic combat scenes in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, just as Woolf prescribed Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov to the fiction writer tempted by pat characterization, superficial psychology, all-too-conclusive action, and purely material relations.
Keegan had it in for the “battle piece” – the sonorous, superbly modulated, rhetorical-declamatory mode of recounting battle; the stagey conventions under which all action is directed and decisive, all figures victors or vanquished, steadfast or yielding; a form Romantically colored and full of movement but for all that unable to convey a credible picture of the action, the colliding bodies, and presenting an “extreme uniformity of human behavior” in situations we know to be marked by jarring contrasts and a grotesque simultaneity. In a reading I’m too ignorant to evaluate, Keegan traces the battle piece to Julius Caesar’s self-promoting, politically savvy memoirs of the conquest of Gaul (mannequin legions waxing in his presence, waning in his absence), and argues that Greek military history (Xenophon, Thucydides) can offer an alternative tradition – one more formally relaxed, decentered and diffuse, as well as more attentive to the fickle, individually wayward responses of men in battle. And when we try to visualize Napoleonic battles, Keegan cautions us to avoid the Salon painting of Second Empire France and Victorian England – the ridiculous CGI of its time, apparently – all those paintings “which by their combination of photographic observation of detail with defiance of physical laws anticipate the work of the Surrealists.” As a contemporary critic, Baudelaire was harsher, calling exhibitions of battle scenes trade fairs for army contractors, vulgar hubbub of boot- and knapsack-makers; and of the soldier-painter Horace Vernet, Baudelaire said, “I hate this man because his pictures are not painting, but a sort of agile and frequent masturbation, an irritation of the French epidermis.”
Given the influence I’m told this book has had, Keegan would seem to have succeeded in his effort to convince historians to treat the face of battle as something fugitive and multiform, appearing in many guises to participants variously affected by simple position, by wounds, sleeplessness, hunger, cold, terror, alcohol, noise, and smoke. I was particularly struck by an account of Waterloo Keegan quotes, that of the British gunner officer Mercer:
So appeared the grand French cavalry charges – an irresistibly operatic subject for later painters of the battle – to one veteran. This book’s classic status is understandable because Keegan installs battle as a image of life itself – a welter of particulars we suspect must mean something, decide something, must in the end make a shape, a shape about which we hazard and discard, or fiercely cling to, guesses and theories and stories. Something is happening to us – over the ridge, through that smoke – just at the edge of our grasp.
Keegan had it in for the “battle piece” – the sonorous, superbly modulated, rhetorical-declamatory mode of recounting battle; the stagey conventions under which all action is directed and decisive, all figures victors or vanquished, steadfast or yielding; a form Romantically colored and full of movement but for all that unable to convey a credible picture of the action, the colliding bodies, and presenting an “extreme uniformity of human behavior” in situations we know to be marked by jarring contrasts and a grotesque simultaneity. In a reading I’m too ignorant to evaluate, Keegan traces the battle piece to Julius Caesar’s self-promoting, politically savvy memoirs of the conquest of Gaul (mannequin legions waxing in his presence, waning in his absence), and argues that Greek military history (Xenophon, Thucydides) can offer an alternative tradition – one more formally relaxed, decentered and diffuse, as well as more attentive to the fickle, individually wayward responses of men in battle. And when we try to visualize Napoleonic battles, Keegan cautions us to avoid the Salon painting of Second Empire France and Victorian England – the ridiculous CGI of its time, apparently – all those paintings “which by their combination of photographic observation of detail with defiance of physical laws anticipate the work of the Surrealists.” As a contemporary critic, Baudelaire was harsher, calling exhibitions of battle scenes trade fairs for army contractors, vulgar hubbub of boot- and knapsack-makers; and of the soldier-painter Horace Vernet, Baudelaire said, “I hate this man because his pictures are not painting, but a sort of agile and frequent masturbation, an irritation of the French epidermis.”
Given the influence I’m told this book has had, Keegan would seem to have succeeded in his effort to convince historians to treat the face of battle as something fugitive and multiform, appearing in many guises to participants variously affected by simple position, by wounds, sleeplessness, hunger, cold, terror, alcohol, noise, and smoke. I was particularly struck by an account of Waterloo Keegan quotes, that of the British gunner officer Mercer:
Of what was transacting in the front of the battle we could see nothing, because the ridge in which our first line was posted was much higher than the ground we occupied. Of that line itself we could see only the few squares of infantry immediately next to us, with the intervening batteries. From time to time bodies of cavalry swept over the summit between the squares, and, dispersing on the reverse of the position, vanished again, I know not how.
So appeared the grand French cavalry charges – an irresistibly operatic subject for later painters of the battle – to one veteran. This book’s classic status is understandable because Keegan installs battle as a image of life itself – a welter of particulars we suspect must mean something, decide something, must in the end make a shape, a shape about which we hazard and discard, or fiercely cling to, guesses and theories and stories. Something is happening to us – over the ridge, through that smoke – just at the edge of our grasp.
September 17, 2018
I debated between being objective about this nonfiction or just reviewing it based on my gut feeling.
In the end, I had to give it a 5 for good analysis and its own bright objectivity.
But for myself, I have to wonder why I read military history and why, after each time I do it, I feel sullied and unclean. If I leave enjoyment out of it, I did learn a lot about the details of these battles and the author did his very best to bring in all sides of the battles, not just what-ifs and strategy, but a lifetime of critical thinking.
I really appreciated that. And, a point-of-fact, I would absolutely recommend this book for all military buffs and history buffs. He's not only pretty exhaustive and wise about the battles, but he has a healthy dose of self-doubt tempered by a lot of experience. But not of battle. He makes it very clear he cannot understand battle from direct knowledge. But more importantly, neither can almost anyone. :)
But, of course, any history is going to rest or fall on its details and analysis. Fortunately, this one comes through with flying colors. :)
But again... I really didn't *enjoy* this text all that much. Be it mood or distaste, I generally don't go out of my way to read about war and for that reason alone I had a hard time liking it. And yet I can still appreciate a good dose of new knowledge, so it balances out.
In the end, I had to give it a 5 for good analysis and its own bright objectivity.
But for myself, I have to wonder why I read military history and why, after each time I do it, I feel sullied and unclean. If I leave enjoyment out of it, I did learn a lot about the details of these battles and the author did his very best to bring in all sides of the battles, not just what-ifs and strategy, but a lifetime of critical thinking.
I really appreciated that. And, a point-of-fact, I would absolutely recommend this book for all military buffs and history buffs. He's not only pretty exhaustive and wise about the battles, but he has a healthy dose of self-doubt tempered by a lot of experience. But not of battle. He makes it very clear he cannot understand battle from direct knowledge. But more importantly, neither can almost anyone. :)
But, of course, any history is going to rest or fall on its details and analysis. Fortunately, this one comes through with flying colors. :)
But again... I really didn't *enjoy* this text all that much. Be it mood or distaste, I generally don't go out of my way to read about war and for that reason alone I had a hard time liking it. And yet I can still appreciate a good dose of new knowledge, so it balances out.
April 16, 2021
Military historiography is one of the oldest literary genres (e.g. Herodotus and Thucydides). However for many years if a reader wanted to learn about the human experience of being in the midst of battle they needed to read the accounts of novelists such as Tolstoy and Stendhal.
This book purports to provide a nonfiction analysis of the experience of battle from the viewpoint of those doing the fighting. It does this by combining carefully considered guesswork with the available data and reports for three major battles—Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the first day of the Somme (1916). The span of years between 1415 and 1916 allows comparison of what changed and what stayed the same for soldiers in the field. Near the end of the book this information is combined with knowledge of modern technology and psychology to speculated on the future of war.
One constant about battle is that life is miserable for the foot soldier. It is also true that they have little idea of what's going on beyond their immediate location.
It is also my observation that prepared defenders almost always have an advantage over the attackers—thus the advantage of surprise attack. Big armies move slowly and can't be hidden so the three battles being studied in this book were not a surprise to any of those involved.
I found it interesting to note differences for the role of religion between the three battles. Many combatants took Christian Communion prior to the battle at Agincourt and Somme, but there's no record of that taking place at Waterloo. As a matter of fact, Wellington's army had no chaplains. Based on these difference one could surmise that the Georgian period was less religious than the Edwardian period. Perhaps this was due to the left over effects of the Enlightenment, and that revivalism of the Victorian era created the enhanced concern for religion by the early 20th century. (These speculations are my own and not from the book.)
In the final chapter the author examines what we know from modern psychology about those subjected to the stress of battle.
Also in the final chapter the author considers the future of war and the changes in technology that affect it. He ultimately supposes that war will grow increasingly horrific, regardless of the perks and amenities nations attempt to provide their armies, such as pensions and air conditioned tanks. The book concludes with the following comment.
This book purports to provide a nonfiction analysis of the experience of battle from the viewpoint of those doing the fighting. It does this by combining carefully considered guesswork with the available data and reports for three major battles—Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the first day of the Somme (1916). The span of years between 1415 and 1916 allows comparison of what changed and what stayed the same for soldiers in the field. Near the end of the book this information is combined with knowledge of modern technology and psychology to speculated on the future of war.
One constant about battle is that life is miserable for the foot soldier. It is also true that they have little idea of what's going on beyond their immediate location.
"Ordinary soldiers do not think of themselves, in life-and-death situations, as subordinate members of whatever formal military organization it is to which authority has assigned them, but as equals within a very tiny group...."In the heat of fighting, running away is more dangerous and remaining engaged, however the sight of seeing ones compatriots running away is very contagious. The job of their leaders is to hold individuals to a collective fate. One of the strongest motivations to remain in the battle is to avoid the appearance of betrayal of their fighting companions.
It is also my observation that prepared defenders almost always have an advantage over the attackers—thus the advantage of surprise attack. Big armies move slowly and can't be hidden so the three battles being studied in this book were not a surprise to any of those involved.
I found it interesting to note differences for the role of religion between the three battles. Many combatants took Christian Communion prior to the battle at Agincourt and Somme, but there's no record of that taking place at Waterloo. As a matter of fact, Wellington's army had no chaplains. Based on these difference one could surmise that the Georgian period was less religious than the Edwardian period. Perhaps this was due to the left over effects of the Enlightenment, and that revivalism of the Victorian era created the enhanced concern for religion by the early 20th century. (These speculations are my own and not from the book.)
In the final chapter the author examines what we know from modern psychology about those subjected to the stress of battle.
Men whose symptoms we can now recognize as those of true psychiatric breakdown were shot for desertion during the first two years of the First World War, and the fear of the death penalty yielded a multitude of ‘hysterical conversion symptoms’ (by which men lose the use of limbs, speech or sight rather than demonstrate straightforward displays of anxiety). The army eventually reconciled itself to the inescapable fact of the breakdown of so many of its soldiers by inventing the notion of ‘shellshock’ which suggested for it a single physical cause; and treated the soldiers so affected in what were called N.Y.D.N. (Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous) hospitals. But any statistics of the proportion of psychiatric casualties to all battle casualties for 1914-18 remain hidden.I noticed that this book made no mention of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This made me wonder when that term came into common usage. According to this Wikipedia article the term "post-traumatic stress disorder" was first proposed in 1978. This book was first published in 1976.
In the Second World War, however, the psychiatrists of the British and, to an even greater extent the American, medical corps were able to insist on a proper recognition and treatment of psychiatric cases, their hand being much strengthened by their success in teaching the armies how to identify among recruits those particularly suited for the specialist military functions it was increasingly necessary to fill and those most likely to make no sort of soldier at all. As a result, we now have some reliable statistical material: and it reveals that, despite the system of rejection the psychiatrists instituted, psychiatric casualties at every stage of the war formed a significant percentage of all battle casualties, diagnosed as ‘exhaustion’ cases in their simplest form and as ‘neuro-psychiatric’ in their more aggravated, ‘Depending on the type of battle,’ wrote one of the British army’s senior psychiatrists, ‘2% to 30% of all casualties may be psychiatric.’ His evidence revealed that, of all battle casualties, ten to fifteen per cent were psychiatric during the ‘active’ phase of the Battle of France in 1940, ten to twenty per cent during the first ten days of the Normandy battle and twenty per cent during the two latter months, seven to ten per cent in the Middle East in the middle of 1942 and eleven per cent in the first two months of the Italian campaign. Many of these, perhaps as many as ninety per cent, were eventually returned to some form of duty, more or less demanding, but even among those judged fit to be returned quickly to their fighting unit ‘(figures varied from 70% to 56%) ... some 5% of these broke down again in the same battle.’ Moreover, as time dragged on, almost all soldiers exposed to continuous or semi-continuous combat broke down. As the authors of the American official report Combat Exhaustion explain:There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’... Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure ... psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare ... Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days, The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless ... The number of men on duty after 200 to 240 days of combat was small and their value to their units negligible.The fighting of the Second World War, in short, led to an infantryman’s breakdown in a little under a year.
Also in the final chapter the author considers the future of war and the changes in technology that affect it. He ultimately supposes that war will grow increasingly horrific, regardless of the perks and amenities nations attempt to provide their armies, such as pensions and air conditioned tanks. The book concludes with the following comment.
The young have already made their decision. They are increasingly unwilling to serve as conscripts in armies they see as ornamental. The militant young have taken that decision a stage further: they will fight for the causes which they profess not through the mechanisms of the state and its armed power but, where necessary, against them, by clandestine and guerrilla methods. It remains for armies to admit that the battles of the future will be fought in never-never land. While the great armored hosts face each other across the boundary between east and west, no soldier on either side will concede that he does not believe in the function for which he [plans and trains. As long as states put weapons in their hands, they will show each other the iron face of war. But the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself.Since this book was first published in 1976 I think the above comment reflects antiwar protests against the Vietnam War that were prevalent at the time. The above quote perhaps can still be applied to middle class young people with career options available to them. However, it is my observation that the so-called "volunteer" army of today is made up largely of those with limited financial means for access to education or training alternatives other than the military.
January 26, 2025
There are many things to like about the book. The author’s penchant for excoriating military historiographers for overwriting and vagueness is enjoyable. As a writer he can tend toward density, but he’s well worth slowing down for. His judgments on his fellows become, I think, downright comic after a while.
Most extraordinary is his ability to read details and come up with new images or possibilities. In the chapter on Agincourt, he discusses the English archers’ attack: the angle of the arrows, how the fusillades were clustered, how they they probably came in very steeply on the French, and how they plunked off their steel armor and likely created a disturbance for the horses ranked nearby.
And consider this comment about Waterloo battle paintings that appears on page 118: “The visual imagination of writer and reader was meanwhile fed by an outpouring of brightly coloured canvases from the studios of an army of successful salon painters—Dighton, Philippoteaux, Raffet, Bellangé, Caton Woodville—paintings which by their combination of photographic observation of detail with defiance of physical laws anticipate the work of the Surrealists.”
How about that! As a writer, Mr. Keegan is something of a pistol, which I suppose makes sense for a military historian. Here’s another:
“[Waterloo] was, as we have seen, the culminating fifteenth of Creasy's Decisive Battles of the World and a majority of writers have followed or anticipated him in seeing their principal task as one of explanation: an explanation of how Wellington won and Napoleon lost (or was cheated of victory or would have won if X had happened; “after an exhaustive reading of Waterloo literature, I flinch,” writes Weller, “when I come upon a sentence which begins with either ‘if’ or ‘had?).” (p. 120)
The section on The Battle of the Somme addresses the British failure at length. The section on wounds — detailing their variety and kind at Agincourt vs. Waterloo vs. the Somme is very interesting. Then he sums up with a discussion of how battles have changed over time and intimates of where they may be going. All the way through his primary focus is on the individual soldier, his preparedness, training, and how well he is led by his officers.
If the book has a weakness, it is in the final section called “The Future of Battle.” I found it not up to author Keegan’s usually consistent writing standard. In fact, there more than a few tortuous displays of reasoning. But overall quite a good book, as is the lion’s share of Keegan’s oeuvre.
Most extraordinary is his ability to read details and come up with new images or possibilities. In the chapter on Agincourt, he discusses the English archers’ attack: the angle of the arrows, how the fusillades were clustered, how they they probably came in very steeply on the French, and how they plunked off their steel armor and likely created a disturbance for the horses ranked nearby.
And consider this comment about Waterloo battle paintings that appears on page 118: “The visual imagination of writer and reader was meanwhile fed by an outpouring of brightly coloured canvases from the studios of an army of successful salon painters—Dighton, Philippoteaux, Raffet, Bellangé, Caton Woodville—paintings which by their combination of photographic observation of detail with defiance of physical laws anticipate the work of the Surrealists.”
How about that! As a writer, Mr. Keegan is something of a pistol, which I suppose makes sense for a military historian. Here’s another:
“[Waterloo] was, as we have seen, the culminating fifteenth of Creasy's Decisive Battles of the World and a majority of writers have followed or anticipated him in seeing their principal task as one of explanation: an explanation of how Wellington won and Napoleon lost (or was cheated of victory or would have won if X had happened; “after an exhaustive reading of Waterloo literature, I flinch,” writes Weller, “when I come upon a sentence which begins with either ‘if’ or ‘had?).” (p. 120)
The section on The Battle of the Somme addresses the British failure at length. The section on wounds — detailing their variety and kind at Agincourt vs. Waterloo vs. the Somme is very interesting. Then he sums up with a discussion of how battles have changed over time and intimates of where they may be going. All the way through his primary focus is on the individual soldier, his preparedness, training, and how well he is led by his officers.
If the book has a weakness, it is in the final section called “The Future of Battle.” I found it not up to author Keegan’s usually consistent writing standard. In fact, there more than a few tortuous displays of reasoning. But overall quite a good book, as is the lion’s share of Keegan’s oeuvre.
March 28, 2022
My second time through this book, I was just as enthralled. It's a mysterious combination of history, historiography, and literary criticism. It teases out the way military history so often devolves into nationalistic takes or heroic mythmaking. Most mysteriously of all it unveils the moment-by-moment happenings and experiences of the men who participated in three battles that even those of us who never had much interest in military history have heard about and developed feelings about: Agincourt (which prompted Shakespeare to write the glorious soliloquy in Henry V), Waterloo, and the WWI battle of The Somme. Of course battle is on my mind just now. It's on everyone's mind on Mar 28 2022. This book gave me one more way to think about the way war is unfolding in Ukraine. In particular what Keegan writes about the importance of the weather in determining outcomes feels eerily like what I'm reading in the news--how the French at Agincourt were defeated as much by mud as by the opposing army.
Original review:
I have never read anything like this book before, and I learned so much, and it's so well written, about a topic I never thought would be something I'd want to read about and it had me riveted. I feel like I've spent time with a very wise person who had given me a better sense of what it means to be human.
Original review:
I have never read anything like this book before, and I learned so much, and it's so well written, about a topic I never thought would be something I'd want to read about and it had me riveted. I feel like I've spent time with a very wise person who had given me a better sense of what it means to be human.
January 25, 2011
It’s a rare day that I become smitten with a 75-year old historian, but that day came when I read the introduction to The Face of Battle. I have several of John Keegan’s books, most of them featuring lots of photographs, but this is the one that made him famous – and for good reason. His elegant prose has the right amount of wit and clarity, scholarship and humility, gripping description and hard facts. After an introduction to military historiography that left me – I'm not even kidding – thinking “What a fascinating topic!!” he describes three seminal European battles that took place in the same region: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. I can’t say that you don’t need to be a teeny bit interested in military history to be interested in this, as I do happen to be interested in military history, but I can objectively testify to his eloquence. He describes what it would be like to be a man-on-the-ground combat soldier in each of these battles with the arrows whizzing by, the cannon smoke obscuring the field, and the rain of bullets falling indiscriminately and unceasingly. (I know “rain of bullets” is cliché, but I’m not John Keegan.) And with a considerable understanding born of his years researching and teaching at Sandhurst, he explains what on earth compells the average soldier to endure the misery and danger of combat. To hear him describe the experience of these battles, buy the book – you, too, can know as closely as it’s possible to know what it would be like to fight in another time period. It’s worth far more than $11 and five or six hours just be wowed by his prose and grateful for your life. Plus you’ll know a lot more about these battles than you would by reading anything else.
May 23, 2022
Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare…Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless…The number of men on duty after 200 to 240 days of combat was small and their value to their units negligible.
- Report of the Special Commission of Civilian Psychiatrists Covering Psychiatric Policy and Practice in the U. S. Army Medical Corps, ETO, 1946
Once considered one of the finest military historians of the twentieth century, John Keegan’s reputation has declined somewhat in recent decades, not least because of his strong support for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The argument is that a scholar of military history should have recognized unworkable strategies and unwinnable wars when he saw them. Nevertheless, he was one of the best when it came to examining the psychology of war and its effects on the men who did the fighting. His books like The Nature of War (1981), Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (1986), and this one, from 1976, remain excellent resources for anyone seeking to understand what it means to be under fire, which shatters minds as well as bodies. In Paul Fussell’s book Doing Battle he quotes Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War II, and a man not known for introspection, who, when asked how soldiers survived combat said, “I don’t think they ever do.”
The Face of Battle looks at the experiences of soldiers in three battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). The book starts with a discussion of the historiography of military history, and raises some excellent points. Readers should ask what the authors are focusing on: generals, strategy, terrain, tactics and maneuvering, or something else? Does the author uncritically accept the stories they recount, or subject them to independent scrutiny? Eyewitness accounts are often embellished when retold by old soldiers decades after the war. For instance, there was a widely repeated account of a failed cavalry charge at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (not mentioned in this book) in which the soldier telling the story spoke of seeing the cavalrymen charge into battle with pennants and banners flying, but in fact the British cavalry had done away with pennants and banners two years before the start of the war.
There is also an interesting comment, presented almost as an aside, that I found useful and informative, and which is worth remembering for anyone with an interest in ancient history: “The difference between Roman and Greek historiography, in the words of Professor Michael Grant, is that the former ‘began with politics and the state’, while the latter ‘sprang from geography and human behaviour’.” (p. 68)
Keegan has a good discussion of how soldiers are trained and why that training focuses on repeating a small number of drills and exercises over and over until they become automatic. General George Patton famously said that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, so it is important to focus on simple steps that can be carried out even amid the chaos and confusion of battle. “The army seeks to instill in its leaders the attitudes it does because experience has taught it that its mechanisms of command and control can only be kept functioning under stress if officers will scrupulously obey the rules of procedure.” (p. 49)
Some military manuals do advocate for more complex maneuvering, but in discussing them Keegan makes the humorous point that “it reads like something from a military Kama Sutra, exciting, intriguing, but likely to have proved a good deal more difficult in practice than it reads on the printed page.” (p. 43)
He also emphasizes something which can be found in many memoirs, that in battle a soldier’s focus shifts to himself and the men immediately around him. In Louis Barthas’s World War One memoir Poilu, he wrote that officers were almost non-existant, and even sergeants were a remote and often unwelcome presence; a soldier’s concern extended only to his corporal and the handful of men under him. Keegan describes it as
The book first looks at Agincourt, the dramatic and unexpected victory of King Henry V against a much larger, more heavily armed French army on a muddy field during the Hundred Years’ War, as Henry tried to avoid being cut off making his way back to the coast. His army had knights led by noblemen, but the core of the force was composed of archers wielding the fearsome longbow, with an effective range of up to 350 yards, and capable of penetrating armor at 100 yards. These were hard men in an era when toughness was essential to survival. “The bowmen of Henry’s army were not only tough professional soldiers. There is also evidence that many had enlisted in the first place to avoid punishment for civil acts of violence, including murder.” (p. 110) Some of the soldiers on the battlefield were there because of feudal obligations, but the overriding motive for all was plunder.
Like Agincourt, Waterloo was a battle in which we can see some modern elements, but must be careful about projecting our own expectations on the combatants. “Eighty or 100 years later, the British officer’s principal motivation would be defined in terms of ‘duty to the regiment’...but the modern regimental system had not been invented by Waterloo. Officers were still independent gentlemen, holding rank by cash purchase, which provided a rough measure of their family status.” (p. 192)
Similarly, “Honour, so absolutely concrete in Homer, was for the British officer of 1815 an almost wholly abstract ideal, a matter of comportment, of exposure to risk, of acceptance of death if it should come, of private satisfaction–if it should not–at having fulfilled an unwritten code.” (p. 194)
As Wellington famously said, the battle was “a near run thing,” and historians have endlessly debated how things might have turned out differently. In fact, even if the British had been defeated, Bülow had a large Prussian army converging on the battlefield, and even Napoleon could probably not have pulled off the miracle of defeating two large armies on successive days after taking horrific casualties in the first encounter. “Within a space of about two square miles of open, waterless, treeless and almost uninhabited countryside, which had been covered at early morning by standing crops, lay by nightfall the bodies of forty thousand human beings and ten thousand horses, many of them alive and suffering dreadfully.” (p. 199)
And finally, the book looks at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a day of horrific slaughter for the British, with 60,000 casualties, including 21,000 killed. That large number of dead holds a terrible secret: the fighting was so intense many of the wounded could not be retrieved, in some cases for days, and even those who were brought in found the medical facilities completely overwhelmed; no one had expected casualties like this. “It may be, therefore, that as many as a third of the killed and missing on 1 July died as a result of wounds from which they would have had a chance of recovering if they could have been brought even to the Regimental Aid Post within the first hours of injury.” (p. 274)
The British Regular Army had been mauled in the battles of 1914, so until 1916 the line was largely held by the Territorial divisions, the equivalent of the National Guard in the United States. The Somme would be the baptism of fire of the new “Kitchener” armies, the men who had rushed to enlist in the first days of the war. The British high command thought little of their military aptitude, and created its battle plan using only the simplest of tactics: rise out of the trenches (each man carrying about 60 pounds of equipment), dress the lines, and move at a steady eighty paces per minute across No Man’s Land. This was considered acceptable because it was thought that the week-long bombardment would have obliterated everything in front of them, and the soldiers had been told that nothing would be left alive when they arrived at the German trenches.
However, the Germans had deep trenches which could be destroyed only a direct hit from heavy artillery, which the British did not have enough of. Also, many of the shells did not explode: up to a third of them had defective fuses. Finally, the shrapnel shells that were supposed to cut the German wire failed to do so because their fuses were not sensitive enough, so even if they hit the wire they would go on through, bury themselves in the ground, and explode harmlessly. The result was that the Germans were alive and ready and the British were facing uncut wire. “In all the British had lost about 60,000, of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes.” (p. 260)
The French, who were on the extreme right of the British line, were the only ones to achieved the first day’s objective assigned to them, because they had better tactics, and were supported by more heavy guns. “French small-unit tactics, perfected painfully over two years of warfare, laid emphasis on the advance of small groups by rushes, one meanwhile supporting another by fire–the sort of tactics which were to become commonplace in the Second World War. This sophistication of traditional ‘fire and movement’ was known to the British but was thought by the staff to be too difficult to be taught to the Kitchener divisions.” (p. 230)
And finally, the book looks at breaking points, both of individual soldiers and of entire armies. Keegan examines this and pulls together a number of facts which are not often seen as pieces of the same puzzle, writing that
Courage in battle is a non-renewable resource. The longer men are under fire the more ineffective they become, which makes a mockery of the idea of ‘veteran’ units. They are effective only because they have lost so many of their original troops, and the new replacements have not yet been killed or come to the realization that their future is likely to be short and violent, and that it will end badly.
Siegfried Sassoon, in his World War One book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer wrote that officers and men were used up after six months, unfit for further front line service. Casualties were so high that even if someone returned to his unit after recovering from being wounded, he would find himself among strangers: all the men he had trained and served with were gone.
The Face of Battle takes an unflinching look at combat at the point where the killing and the dying take place, and even those who survive physically are often shattered psychologically. Kurt Vonnegut, who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured when his 106th division disintegrated under Panzer assault, wrote of the fighting in his book Slaughterhouse-Five. Over and over he uses the phrases “and so it goes” and “there is no why” as placeholders, talismans for memories too horrific for words, the places where hope and sanity go to die.
- Report of the Special Commission of Civilian Psychiatrists Covering Psychiatric Policy and Practice in the U. S. Army Medical Corps, ETO, 1946
Once considered one of the finest military historians of the twentieth century, John Keegan’s reputation has declined somewhat in recent decades, not least because of his strong support for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The argument is that a scholar of military history should have recognized unworkable strategies and unwinnable wars when he saw them. Nevertheless, he was one of the best when it came to examining the psychology of war and its effects on the men who did the fighting. His books like The Nature of War (1981), Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (1986), and this one, from 1976, remain excellent resources for anyone seeking to understand what it means to be under fire, which shatters minds as well as bodies. In Paul Fussell’s book Doing Battle he quotes Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War II, and a man not known for introspection, who, when asked how soldiers survived combat said, “I don’t think they ever do.”
The Face of Battle looks at the experiences of soldiers in three battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). The book starts with a discussion of the historiography of military history, and raises some excellent points. Readers should ask what the authors are focusing on: generals, strategy, terrain, tactics and maneuvering, or something else? Does the author uncritically accept the stories they recount, or subject them to independent scrutiny? Eyewitness accounts are often embellished when retold by old soldiers decades after the war. For instance, there was a widely repeated account of a failed cavalry charge at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (not mentioned in this book) in which the soldier telling the story spoke of seeing the cavalrymen charge into battle with pennants and banners flying, but in fact the British cavalry had done away with pennants and banners two years before the start of the war.
There is also an interesting comment, presented almost as an aside, that I found useful and informative, and which is worth remembering for anyone with an interest in ancient history: “The difference between Roman and Greek historiography, in the words of Professor Michael Grant, is that the former ‘began with politics and the state’, while the latter ‘sprang from geography and human behaviour’.” (p. 68)
Keegan has a good discussion of how soldiers are trained and why that training focuses on repeating a small number of drills and exercises over and over until they become automatic. General George Patton famously said that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, so it is important to focus on simple steps that can be carried out even amid the chaos and confusion of battle. “The army seeks to instill in its leaders the attitudes it does because experience has taught it that its mechanisms of command and control can only be kept functioning under stress if officers will scrupulously obey the rules of procedure.” (p. 49)
Some military manuals do advocate for more complex maneuvering, but in discussing them Keegan makes the humorous point that “it reads like something from a military Kama Sutra, exciting, intriguing, but likely to have proved a good deal more difficult in practice than it reads on the printed page.” (p. 43)
He also emphasizes something which can be found in many memoirs, that in battle a soldier’s focus shifts to himself and the men immediately around him. In Louis Barthas’s World War One memoir Poilu, he wrote that officers were almost non-existant, and even sergeants were a remote and often unwelcome presence; a soldier’s concern extended only to his corporal and the handful of men under him. Keegan describes it as
[The soldier] may still have felt some sense of belonging, possibly to his battalion, probably to his company, until confronted by some dramatic personal threat; then it must only have been the circle of his most immediate comrades which would have retained for him any extrapersonal identity and only their survival, so much bound up with his own, for which he would have striven. (p. 46)
The book first looks at Agincourt, the dramatic and unexpected victory of King Henry V against a much larger, more heavily armed French army on a muddy field during the Hundred Years’ War, as Henry tried to avoid being cut off making his way back to the coast. His army had knights led by noblemen, but the core of the force was composed of archers wielding the fearsome longbow, with an effective range of up to 350 yards, and capable of penetrating armor at 100 yards. These were hard men in an era when toughness was essential to survival. “The bowmen of Henry’s army were not only tough professional soldiers. There is also evidence that many had enlisted in the first place to avoid punishment for civil acts of violence, including murder.” (p. 110) Some of the soldiers on the battlefield were there because of feudal obligations, but the overriding motive for all was plunder.
Medieval warfare, like all warfare, was about many things, but medieval battle, at the personal level, was about only three: victory first, of course, because the personal consequences of defeat could be so disagreeable; personal distinction in single combat–something of which the man-at-arms would think a great deal more than the bowman; but, ultimately and most important, ransom and loot. (p. 115)
Like Agincourt, Waterloo was a battle in which we can see some modern elements, but must be careful about projecting our own expectations on the combatants. “Eighty or 100 years later, the British officer’s principal motivation would be defined in terms of ‘duty to the regiment’...but the modern regimental system had not been invented by Waterloo. Officers were still independent gentlemen, holding rank by cash purchase, which provided a rough measure of their family status.” (p. 192)
Similarly, “Honour, so absolutely concrete in Homer, was for the British officer of 1815 an almost wholly abstract ideal, a matter of comportment, of exposure to risk, of acceptance of death if it should come, of private satisfaction–if it should not–at having fulfilled an unwritten code.” (p. 194)
As Wellington famously said, the battle was “a near run thing,” and historians have endlessly debated how things might have turned out differently. In fact, even if the British had been defeated, Bülow had a large Prussian army converging on the battlefield, and even Napoleon could probably not have pulled off the miracle of defeating two large armies on successive days after taking horrific casualties in the first encounter. “Within a space of about two square miles of open, waterless, treeless and almost uninhabited countryside, which had been covered at early morning by standing crops, lay by nightfall the bodies of forty thousand human beings and ten thousand horses, many of them alive and suffering dreadfully.” (p. 199)
And finally, the book looks at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a day of horrific slaughter for the British, with 60,000 casualties, including 21,000 killed. That large number of dead holds a terrible secret: the fighting was so intense many of the wounded could not be retrieved, in some cases for days, and even those who were brought in found the medical facilities completely overwhelmed; no one had expected casualties like this. “It may be, therefore, that as many as a third of the killed and missing on 1 July died as a result of wounds from which they would have had a chance of recovering if they could have been brought even to the Regimental Aid Post within the first hours of injury.” (p. 274)
The British Regular Army had been mauled in the battles of 1914, so until 1916 the line was largely held by the Territorial divisions, the equivalent of the National Guard in the United States. The Somme would be the baptism of fire of the new “Kitchener” armies, the men who had rushed to enlist in the first days of the war. The British high command thought little of their military aptitude, and created its battle plan using only the simplest of tactics: rise out of the trenches (each man carrying about 60 pounds of equipment), dress the lines, and move at a steady eighty paces per minute across No Man’s Land. This was considered acceptable because it was thought that the week-long bombardment would have obliterated everything in front of them, and the soldiers had been told that nothing would be left alive when they arrived at the German trenches.
However, the Germans had deep trenches which could be destroyed only a direct hit from heavy artillery, which the British did not have enough of. Also, many of the shells did not explode: up to a third of them had defective fuses. Finally, the shrapnel shells that were supposed to cut the German wire failed to do so because their fuses were not sensitive enough, so even if they hit the wire they would go on through, bury themselves in the ground, and explode harmlessly. The result was that the Germans were alive and ready and the British were facing uncut wire. “In all the British had lost about 60,000, of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes.” (p. 260)
The French, who were on the extreme right of the British line, were the only ones to achieved the first day’s objective assigned to them, because they had better tactics, and were supported by more heavy guns. “French small-unit tactics, perfected painfully over two years of warfare, laid emphasis on the advance of small groups by rushes, one meanwhile supporting another by fire–the sort of tactics which were to become commonplace in the Second World War. This sophistication of traditional ‘fire and movement’ was known to the British but was thought by the staff to be too difficult to be taught to the Kitchener divisions.” (p. 230)
And finally, the book looks at breaking points, both of individual soldiers and of entire armies. Keegan examines this and pulls together a number of facts which are not often seen as pieces of the same puzzle, writing that
taking a very broad view of the war, a point was reached in every army at which either a majority or a disabling minority refused to go on. This point was reached by the French army in May 1917, when ‘collective indiscipline’ occurred in 54 of the 100 divisions on the Western Front; in the Russian Army in July 1917, when it failed to resist the German counter-attack consequent on the collapse of the ‘Kerensky Offensive’; in the Italian army in November 1917, when the Second Army disintegrated under German–Austrian attack at Caporetto. In March 1918, the British Fifth Army collapsed, as much morally as physically, and in October the German army in the west signified to its officers its unwillingness to continue fighting. (p. 276)
Courage in battle is a non-renewable resource. The longer men are under fire the more ineffective they become, which makes a mockery of the idea of ‘veteran’ units. They are effective only because they have lost so many of their original troops, and the new replacements have not yet been killed or come to the realization that their future is likely to be short and violent, and that it will end badly.
Siegfried Sassoon, in his World War One book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer wrote that officers and men were used up after six months, unfit for further front line service. Casualties were so high that even if someone returned to his unit after recovering from being wounded, he would find himself among strangers: all the men he had trained and served with were gone.
The Face of Battle takes an unflinching look at combat at the point where the killing and the dying take place, and even those who survive physically are often shattered psychologically. Kurt Vonnegut, who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured when his 106th division disintegrated under Panzer assault, wrote of the fighting in his book Slaughterhouse-Five. Over and over he uses the phrases “and so it goes” and “there is no why” as placeholders, talismans for memories too horrific for words, the places where hope and sanity go to die.
December 23, 2021
Judging from John Keegan's book, the face of battle is one characterized by wild, terrified eyes darting around in search of a toilet.
Keegan paints a picture of blood, mud, noise and death that will dispel any vestigial ideas of 'the glory of battle' that a reader might hold. Whether it's a hailstorm of English arrows, a fusillade of French musket balls or the thunder of guns at the Somme, the lot of the common soldier in battle is the full spectrum of terror, ranging from mere fear to utter, all-consuming horror.
Keegan's picture is not one of just horror though. Through his analysis of three famous battles - Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme - he presents a fascinating picture of life for a simple soldier of the time, a man (and they were all men) facing the pointy end of death in a muddy field.
As a rule, the lot of the common soldier has generally been pretty grueling.
Many of Henry's men at Agincourt were likely suffering dysentery, and were wet, tired and hungry.
Wellington's men at Waterloo scarcely fared better centuries later, most of them having slept out in the open (in the rain) the night before the battle. The Somme, of course, we know well. The roar of shells, the mud in the trenches and the men blown to pieces in no-mans-land made it a twenty-four-seven hell.
Its no wonder so many soldiers used to fight drunk.
There are many, many details in this book that will stick with you. Regarding the toilet mentioned in the opening of this review, a soldier in formation in Henry or Wellington's armies couldn't leave the line to take a bathroom stop. If he needed to go, well, he just went. Where he was standing. Probably into his armor/uniform. No doubt they didn't mention that on the recruitment posters...
Soldiers at Waterloo endured their comrades getting blown to pieces around them because their formations provided the only effective way for them to mass their musket fire. To break formation would make them vulnerable to cavalry (which was otherwise pretty useless by this stage of history - horses won't run into massed groups of people as they aren't stupid).
And there are many more. I learned more about fighting and realities of war from this book than from ten of the general histories on the subject I've read in the past.
Overall, The Face of Battle is a great counterpoint to all the grand histories of war which focus on brilliant generals and the historic impact of conflict, rather than the individual people involved.
Keegan set out to write a book that contrasted with these largely bloodless (and sweat, dirt and pooping-your-armor-less) accounts, and The Face of Battle succeeds admirably in this respect, as well as being a fascinating read to boot.
Four hungry, tired and grumpy soldiers (who could really use a clean bathroom right now) out of five.
Keegan paints a picture of blood, mud, noise and death that will dispel any vestigial ideas of 'the glory of battle' that a reader might hold. Whether it's a hailstorm of English arrows, a fusillade of French musket balls or the thunder of guns at the Somme, the lot of the common soldier in battle is the full spectrum of terror, ranging from mere fear to utter, all-consuming horror.
Keegan's picture is not one of just horror though. Through his analysis of three famous battles - Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme - he presents a fascinating picture of life for a simple soldier of the time, a man (and they were all men) facing the pointy end of death in a muddy field.
As a rule, the lot of the common soldier has generally been pretty grueling.
Many of Henry's men at Agincourt were likely suffering dysentery, and were wet, tired and hungry.
Wellington's men at Waterloo scarcely fared better centuries later, most of them having slept out in the open (in the rain) the night before the battle. The Somme, of course, we know well. The roar of shells, the mud in the trenches and the men blown to pieces in no-mans-land made it a twenty-four-seven hell.
Its no wonder so many soldiers used to fight drunk.
There are many, many details in this book that will stick with you. Regarding the toilet mentioned in the opening of this review, a soldier in formation in Henry or Wellington's armies couldn't leave the line to take a bathroom stop. If he needed to go, well, he just went. Where he was standing. Probably into his armor/uniform. No doubt they didn't mention that on the recruitment posters...
Soldiers at Waterloo endured their comrades getting blown to pieces around them because their formations provided the only effective way for them to mass their musket fire. To break formation would make them vulnerable to cavalry (which was otherwise pretty useless by this stage of history - horses won't run into massed groups of people as they aren't stupid).
And there are many more. I learned more about fighting and realities of war from this book than from ten of the general histories on the subject I've read in the past.
Overall, The Face of Battle is a great counterpoint to all the grand histories of war which focus on brilliant generals and the historic impact of conflict, rather than the individual people involved.
Keegan set out to write a book that contrasted with these largely bloodless (and sweat, dirt and pooping-your-armor-less) accounts, and The Face of Battle succeeds admirably in this respect, as well as being a fascinating read to boot.
Four hungry, tired and grumpy soldiers (who could really use a clean bathroom right now) out of five.
January 8, 2021
Excellent and at times harrowing account of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme.
January 22, 2024
Ovo je vojna istorija na jednom veoma ličnom nivou. Nema tu taktike, strategije, velikih planova generala. Ima ličnih stvari, bitke su onakve kakve ih vidi jedan običan vojnik - okej, psihologija vojnika možda nije na nivou onog u Ratu i miru, ali je blizu, za jednu stručnu knjigu.
Šta se dešava kad te udari buzdovan za vreme bitke kot Azenkura (1415), koliko kao vojnik vidiš oko sebe, kako se braniš od kiše strelica, šta se dešava sa ranjenicima i kolike su ti šanse za preživljavanje ako si ranjen? Kako su pobijeni zarobljenici? Nije ni to tako lako kad nemaš automatsko oružje, a odlučio si da to uradiš za vreme ili odmah nakon same bitke (Vikipedija kaže: "Ujutro se Henri vratio i ubio svakog preživelog Francuza koji je preživeo noć na otvorenom.")
At Agincourt, where the man-at-arms bore lance, sword, dagger, mace or battleaxe, his ability to kill or wound was restricted to the circle centered on his own body, within which his reach allowed him to club, slash or stab. Prevented by the throng at their backs from dodging, side-stepping or retreating from the blows and thrusts directed at them by their English opponents, the individual French man-at-arms must shortly have begun to lose their man-to-man fights, collecting blows on the head or limbs which, even through armor, were sufficiently bruising or stunning to make them drop their weapons or lose their balance or footing. Within minutes, perhaps seconds, of hand-to-hand fighting being joined, some of them would have fallen, their bodies lying at the feet of their comrades, further impeding the movement of individuals and thus offering an obstacle to the advance of the whole column.
Tu su i pomalo čudni detalji vojnog prava - glasnici obe strane se sastaju na dogovorenom mestu, sa kog im se pruža 'lep' pogled na bojno polje. Prate koliko se koja strana pridržava međunarodnog prava (ono pobijanje zatvorenika tu nije dobro prošlo), a na kraju sednu i zajedno odrede ime bitke, za hroničare.
Kigan kao drugu bitku opisuje Vaterlo (1815). Tu je opis manje intiman, ipak nema toliko ubijanja sa metra-dva, ali ima mnogo više mrtvih (oko 40,000 u odnosu na desetak hiljada kod Azenkura). A i prvi put mi je neko koliko-toliko uverljivo objasnio zašto su pešadinci spremni da stoje u stavu mirno, trpeći neprijateljsku vatru ili artiljerijsko bombardovanje. U par reči: čast, potencijalna sramota, ali i potpuna psihička obamrlost zbog alkohola i umora.
Treća je najveća bitka Velikog rata, Bitka na Somi (1916), sa više od 300,000 poginulih. Mitraljez, artiljerija - menja se ratovanje, menja se psihologija, menjaju se rane koje doživiš. Jeste, tu je trijaža, medicina je napredovala, ali koliko je za vreme bitke ostalo na tebi tela da bi medicina dokazala svoj napredak?
“The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalion failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?”
Šta se dešava kad te udari buzdovan za vreme bitke kot Azenkura (1415), koliko kao vojnik vidiš oko sebe, kako se braniš od kiše strelica, šta se dešava sa ranjenicima i kolike su ti šanse za preživljavanje ako si ranjen? Kako su pobijeni zarobljenici? Nije ni to tako lako kad nemaš automatsko oružje, a odlučio si da to uradiš za vreme ili odmah nakon same bitke (Vikipedija kaže: "Ujutro se Henri vratio i ubio svakog preživelog Francuza koji je preživeo noć na otvorenom.")
At Agincourt, where the man-at-arms bore lance, sword, dagger, mace or battleaxe, his ability to kill or wound was restricted to the circle centered on his own body, within which his reach allowed him to club, slash or stab. Prevented by the throng at their backs from dodging, side-stepping or retreating from the blows and thrusts directed at them by their English opponents, the individual French man-at-arms must shortly have begun to lose their man-to-man fights, collecting blows on the head or limbs which, even through armor, were sufficiently bruising or stunning to make them drop their weapons or lose their balance or footing. Within minutes, perhaps seconds, of hand-to-hand fighting being joined, some of them would have fallen, their bodies lying at the feet of their comrades, further impeding the movement of individuals and thus offering an obstacle to the advance of the whole column.
Tu su i pomalo čudni detalji vojnog prava - glasnici obe strane se sastaju na dogovorenom mestu, sa kog im se pruža 'lep' pogled na bojno polje. Prate koliko se koja strana pridržava međunarodnog prava (ono pobijanje zatvorenika tu nije dobro prošlo), a na kraju sednu i zajedno odrede ime bitke, za hroničare.
Kigan kao drugu bitku opisuje Vaterlo (1815). Tu je opis manje intiman, ipak nema toliko ubijanja sa metra-dva, ali ima mnogo više mrtvih (oko 40,000 u odnosu na desetak hiljada kod Azenkura). A i prvi put mi je neko koliko-toliko uverljivo objasnio zašto su pešadinci spremni da stoje u stavu mirno, trpeći neprijateljsku vatru ili artiljerijsko bombardovanje. U par reči: čast, potencijalna sramota, ali i potpuna psihička obamrlost zbog alkohola i umora.
Treća je najveća bitka Velikog rata, Bitka na Somi (1916), sa više od 300,000 poginulih. Mitraljez, artiljerija - menja se ratovanje, menja se psihologija, menjaju se rane koje doživiš. Jeste, tu je trijaža, medicina je napredovala, ali koliko je za vreme bitke ostalo na tebi tela da bi medicina dokazala svoj napredak?
“The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalion failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?”
March 28, 2017
An enlightening erudition of three monumental battles in English history: Agincort; Waterloo; and the Somme. Agincort-when battle was chivalrous and troops were led by the king
Waterloo-when the height of technology was the soldier's bayonet
The Somme-when the top line of defense was...well...an actual line of trenches and razor wire called the Maginot
The author details both the strategy and tactics of each of these battles then finishes the book by comparing and contesting them as well as discussing their relationship to and effects on modern warfare.
Any student warfare should read this book. The audio version is also very good.
Waterloo-when the height of technology was the soldier's bayonet
The Somme-when the top line of defense was...well...an actual line of trenches and razor wire called the Maginot
The author details both the strategy and tactics of each of these battles then finishes the book by comparing and contesting them as well as discussing their relationship to and effects on modern warfare.
Any student warfare should read this book. The audio version is also very good.
May 6, 2018
I first read The Face of Battle in 1991. I was a young 2nd Lieutenant attending the Armor Officer's Basic Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. As a 2nd Lieutenant my focus was on the small world of the armor platoon leader (four tanks - sixteen soldiers) and the type of combat that I would encounter as a platoon leader. "The Face of Battle" was amazing for it addressed many of the issues that I found myself wondering about. It was a breath of fresh air. I have since read it several times both in it's entirety and it's different sections.
Thirty-six years after it was first published Keegan's The Face of Battle might seem like old hat. There are no lack of critics who will point out the mistakes in Keegan's methodology; that he examined three British battles that were victories (I would argue that The Somme was hardly a victory) and so on and so forth.Then there are those who have issues with the man himself and allow their personal opinions to influence their critiques of his books. I readily acknowledge that John Keegan is not perfect and I have found many of his more recent books to be flat, but The Face of Battle is something special.
To understand why Keegan wrote Battle all you have to do is read the first twenty pages. Keegan examines contemporary military history (mid - 1970's) and it's depiction of the physical reality of combat. Military historians interests were more on the macro rather than the micro. Many of them used sweeping generalities and cliches when describing the experiences of the soldiers in battle. There were exceptions of course. Historians who were looking at the existence of the individual soldier. Most notable (at the time of the book being written) would have been writers Cornelius Ryan and John Ellis, but for the most part, historians had not examined the battlefield empirically.
With The Face of Battle Keegan moved into new territory. It's hard to understand in 2012 just how groundbreaking his book was at the time. It's hard to understand because his work has been so influential that it has been seamlessly incorporated into other historians research. That in itself is probably the greatest compliment possible.
The book is very readable. Each battle is analyzed methodically, but it never drags. Different aspects of each battle is looked at. Such as the experience of the infantry, cavalry, commanders, artillery and so on. He looks at the conditions of the battlefield itself when the fighting begins and how it changed as the fighting went on. He also examines the effect of the physical conditions (of the battlefield) on the tactics and the how it effected the moral of the soldiers involved in the fighting. Again there had been historians before Keegan who had examined these things, but not as methodically nor had such an examination been the thesis of the earlier books.
All in all a fascinating read and one that is deserving of it's place in military history.
Thirty-six years after it was first published Keegan's The Face of Battle might seem like old hat. There are no lack of critics who will point out the mistakes in Keegan's methodology; that he examined three British battles that were victories (I would argue that The Somme was hardly a victory) and so on and so forth.Then there are those who have issues with the man himself and allow their personal opinions to influence their critiques of his books. I readily acknowledge that John Keegan is not perfect and I have found many of his more recent books to be flat, but The Face of Battle is something special.
To understand why Keegan wrote Battle all you have to do is read the first twenty pages. Keegan examines contemporary military history (mid - 1970's) and it's depiction of the physical reality of combat. Military historians interests were more on the macro rather than the micro. Many of them used sweeping generalities and cliches when describing the experiences of the soldiers in battle. There were exceptions of course. Historians who were looking at the existence of the individual soldier. Most notable (at the time of the book being written) would have been writers Cornelius Ryan and John Ellis, but for the most part, historians had not examined the battlefield empirically.
With The Face of Battle Keegan moved into new territory. It's hard to understand in 2012 just how groundbreaking his book was at the time. It's hard to understand because his work has been so influential that it has been seamlessly incorporated into other historians research. That in itself is probably the greatest compliment possible.
The book is very readable. Each battle is analyzed methodically, but it never drags. Different aspects of each battle is looked at. Such as the experience of the infantry, cavalry, commanders, artillery and so on. He looks at the conditions of the battlefield itself when the fighting begins and how it changed as the fighting went on. He also examines the effect of the physical conditions (of the battlefield) on the tactics and the how it effected the moral of the soldiers involved in the fighting. Again there had been historians before Keegan who had examined these things, but not as methodically nor had such an examination been the thesis of the earlier books.
All in all a fascinating read and one that is deserving of it's place in military history.
November 28, 2021
Deludente lavoro che prometteva, almeno a giudicare dal titolo, di fare luce sulla sfera prettamente umana della battaglia, intendendo con questo termine i comportamenti, le reazioni, i patimenti, degli uomini chiamati in varie epoche e in luoghi diversi ad essere soldati. Solo in parte il libro mantiene le promesse. Poche pagine nel totale, peraltro belle e documentate, annegate pero' in un mare di storia militare da accademia, oltretutto infarcite di un irritante tono di alterigia anglofila.
July 4, 2020
Focused on the psychology of the soldier to a commendable degree.
Keegan is an able myth buster, taking down notions of Henry’s lack of chivalry at agincourt to the defects of soldiers esprit de corps at the Somme.
Getting drunk, shirking, and self inflicted wounds are far more prevalent than one is led to believe.
The historiography of detailing immense troop movements is romantic and nonsensical.
And smoke and confusion are the most ubiquitous characteristics of battles of the later ages.
Tolstoy would be pleased. Keegan highlights that the idea of planning a battle ends at the first moment the soldiers clash.
Keegan is an able myth buster, taking down notions of Henry’s lack of chivalry at agincourt to the defects of soldiers esprit de corps at the Somme.
Getting drunk, shirking, and self inflicted wounds are far more prevalent than one is led to believe.
The historiography of detailing immense troop movements is romantic and nonsensical.
And smoke and confusion are the most ubiquitous characteristics of battles of the later ages.
Tolstoy would be pleased. Keegan highlights that the idea of planning a battle ends at the first moment the soldiers clash.
August 2, 2012
John Keegan was an instructor at Sandhurst when he wrote this in the early 1970s. As he notes, he was someone who had never seen battle himself, teaching those who would. He writes about battles in a nuts-and-bolts, but also a deeply human way, investigating their moral aspects: why were prisoners sometimes killed, sometimes not? When it quickly became clear that soldiers were dying needlessly in some of the attrition battles of WWI, why were those particular offenses not stopped? Why did the officer class become increasingly distanced from actual killing, so that in WWI some only carried an ornamental sword, and in WWII some only a walking stick? Why did so many combatants over the centuries enter battle drunk? How and why did the fatality rate (men killed as a proportion of those entering battle) change over the centuries, or from battle to battle? What does it mean when somewhere between 10-20% of battle casualties are psychological? (After a certain number of days in battle, psychological damage is inevitable, researchers have found.)
This is a work of historiography as much as history. Keegan examines several styles of writing about battles, comparing, for example, Caesar with Thucydides, as well as later historians.
This is a work of historiography as much as history. Keegan examines several styles of writing about battles, comparing, for example, Caesar with Thucydides, as well as later historians.
January 3, 2012
This was the first book I read by John Keegan, and it became the first of many. In it he describes three different historical battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, if memory serves) and describes what we know (or can guess) about what the battle experience was like for the men involved. Of particular interest is the way he breaks this down into sub-topics like "infantry vs. archers", "infantry vs. cavalry", "cavalry vs. artillery" etc.
This is probably the best non-fiction description of the horror of battle that I have read. Keegan notes that long ago (and perhaps not so long ago) it was common on the night before battles for a great number of the soon-to-be participants to drink themselves nearly to oblivion, as a way of steeling themselves to face what was to come.
Keegan is a well known British military historian, and held a lectureship in Military History at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst) for 26 years.
This is probably the best non-fiction description of the horror of battle that I have read. Keegan notes that long ago (and perhaps not so long ago) it was common on the night before battles for a great number of the soon-to-be participants to drink themselves nearly to oblivion, as a way of steeling themselves to face what was to come.
Keegan is a well known British military historian, and held a lectureship in Military History at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst) for 26 years.
July 14, 2012
I read this as part of an "expand your horizons" challenge, and I very much enjoyed it. Keegan has an engaging style and is very easy to listen to (audio format) -- and the narrator, one of my all-time favorites (Simon Vance), didn't hurt any either.
This is a classic book of military history/analysis...but it almost seems blase in some ways, today, because so many writers have learned from Keegan's insights. While I was listening, I kept thinking that any writer of fiction who wanted to include battle scenes in their stories should read this book before setting their own pens to paper; and I kept seeing lessons from this book reflected in the works of some of my favorite authors.
I am docking this book one star simply because it was published before any of the current mid-East conflicts heated up. IMHO some of Keegan's conclusions about mechanisation at the end of his book have been thrown into doubt by the intimacy of many of the recent battles over there. I would really love to see his analyses of recent battle trends...unfortunately, his only book on the subject (so far) was written near the beginning of the war, so I'll have to wait for something more up-to-date!
This is a classic book of military history/analysis...but it almost seems blase in some ways, today, because so many writers have learned from Keegan's insights. While I was listening, I kept thinking that any writer of fiction who wanted to include battle scenes in their stories should read this book before setting their own pens to paper; and I kept seeing lessons from this book reflected in the works of some of my favorite authors.
I am docking this book one star simply because it was published before any of the current mid-East conflicts heated up. IMHO some of Keegan's conclusions about mechanisation at the end of his book have been thrown into doubt by the intimacy of many of the recent battles over there. I would really love to see his analyses of recent battle trends...unfortunately, his only book on the subject (so far) was written near the beginning of the war, so I'll have to wait for something more up-to-date!
December 2, 2010
Meh. It's ok. Written in 1976, The Face of Battle is badly in need of an update. In addition, the battles are all very British (Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme). This is understandable, since the book is probably an outgrowth from Keegan's teaching notes. The focus is on the experience of the individual soldier, which is pretty standard stuff in current battle books. The Face of Battle can be a bit dry at times (the first 20 pages are a real slog), but it can also be quite fascinating. It was interesting to see that Keegan portrays the demise of calvary as early as Agincourt, which works as a great lead in to all those futile French charges at Waterloo. What a waste. My edition has some cool (and very rare) pictures of infantry charges during WW 1 and Dien Bien Phu.
May 26, 2024
This book was recommended to me for research I was doing into the nature of war--a broad overview of how commanders think--and it was perfect. I love that Keegan, having gone into some detail about how impossible it is to write about battles, goes on to write about three pivotal battles in elegant but not flowery language, laying out the offensives with precision and care. I had very little knowledge about Agincourt (which was the type of battle most relevant to my writing) and I was impressed with how Keegan turned it into a story without sacrificing any of the brutality.
Even more valuable is Keegan's first chapter, a lengthy explanation of the different ways people have chosen to write about battles over the centuries and why and how those descriptions have changed with time. I found the book not only useful, but fun--Keegan's voice is dry and witty, very much as I associate with the British of his generation. Very much recommended as an insight into the mind of war chroniclers.
Even more valuable is Keegan's first chapter, a lengthy explanation of the different ways people have chosen to write about battles over the centuries and why and how those descriptions have changed with time. I found the book not only useful, but fun--Keegan's voice is dry and witty, very much as I associate with the British of his generation. Very much recommended as an insight into the mind of war chroniclers.
February 3, 2019
In The Face of Battle, author John Keegan, in his role as historian and not soldier, attempts to dissect the experience of battle as the common soldier knows it. The trouble with most accounts, he explains at length in his opening chapters, is that historians tend to focus on the win/lose aspects of the battle, or else how its outcome has affected the course of human events, or else been enamored with its pageantry and its place in the popular imagination. As an educator of young cadets who would someday be British officers, he found these methods inadequate; and, it would seem, motivated by his own lack of experience IN battle while teaching ABOUT battle, he sought to reach a different level of discourse about the process.
Along with his lengthy opening concerning how battles are traditionally recorded, he also seeks to define what he means specifically by the word 'battle'. Rather than the generic descriptor, he is referring to particular events, possible within a larger framework of warfare, in which the set conditions are fairly narrowly confined. Instead of re-defining Professor Keegan's description, I think the 'battles' that he chooses to focus on are indicative themselves of the term as he uses it: Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme.
Once these preliminary discussions are out of the way, Professor Keegan begins his dissection of the three battles mentioned, and I doubt I have ever read a more fascinating account of warfare. While the general course of the contest is first described, what follows is an examination of what an individual may have experienced, reasonable suppositions as to why they men may have behaved as they did, and a breakdown of the different weaponry systems as they were deployed against one another. In many ways, I'm reminded of the old rhyme, 'for want of a nail, the battle was lost', since essentially what Professor Keegan is examining is the 'nails'. It may make great theater to hear Henry inspire his men with the St. Crispin's Day speech, but how exactly did an outnumbered and bedraggled English army slaughter the French in 1415 to the point there were 'heaps of dead'? How exactly were Napoleon's cavalry attacks repulsed by the infantry? And, a question I've always wondered myself, exactly what could have propelled a man up and out of the trench to walk into the machine-guns of No-Man's-Land? These and many other questions are examined, and one has to agree (finally!) with a blurb that decorates the cover of the paperback edition - 'one learns as much about the nature of man as of battle.'
Over the years, as I have read more traditional account of battles, there often seem to be downright unexplainable factors that influence the outcome - bravery in one individual, cowardice in another, weapons that had once been effective, but no longer were, and on and on. Professor Keegan is intensely interested in these factors - in fact, that is the whole theme of his historiography: To seek explanation for what has before seemed nearly impenetrable.
There are two sections of The Face of Battle which bookend the description of the three battles; one, an introductory section which seeks to explain the author's motivation and ideas behind the book, and then a concluding chapter--'The Future of Battle'. The first is necessary, I think, though overlong. I found the second to be disinteresting - written in 1976, it suffers the same problems most attempts to look at the future do. Regardless of these two issues, the meat of the book is a transformative look at warfare and the actions of those involved in it. It is by far the most truthful look at the process that I have read, tallying neatly with my own experiences.
I do not think it necessary to agree with Professor Keegan's analysis or all his comments to appreciate this effort. It is his revolutionary way of looking at the events which rightly place this book on the top lists of non-fiction of the twentieth century. Highly recommended
Along with his lengthy opening concerning how battles are traditionally recorded, he also seeks to define what he means specifically by the word 'battle'. Rather than the generic descriptor, he is referring to particular events, possible within a larger framework of warfare, in which the set conditions are fairly narrowly confined. Instead of re-defining Professor Keegan's description, I think the 'battles' that he chooses to focus on are indicative themselves of the term as he uses it: Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme.
Once these preliminary discussions are out of the way, Professor Keegan begins his dissection of the three battles mentioned, and I doubt I have ever read a more fascinating account of warfare. While the general course of the contest is first described, what follows is an examination of what an individual may have experienced, reasonable suppositions as to why they men may have behaved as they did, and a breakdown of the different weaponry systems as they were deployed against one another. In many ways, I'm reminded of the old rhyme, 'for want of a nail, the battle was lost', since essentially what Professor Keegan is examining is the 'nails'. It may make great theater to hear Henry inspire his men with the St. Crispin's Day speech, but how exactly did an outnumbered and bedraggled English army slaughter the French in 1415 to the point there were 'heaps of dead'? How exactly were Napoleon's cavalry attacks repulsed by the infantry? And, a question I've always wondered myself, exactly what could have propelled a man up and out of the trench to walk into the machine-guns of No-Man's-Land? These and many other questions are examined, and one has to agree (finally!) with a blurb that decorates the cover of the paperback edition - 'one learns as much about the nature of man as of battle.'
Over the years, as I have read more traditional account of battles, there often seem to be downright unexplainable factors that influence the outcome - bravery in one individual, cowardice in another, weapons that had once been effective, but no longer were, and on and on. Professor Keegan is intensely interested in these factors - in fact, that is the whole theme of his historiography: To seek explanation for what has before seemed nearly impenetrable.
There are two sections of The Face of Battle which bookend the description of the three battles; one, an introductory section which seeks to explain the author's motivation and ideas behind the book, and then a concluding chapter--'The Future of Battle'. The first is necessary, I think, though overlong. I found the second to be disinteresting - written in 1976, it suffers the same problems most attempts to look at the future do. Regardless of these two issues, the meat of the book is a transformative look at warfare and the actions of those involved in it. It is by far the most truthful look at the process that I have read, tallying neatly with my own experiences.
I do not think it necessary to agree with Professor Keegan's analysis or all his comments to appreciate this effort. It is his revolutionary way of looking at the events which rightly place this book on the top lists of non-fiction of the twentieth century. Highly recommended
July 18, 2020
Amikor én történelmi munkát olvasok, azt szeretem, ha látom az embert. Az olyat, mint én. Mit evett, hol aludt, mitől félt, hogy reagált a nagy eseményekre, mit veszíthetett és mit veszített. Milyen lehetett ott lenni, éhesen vagy jóllakottan, szorongva vagy adrenalintól feldobva, olyasvalakinek, aki nem márványból van, sem pedig gipszből?
Amikor először rátaláltam John Keegan műveire, rögtön egyértelmű volt, hogy pontosan azt adja, amire nekem szükségem van. Még a nagy hadvezéreknek is a kisember-arcát mutatja meg, nemhogy a közkatonáknak. Vagy éppen az érintett civileknek.
Ebben a könyvében pedig konkrétan 4D-s mozit csinált a történelemből.
https://gyujtogeto-alkoto.blog.hu/202...
Amikor először rátaláltam John Keegan műveire, rögtön egyértelmű volt, hogy pontosan azt adja, amire nekem szükségem van. Még a nagy hadvezéreknek is a kisember-arcát mutatja meg, nemhogy a közkatonáknak. Vagy éppen az érintett civileknek.
Ebben a könyvében pedig konkrétan 4D-s mozit csinált a történelemből.
https://gyujtogeto-alkoto.blog.hu/202...
November 17, 2015
Keegan was one of the greatest historians and I have read several of his works. But this one was not exactly what I thought it was going to be. It is not a description of tactics and battle plans but rather the reason that men fight, how they summon courage, or run away. He takes an interesting approach by using the backdrop of three famous battles to make his point about war in general and how it and the men involved change (or don't change) over the years
I have to admit that there were sections which were rather dry...but the author took much of his material from his lectures as an instructor at Sandringham which probably explains those lapses. So don't expect blazing guns, exploding bombs, and complicated battle plans. This book goes much deeper than the generalities of all wars but instead, delves into the reasons why and the human side of battle. Recommended.
I have to admit that there were sections which were rather dry...but the author took much of his material from his lectures as an instructor at Sandringham which probably explains those lapses. So don't expect blazing guns, exploding bombs, and complicated battle plans. This book goes much deeper than the generalities of all wars but instead, delves into the reasons why and the human side of battle. Recommended.
February 13, 2015
-Para muchos, un punto de inflexión. Para algunos, hasta una inspiración.-
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Aproximación al concepto de la batalla y en concreto a su tratamiento historiográfico por parte de autores y expertos, además de su experiencia y efecto sobre los que luchan, analizando sus deficiencias, fortalezas y utilidades, para a continuación revisar tres famosos enfrentamientos (Azincourt, Waterloo y el Somme, las tres cercanas en el espacio y separadas por el tiempo) y, por último, ofrecer comentarios sobre los desarrollos de la guerra desde la perspectiva de la época en que fue escrita la obra.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Aproximación al concepto de la batalla y en concreto a su tratamiento historiográfico por parte de autores y expertos, además de su experiencia y efecto sobre los que luchan, analizando sus deficiencias, fortalezas y utilidades, para a continuación revisar tres famosos enfrentamientos (Azincourt, Waterloo y el Somme, las tres cercanas en el espacio y separadas por el tiempo) y, por último, ofrecer comentarios sobre los desarrollos de la guerra desde la perspectiva de la época en que fue escrita la obra.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
July 8, 2019
Keegan’s The Face of Battle has been a book that I’ve wanted to read for some time now. I knew it as a significant milestone in the style of military history writing, and was eager to read about Keegan’s description of war from the soldier’s point of view. It’s safe to say that I had high expectations before reading. Fortunately, the book did meet my expectations, but not in the ways I had anticipated.
The book begins with a lengthy introduction about military historiography, or as Keegan puts it, “the history of military history writing”. Keegan briefly discusses the merit or lack thereof of learning and teaching military history, from which Keegan draws from his experience as a lecturer at Sandhurst. The rest is spent analyzing how battles have been perceived and recorded throughout history. I found this section fascinating, though the more casual reader may be left bored by this discussion.
Following the introduction, Keegan proceeds to look at his three battles of choice – Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), the Somme (1916). All were battles involving the English and British armies, interestingly within the same rough geographic location. Some might argue that Keegan’s British bias is disruptive, but I would argue that the national bias doesn’t have an impact on the quality of the book. Focusing on three battles he’s familiar with allows Keegan to write authoritatively on all three conflicts. The battles themselves are fairly representative of battles of their time, and anyway their purpose is to serve as a lens through which Keegan analyzes human beings in battle at different points in history.
Keegan’s descriptions of the strategies and tactics are kept to a minimum. This certainly is not a narrative history of these battles. Instead, after giving an outline of the events of the battles, Keegan stoops down to analyze the battle from the individual’s view. Before reading, I expected this to be done through plenty of first-hand accounts and more of an emotional view of the horrors of battle (as I have seen in other books). I was surprised to find a dry and analytical approach instead. Those adjectives are hardly flattering, but don’t let them dissuade you from reading The Face of Battle. After I overcame my initial misconception, I was gratified by Keegan’s technique. By eliminating any romantic sentiment and focusing solely on the physical situations that the individuals faced he is able to objectively analyze what battle could have been like. The following is a list of just some of the situations he analyzed:
Agincourt
1. How much of a role did the pile of dead bodies play in the battle?
2. What drove Henry V to order the execution of prisoners, and to what extent were his orders were carried out.
Waterloo
1. The limited visibility of the battlefield.
2. The quality of leadership that enabled men to suffer under fire for hours on end.
The Somme
1. The ineffective British artillery barrage.
2. The fate of the wounded soldier.
Besides these examples, there were many interesting sections focusing on the psychology of soldiers. What drives them to kill, what impels them to fight, or to flee. Indeed, much of this book looks at the mindset of those in battle.
In the final chapter, Keegan reflects on the past and looks forward to the future of battle. I found his observations and predictions fascinating and thought-provoking. Some are now obsolete, but some are strikingly accurate.
Looking at the book as a whole, there are some flaws, but not many. For one, Keegan occasionally gets sidetracked, but for the most part this book is direct and focused. Some might also find Keegan’s writing a little too academic. Keegan gives enough background information about the battles (along with three useful maps) that should be sufficient to give the novice reader enough knowledge to understand the conflicts themselves.
Which begs the question, who should read this book? That’s a difficult question to answer. Those looking for a casual history read might find the material boring, particularly the introduction. Those looking for a history of any of the three battles focused here should certainly look elsewhere for a fuller description of that particular battle. But, those interested in a serious assessment of battle and its participants will find a wealth of fascinating insight in The Face of Battle.
The book begins with a lengthy introduction about military historiography, or as Keegan puts it, “the history of military history writing”. Keegan briefly discusses the merit or lack thereof of learning and teaching military history, from which Keegan draws from his experience as a lecturer at Sandhurst. The rest is spent analyzing how battles have been perceived and recorded throughout history. I found this section fascinating, though the more casual reader may be left bored by this discussion.
Following the introduction, Keegan proceeds to look at his three battles of choice – Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), the Somme (1916). All were battles involving the English and British armies, interestingly within the same rough geographic location. Some might argue that Keegan’s British bias is disruptive, but I would argue that the national bias doesn’t have an impact on the quality of the book. Focusing on three battles he’s familiar with allows Keegan to write authoritatively on all three conflicts. The battles themselves are fairly representative of battles of their time, and anyway their purpose is to serve as a lens through which Keegan analyzes human beings in battle at different points in history.
Keegan’s descriptions of the strategies and tactics are kept to a minimum. This certainly is not a narrative history of these battles. Instead, after giving an outline of the events of the battles, Keegan stoops down to analyze the battle from the individual’s view. Before reading, I expected this to be done through plenty of first-hand accounts and more of an emotional view of the horrors of battle (as I have seen in other books). I was surprised to find a dry and analytical approach instead. Those adjectives are hardly flattering, but don’t let them dissuade you from reading The Face of Battle. After I overcame my initial misconception, I was gratified by Keegan’s technique. By eliminating any romantic sentiment and focusing solely on the physical situations that the individuals faced he is able to objectively analyze what battle could have been like. The following is a list of just some of the situations he analyzed:
Agincourt
1. How much of a role did the pile of dead bodies play in the battle?
2. What drove Henry V to order the execution of prisoners, and to what extent were his orders were carried out.
Waterloo
1. The limited visibility of the battlefield.
2. The quality of leadership that enabled men to suffer under fire for hours on end.
The Somme
1. The ineffective British artillery barrage.
2. The fate of the wounded soldier.
Besides these examples, there were many interesting sections focusing on the psychology of soldiers. What drives them to kill, what impels them to fight, or to flee. Indeed, much of this book looks at the mindset of those in battle.
In the final chapter, Keegan reflects on the past and looks forward to the future of battle. I found his observations and predictions fascinating and thought-provoking. Some are now obsolete, but some are strikingly accurate.
Looking at the book as a whole, there are some flaws, but not many. For one, Keegan occasionally gets sidetracked, but for the most part this book is direct and focused. Some might also find Keegan’s writing a little too academic. Keegan gives enough background information about the battles (along with three useful maps) that should be sufficient to give the novice reader enough knowledge to understand the conflicts themselves.
Which begs the question, who should read this book? That’s a difficult question to answer. Those looking for a casual history read might find the material boring, particularly the introduction. Those looking for a history of any of the three battles focused here should certainly look elsewhere for a fuller description of that particular battle. But, those interested in a serious assessment of battle and its participants will find a wealth of fascinating insight in The Face of Battle.
July 25, 2025
It's all down to the soldiers
I read John Keegan's The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme fourteen years ago, in April 2009. I can be precise about that because that's when I ordered it from Amazon. I was reminded of it two days ago by two things. The first was an essay that appeared on the web Michael Taylor on John Keegan’s The Face of Battle: A Retrospective. The second was a chain of literary free associations. I recently finished Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. Kaz Brekker and his team of Crows reminded me of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.. From there it was a short mental leap to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and from there to the only book I have read that I know to be by a Sandhurst professor, John Keegan. (To be accurate, I think I also read Keegan's A History of Warfare many many years ago, in time out of reach of an Amazon order search.)
I mention this because I feel that Kipling illuminates Keegan and The Face of Battle. Like Kipling, Keegan writes of "Famous Victories". What particularly distinguished The Face of Battle from earlier military scholarship was its focus on the soldiers as the people who won battles. And by soldiers I do not so much mean generals and kings as the common grunts. (Although, in one of his battles, Agincourt, the "grunts" on one side were French knights who would not at all appreciate being so described.) Keegan makes very clear in his first chapter, "Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things" that he thinks it is of the highest importance to see battle from their point of view. Although he doesn't entirely eschew the familiar maps of battles and discussion of tactics, he more or less implies that these things are of secondary importance compared to the psychological factors that drive the soldiers to fight and endure.
Keegan, like Kipling, grew up in the company of soldiers, yet never was one himself. The reasons were similar -- Keegan was handicapped as a result of a childhood illness, and was ineligible to serve -- Kipling was too old to serve in the first World War. You have only to read Kipling's books to see how highly he revered soldiers. Indeed, in Stalky & Co. during the visit of the "Old Boys" (meaning former students of the school), who are now mostly soldiers, they are seen as gods among men. Keegan is of course more measured, but passages like this reveal how important the soldier's point of view is to him
Blog review.
I read John Keegan's The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme fourteen years ago, in April 2009. I can be precise about that because that's when I ordered it from Amazon. I was reminded of it two days ago by two things. The first was an essay that appeared on the web Michael Taylor on John Keegan’s The Face of Battle: A Retrospective. The second was a chain of literary free associations. I recently finished Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. Kaz Brekker and his team of Crows reminded me of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.. From there it was a short mental leap to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and from there to the only book I have read that I know to be by a Sandhurst professor, John Keegan. (To be accurate, I think I also read Keegan's A History of Warfare many many years ago, in time out of reach of an Amazon order search.)
I mention this because I feel that Kipling illuminates Keegan and The Face of Battle. Like Kipling, Keegan writes of "Famous Victories". What particularly distinguished The Face of Battle from earlier military scholarship was its focus on the soldiers as the people who won battles. And by soldiers I do not so much mean generals and kings as the common grunts. (Although, in one of his battles, Agincourt, the "grunts" on one side were French knights who would not at all appreciate being so described.) Keegan makes very clear in his first chapter, "Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things" that he thinks it is of the highest importance to see battle from their point of view. Although he doesn't entirely eschew the familiar maps of battles and discussion of tactics, he more or less implies that these things are of secondary importance compared to the psychological factors that drive the soldiers to fight and endure.
Keegan, like Kipling, grew up in the company of soldiers, yet never was one himself. The reasons were similar -- Keegan was handicapped as a result of a childhood illness, and was ineligible to serve -- Kipling was too old to serve in the first World War. You have only to read Kipling's books to see how highly he revered soldiers. Indeed, in Stalky & Co. during the visit of the "Old Boys" (meaning former students of the school), who are now mostly soldiers, they are seen as gods among men. Keegan is of course more measured, but passages like this reveal how important the soldier's point of view is to him
The insight which intimacy with soldiers at this level can bring to the military historian enormously enhances his surety of touch in feeling his way through the inanimate landscape of documents and objects with which he must work. It will, I think, rob him of patience for much that passes as military history; it will diminish his interest in much of the ‘higher’ study of war – of strategic theory, of generalship, of grand strategic debate, of the machine-warfare waged by air forces and navies. And that, perhaps, is a pity. But if it leads him to question – as I have found it does me – the traditional approach to writing about combat corps à corps, to decide that, after he has read the survivors’ letters and diaries, the generals’ memoirs, the staff officers’ dispatches, that there is yet another element which he must add to anything he writes – an element compounded of affection for the soldiers he knows, a perception of the hostilities as well as the loyalties which animate a society founded on comradeship, some appreciation of the limits of leadership and obedience, a glimpse of the far shores of courage, a recognition of the principle of self-preservation ever present in even the best soldier’s nature, incredulity that flesh and blood can stand the fears with which battle will confront it and which his own deeply felt timidity will highlight – if, in short, he can learn to make up his mind about the facts of battle in the light of what all, and not merely some, of the participants felt about their predicament, then he will have taken the first and most important step in understanding battle ‘as it actually was’.The Face of Battle is an attempt by a man who never was a soldier to understand how the "face of battle" appears to a soldier. It is recognized as one of the classics of military history. It is instructive, I believe, to compare this with another classic of military history, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman F. Dixon. The contrast is not so great as the titles might lead you to expect.
Blog review.
October 25, 2021
By 20th century standards, I don’t think Keegan was saying much innovative in his critique of “battle pieces” as superficial nonsense. Of course Victorians like Creasy and ancients like Caesar wrote in a way that doesn’t satisfy us. That said, a historian writing in the 1950s like Bruce Catton would seem to meet most of Keegan’s positive criteria, minus a few technical details and with a literary flourish.
The book does justice to historiography for a generalist reader, but is pretty superficial on some of the historians discussed like Delbruck. Keegan seems unwilling or incapable of substantially asking why some writers, who have been in combat, are guilty of writing “battle pieces”. My own view is that this tells you quite a lot about writers like Caesar, for whom suffering is unimportant, or Sir William Napier, who only cares about glory. One senses that Keegan’s real complaint here is that he finds this morally distasteful rather than inaccurate.
This sort of humane sensibility inhibits the book. War involves lots of people behaving like predators, from statesmen to privates, and although Keegan seems to understand, he doesn’t seem to want to accept or internalize their rationalizations. He prefers the position of a disinterested observer, who suspects (in 1973!) that “battle has already abolished itself”. A comforting thought that hasn’t been borne out by subsequent history. This is hardly something to be gloated over, but it does require some reflection on bleaker possibilities regarding humanity and our future. Even in the era of Detente Keegan’s view lacked imagination.
The chapters on Waterloo and the Somme are the better parts of this book. The chapter on Agincourt has so much speculation and so few citations that it basically illustrates how useless Keegan’s battle methodology is for pre-modern military history.
The book does justice to historiography for a generalist reader, but is pretty superficial on some of the historians discussed like Delbruck. Keegan seems unwilling or incapable of substantially asking why some writers, who have been in combat, are guilty of writing “battle pieces”. My own view is that this tells you quite a lot about writers like Caesar, for whom suffering is unimportant, or Sir William Napier, who only cares about glory. One senses that Keegan’s real complaint here is that he finds this morally distasteful rather than inaccurate.
This sort of humane sensibility inhibits the book. War involves lots of people behaving like predators, from statesmen to privates, and although Keegan seems to understand, he doesn’t seem to want to accept or internalize their rationalizations. He prefers the position of a disinterested observer, who suspects (in 1973!) that “battle has already abolished itself”. A comforting thought that hasn’t been borne out by subsequent history. This is hardly something to be gloated over, but it does require some reflection on bleaker possibilities regarding humanity and our future. Even in the era of Detente Keegan’s view lacked imagination.
The chapters on Waterloo and the Somme are the better parts of this book. The chapter on Agincourt has so much speculation and so few citations that it basically illustrates how useless Keegan’s battle methodology is for pre-modern military history.
May 26, 2021
It's a meta-level discussion of "battle" and how it varies through history, not just on the technological axis but covering these too:
* time extent of battle - the length of encounters and expectations of soldier's commitment
* by class - from grunt, through officer, even covering later writers of formal or informal accounts of battles - how their conduct in and out of battle changed - how officers attitudes towards their role, "pals battalions" vs conscription
* subjective evaluation of the experience of being in each position through time
* changes in the ability to flee from battle - techniques for coercion, the role of unit social structure in morale
* distance/size - how has battle size/scope changed - from small scale with hand arms to huge storms of steel and killing zones, and how it effected training methods.
* changes in information available for participants - fog of war, role of an individual's tactical / strategic ability, changes in participation levels of generals
* weapon design and effectiveness; medical systems for evacuation, triage systems
* pairings by unit type and what each matchup was like: infantry vs infantry, infantry vs cavalry, machine gunners vs infantry etc, and the characteristics of each pairing over time
Keegan writes magnificently, filling in the background knowledge required to place a battle and an individual's experience in the scope of change over history in multitudinous ways. It'll inform all future media depictions of battle I encounter. 5/5
* time extent of battle - the length of encounters and expectations of soldier's commitment
* by class - from grunt, through officer, even covering later writers of formal or informal accounts of battles - how their conduct in and out of battle changed - how officers attitudes towards their role, "pals battalions" vs conscription
* subjective evaluation of the experience of being in each position through time
* changes in the ability to flee from battle - techniques for coercion, the role of unit social structure in morale
* distance/size - how has battle size/scope changed - from small scale with hand arms to huge storms of steel and killing zones, and how it effected training methods.
* changes in information available for participants - fog of war, role of an individual's tactical / strategic ability, changes in participation levels of generals
* weapon design and effectiveness; medical systems for evacuation, triage systems
* pairings by unit type and what each matchup was like: infantry vs infantry, infantry vs cavalry, machine gunners vs infantry etc, and the characteristics of each pairing over time
Keegan writes magnificently, filling in the background knowledge required to place a battle and an individual's experience in the scope of change over history in multitudinous ways. It'll inform all future media depictions of battle I encounter. 5/5
May 22, 2021
"What battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them....it is necessarily a social and psychological study. But it is not a study only for the sociologist or the psychologist, and indeed ought not perhaps to be properly a study for either....for Battle is a historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long historical perspective." -- John Keegan, The Face of Battle
Keegan wrote a work that that took battle's soaring narratives and great man perspectives and replaced it with the man-in-the-fray's view - one that is lowered, prostrate, crouched, unelevated, crowded, shattered, and decumbent. In the process, he created a classic, and forever changed the way lay readers like myself think about battle.
War is hell, it's been said. Keegan ensures no place for disagreement.
Keegan wrote a work that that took battle's soaring narratives and great man perspectives and replaced it with the man-in-the-fray's view - one that is lowered, prostrate, crouched, unelevated, crowded, shattered, and decumbent. In the process, he created a classic, and forever changed the way lay readers like myself think about battle.
War is hell, it's been said. Keegan ensures no place for disagreement.
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May 1, 2023
3.75 marked up to four by Goodreads. Full review to come.
5/1/23: This is (was) very interesting in an academic way. I learned lots about Agincourt (starting from nothing) and Waterloo (starting from not very much knowledge), but not sure I learned anything earth-shatteringly new about BATTLE, as in man-to-man (or machine-to-machine) conflict. Other than personal experience, those lessons are best learned from first-hand accounts -- see Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel or Edwin Vaughan's Some Desperate Glory or even Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War.
To be fair to Keegan, I think he would agree with the above . . . his criticism is about the way some (most) historians treat battle, e.g., as markers on a map table or from a general's-eye view. Keegan's comments on historiography were quite interesting to me (with an academic history background) but might not be as interesting to others.
5/1/23: This is (was) very interesting in an academic way. I learned lots about Agincourt (starting from nothing) and Waterloo (starting from not very much knowledge), but not sure I learned anything earth-shatteringly new about BATTLE, as in man-to-man (or machine-to-machine) conflict. Other than personal experience, those lessons are best learned from first-hand accounts -- see Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel or Edwin Vaughan's Some Desperate Glory or even Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War.
To be fair to Keegan, I think he would agree with the above . . . his criticism is about the way some (most) historians treat battle, e.g., as markers on a map table or from a general's-eye view. Keegan's comments on historiography were quite interesting to me (with an academic history background) but might not be as interesting to others.
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