Book review: “The Face of Battle” by John Keegan

John Keegan opens The Face of Battle, his groundbreaking 1976 book on war, with an examination of generations of military historians and finds them wanting.

For instance, he quotes at length a description of a French cavalry attack against a Russian position in 1807 from David Chandler’s exhaustive study The Campaigns of Napoleon and then comments:

It is unbelievably complicated; indeed, 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.

Keegan writes that a close reading of the account raises many doubts about whether the movement went as smoothly as Chandler portrays.  Did the Russian troops fall down or run away? Either way, they would have clogged up the French horse lines that are supposed to have flown on through.

It is all very baffling.  And to say that it is not to imply disbelief that the episode happened, nor that it happened much as described.  It is only to say that one does not see how.

 

How war happens

To see “how” war happens — to see how fighting actually takes place and how loud and chaotic and scary it is and how it feels to be a soldier on a battlefield — is the point of The Face of Battle.

It is a book that looks at the experience of the frontline soldier in three major European battles:

• Agincourt, October 25, 1415, in northern France, in which a smaller force of English soldiers defeated a much larger French army.
• Waterloo, June 18, 1815, in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (now Belgium), in which two armies, one British and one Prussian, beat the French Imperial Army under Napoleon, ending the Napoleonic Wars.
• The first day of the Battle of Somme, July 1, 1916, in which British soldiers, attacking on a wide front against entrenched German lines, suffered more than 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 killed, in a conflict that continued for nearly five months and has been termed one of the deadliest battles in human history.

“Not wholly petrifying”

Keegan, a teacher in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (the British version of West Point) and 42 at the time, published the book for military leaders and military historians, for the general reader and politicians, with the idea that the more such people knew about the experience of the frontline, the better decisions they would make.

At the same time, it seems to me, he wrote it for the soldiers and their officers, like the ones in his classroom.  Early on, he makes the point that it is highly beneficial for officers (and, one would add, soldiers) to know what to expect when they find themselves in battle.

For by training the young officer to organize his intake of sensations, to reduce the events of combat to as few and as easily recognizable a set of elements as possible, to categorize under manageable headings the noise, blast, passage of missiles and confusion of human movement which will assail him on the battlefield, so that they can be described — to his men, to his superiors, to himself — as “incoming fire,” “outgoing fire,” “airstrike,” “company-strength attack,” one is helping him avert the onset of fear or, worse, of panic, and to perceive a face of battle which, if not familiar, and certainly not friendly, need not, in the event, prove wholly petrifying.

 

“A great advantage”

In the opening words of The Face of Battle, Keegan writes:

I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.

Nonetheless, he wrote that he learned about battle by questioning those who had been in such fighting and by reading widely and deeply in military history. He didn’t add more, but he could have.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, when he published his twenty-third book The First World War, he spoke with me via telephone about his vibrant history-writing career, and we discussed the orthopedic tuberculosis he suffered in his right leg at the age of 13 and the limp that resulted, leaving him unfit for military service.

As a military historian, Keegan said, it had been “a great advantage to be disabled.”

For one thing, stuck away in a hospital for three years in his mid-teens, he learned to look in more original and complex ways than if he had been in school. “Lack of education is a very bad thing, but, equally, it can be a very good thing because nobody tells you what to think,” he said.

Even more, among warriors, he was clearly an outsider.  As such, he could take a more objective and dispassionate approach than those who had seen combat and whose memories were colored by the intense and often overwhelming feelings of their particular spot on the battlefield.

His lameness, too, signaled to soldiers his lack of personal knowledge of combat.  As a result, he had “a sort of freedom to talk to soldiers” about their experiences. “I could ask these men questions,” Keegan said, “and they could see: He’s asking because he really doesn’t know.”

 

“Where they stood”

The Face of Battle is an intensely humane book albeit one that describes in clear, undistracted detail violence on the human body and the moments leading up and away from that violence.

Consider this description of the three or four hours that, at Agincourt, the two armies stood — well, actually, sat — waiting across from each other for the battle to begin:

Waiting, certainly for the English, must have been a cold, miserable and squalid business. It had been raining, the ground was recently ploughed, air temperature was probably in the forties or low fifties Fahrenheit and many of the army were suffering from diarrhea.  Since none would presumably have been allowed to leave the ranks while the army was deployed for action, sufferers would have had to relieve themselves where they stood.  For any afflicted man-at-arms wearing mail leggings laced to his plate armor, even that may not have been possible.

In many ways, those four sentences encapsulate Keegan’s approach and method in The Face of Battle.

 

“Must have been”

He zeroes in on what it must have been like physically for the soldiers in the time before fighting. The key phrase is “must have been.”

To create these sentences, Keegan has taken bits and pieces of information from the handful accounts of the battle as well as his already broad knowledge of war through the centuries and, using his imagination, has synthesized them into something that makes sense.  This is indicated by his use of “must have been” and “probably” and “presumably” and “may not have been possible.”

He is not selling this description as gospel truth but as the closest he has been able to come to understanding this time of waiting.

In addition, he has not limited himself to such things as weapons and terrain but looks at those very human activities of urination and defecation in this moment of high tension when privacy would be impossible to achieve.

 

“Solid cannon-balls”

Or look at Keegan’s analysis of the psychological impact on British soldiers standing in formation on the hills at Waterloo as Napoleon’s cannon balls came flying toward them and bouncing through them:

For though the eighty-odd guns in Napoleon’s “grand battery,” seven hundred yards distant from the British line, could not do any particular infantry formation the same concentrated harm as could a “galloping battery” firing grape or cannister into it from close range, the arrival of their solid cannon-balls was so frequent, the effect of the balls on human flesh so destructive, the apprehension of those temporarily spared so intense that the cannonade came as near as anything suffered by the British at Waterloo to breaking their line.

Unlike Agincourt, there were a vast number of memoirs written about this battle that changed the course of European history.  These, however, were from the viewpoints of individuals, and what Keegan did was to use them to create his one-sentence summary above of the significance of the cannon attacks.

 

“Like a cricket ball”

Woven into the battle description are references to many of these soldier memoirs. For instance, Ensign William Leake’s sergeant “prevented him from trying to stop one of these [cannon] shot which came ‘rolling down like a cricket ball’ with the warning that it would have seriously injured his foot.’ ”

Think of that homey-seeming scene of a cannon ball bouncing across the field — just like a cricket ball at home — but instead of being an object of play, it is a deadly threat.

Leake, who had watched mesmerized while a French gun-crew several hundred yards distant sponged out, loaded, rammed and fired, apparently straight at him, and had even glimpsed the ball leave the muzzle, saw the four men in file next to him fall dead or mutilated two seconds later.

That — although only one example — was what it was like on the battlefield at Waterloo.

 

“On my own”

By the time the Battle of the Somme started 91 years later, the scale of war, because of mechanization, had become gargantuan.  And inhuman.

British and French soldier left their trenches along a huge line to attack German entrenchments that were supposed to have been crushed by a massive bombardment — but often weren’t. Indeed, most British soldiers encountered heavy fire within seconds of leaving their trenches, and Keegan quotes from a sergeant who described how it was:

“I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men.  Then I heard the ‘patter, patter’ of machine guns in the distance. By the time I’d gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.”

 

“Human tragedy”

Keegan writes that the first day of the Battle of the Somme wasn’t a complete military failure but it was “a human tragedy.”

The Germans who had about 35,000 soldiers in the fighting suffered about 6,000 killed and wounded (about one in every six). By contrast, the British deployed about 120,000 and suffered nearly 60,000 killed and wounded (about one in two), almost 20,000 of whom were killed — “most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes,” Keegan adds.

He notes that, a half century after the war, British broadcaster and popular historian Robert Kee wrote,

“The trenches were the concentration camps of the First World War.”

 

“Something Treblinka-like”

An academic reviewer, Keegan writes, would find such an analogy unhistorical, but he goes on:

[T]here is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1^st, 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 range of 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. 

Anger is the response which the story of the Somme most commonly evokes among professionals.

 

Immersed in humanity

A half century after its publication, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle remains a classic of military history and of human history.

Describing the least humane of human activities, war, it is a work that is immersed in humanity and in a love of humanity and in a deep empathy for the flesh and blood people who must put themselves in harm’s way.

These were characteristics of Keegan’s long career as a historian and as a writer. Keegan, who died in 2012, was a man of intelligence, wisdom, courage and great heart.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.3.25