John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (New York: Penguin Books, 1976)
Biography: John Keegan was an English military historian who published many works on armed conflict including The Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, A History of Warfare, and Intelligence in War and a plethora of others. He is the recipient of multiple awards, including being named Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) while serving as a war correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in the gulf war. In 1996 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize by the Society for Military History.
Thesis: Keegan seeks to answer the central question: “what is it like to be in a battle?” (16). A comparative study on three monumental battles for the British Army that occurred in roughly the same area of France/Belgium.
Overview: Keegan examines are three specific British victories that take place over a period of 500 years and a geographical range of 100 miles: the battle of Agincourt, where Henry V fought by the side of his 6,000 archers and cavalrymen, each in sixty pounds of armor, man-to-man; Waterloo, where Wellington rode all day behind the cannons to stay near the heaviest fighting; and the Somme in 1916, where the British lost thousands of men in the first minutes of battle, and where only the junior officers saw action.
Scope of Book:
- In particular he examines how the mechanics and logistics of conflict affected the psychology of the individual soldier – looking not just at the critical moments during the heat of combat, but also at the hours before battle was joined, and its aftermath once the dust has settled. Throughout the battle he examines specific combat type for analysis, such as archer versus infantry; infantry versus infantry; cavalry versus infantry; artillery versus artillery, and every imaginable combination in each battle.
- But at its core, this book argues that battle is a peculiarly human experience. Not because violent life-and-death struggles between competing groups do not regularly occur elsewhere in nature, but because human beings, alone, are capable of understanding the terrible social and personal toll that battle imposes on its participants. And because of this uniquely human understanding, Keegan argues, all battles and their human combatants’ evidence certain fundamental characteristics that have remained changeless throughout history. Thus, the weapons and tactics of battle may have changed through the ages, but not the men who have fought them. These commonalities, Keegan suggests, are evident both in terms of the soldier’s psyche and in his behavior.
- During the first chapter, Keegan describes the historiography of battles and military history, noting that it lacks analysis of soldier level action. Military history scholarship, for Keegan, is much too dogmatic and methodical, lacking the nuance of thought required to study such a complex human activity. The focus of his study is not upon the respective generals and their abilities to lead and choose the correct course of action, but upon the lower ranks: a bottom-up rather than a top-down angle.
- In his final chapter, Keegan attempts to analyze current trends on the future of warfare. He comes to the conclusion that “What battles have in common is human:” and concludes that “it is necessarily a social and psychological study” but that if it is only studied by social scientists, “battle is drained of life and meaning by the laboratory approach which social scientists practice.” “Battle,” after all, “is a historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long historical perspective.” (303) He concludes the book by describing decisive battle as usually understood to be one with a clear-cut victor or something that shifts the direction of human affairs. He states that battles are fought by armies comprised of men and that the really decisive effects of battle are not there but rather more immediate and personal in how they kill and change the individual soldier (342).
Commentary: An excellent, lucid read. Keegan’s prose is top notch and a treat to read. He places his ideas into a logical framework that allows the reader to find specific portions. The main criticism comes from his inability to focus on soldier motivation beyond junior officers before the Somme. But he describes the difficulty in sources throughout. Keegan created the “face of battle” approach to military history in which the perspective of participants is used to relate events, while the historian attempts to convey a sense of reality in details through examples, third the writer seeks to establish casual connection between soldiers reaction to weapons and the effectiveness and movement of their combat arms through the battle. I think the key to this book is its intervention in the scholarship and his detailed analysis of the extant scholarship on battles.