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The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme Review

I recently finished Bernard Cornwell's lengthy series about Rifleman Richard Sharpe and the Napoleonic wars -- the last volume of which focuses, naturally, on Waterloo -- and then followed that up with Cornwell's newest, about the nearly mythical Battle of Agincourt. So it seemed time to reread Keegan's much praised first book, half of which is dedicated to a ground's-eye view of those two battles. The third battle he covers in detail is the Somme in 1916, where some of the fighting covered much the same ground as Henry V's army in 1415. Keegan was an academic military historian at Sandhurst for many years (he was prohibited from military service for medical reasons) and some of his considered opinions about the nature of strategy and related matters have been deeply unpopular in certain military quarters. He has also been a vocal supporter of Bush's war in Iraq. But those are political issues and they do not change the fact that this volume is a masterpiece of military inquiry and interpretation from the point of view of the ordinary infantryman. (Although his personal opinions permeate his writing here, too.) His analysis of effectiveness and the consequences of the wide variety of types of combat at Waterloo -- infantry vs. cavalry, infantry vs. artillery, cavalry vs. cavalry, etc -- is especially illuminating. The third section, on the Somme, is a different matter. I admit my knowledge of World War I is relatively limited, especially compared to medieval warfare, but the greatly increased pace of social change and technological innovation during the 19th century seems to make the Somme so very different -- in the geopolitical aims of the participants, in the kind of men who served both as privates and as officers, in the major change in the role of the commanders (from war leader to office-bound executive), not to mention enormous differences in communications, transportation, and medicine -- that it's difficult for me to identify a single point of comparison. It's like comparing Phoenician exploration in the Mediterranean with the Space Program. The final section, "The Future of Battle," since it was written more than a quarter-century ago, is best read as an historical curiosity. Keegan is still around, of course, and still writing books, but back then he had not the slightest idea of what warfare would become in the early 21st century. He laughs a bit over the U.S. Army's introduction of Specialist grades to replace privates and corporals, but the contemporary junior soldier must be (and is) far more technically sophisticated than his counterpart even in Vietnam, much less at the Somme. Keegan is an excellent analyst of the past, and the book is highly recommended for that reason, but he has never proven to be much of a prognosticator.

The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme Feature

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The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme Overview

Although he has never fought in a war the author creates a realistic picture of the fears, pressures, and mechanics of fighting a battle, emphasizing three particular campaigns.

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Customer Reviews

Accurate Depiction of How Battlefields Look Like. - Maximiliano F Yofre - Buenos Aires, Argentina
"The Face of Battle" is an early book from Mr. Keegan (1976) which shows all his virtues combined: he is a professor (at Sandhurst Military Academy), so the book is didactic; he is an investigator so his researches on how to describe a battle are shown; he is a talented literate writer, so his prose is engaging and fluent.
As with other books of the author this is a very commendable reading for different audiences: those interested in specific military topics, those interested in history (as me), those who want to know how a battle looks like and more.

Mr. Keegan open his work with an introduction in which he wonders how battles has been described and perform a critical reading on some famous excerpts, pointing out why they fail to tell us what really happened in those critical moments of history. At the same time he draws a model on how a battle should be told.
He applies this model to three outstanding battles: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. He analyzes and describes each piece of battle, taking pain to break them into small components and present them to the reader with a forceful language.

Agincourt is a fearful hand to hand and man to man conflict; Mr. Keegan reviews the weapons, the battlefield, the climate, the mood of the warriors, the leadership, and the moral conflict of killing prisoners among other things. Even if this battle piece is described with scientific method you have the poignant feeling of being there.

Waterloo is different scenario; weaponry has evolved changing the kind and quality of armed encounters. Documentation on the battle overflows and menaces to drown the historian. Artists' imagination is aroused and lots of paintings full of color and inaccuracy find their way to galleries and museums. From all this massed data and imagery, however Mr. Keegan, produce another coherent and accurate description of the events on 18th June.

The Somme is XXth century and an industrialized mass war, the size of the battle field enlarges to an inhuman scale, increasing logistic and communication problems. General staff miscalculations translate into human useless suffering. Pre-battle, battle and post-battle issues are analyzed and shown in this section. Military lessons may be extracted from it by military professionals. A very realistic picture of the pains, disorientation, vision, behavior, of the front officers and soldiers, among many other "observables" may be grasped by the rest of the readers.

But as I said at the beginning of the review, Mr. Keegan is not only an historian, he is an educator, and so to complete his work, as an epilogue, he discusses the future of battle and the art of War.

Reviewed by Max Yofre.

Examining the ordeal of the individual soldier - William S. Grass -
The Face of Battle is the best known work of one of the world's preeminent military historians, John Keegan. One finds The Face of Battle on virtually every general military history reading list. In it, Keegan steers away from the traditional subjects of strategy and generalship and examines the ordeal of the individual soldier on the battlefield. He presents case studies of three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. All fought by English-British armies in a small geographic area of northern France and southern Belgium, but separated sufficiently in time to demonstrate how technological and to a lesser extent sociological developments brought about different battlefield experiences for these soldiers in different eras.

In an introductory section, Keegan gives an overview of military historiography through the ages, and demonstrates that with rare exceptions, military historians have been preoccupied with strategy and generalship, and not the travails of the individual soldier. Some reviewers have remarked that they could have done without this section, and gotten straight to the accounts of the three battles. I, however, enjoyed the opening section, and was interested in Keegan's comparison of Caesar to Thucydides, and his critiques of David Chandler, Michael Howard and others.

Keegan makes it clear at the very beginning that he has never been in a battle nor seen one. He does, however, have observant and sympathetic eyes and ears for those who have experienced battle. Of the three studies, I found that of Agincourt to be the most evocative, possibly because its scale was small enough, compared to the other two, to visualize the entire battle, which occurred in a few hours in an area covered only by several hundred yards. Among the vivid images related by Keegan is the one of the reaction of the horses of the French cavalry, when enduring the initial salvo of arrows from the English archers: "Animal cries of pain and fear would have risen above the metallic clatter."

There is a final section, wherein Keegan contemplates the future of battle. It is somewhat dated due to its Cold War frame of reference. Keegan's final conclusion, that we may have seen the "abolition of battle," has drawn criticism. Since Face of Battle was published in the 1970s, there has been no shortage of wars. But there has been a shortage of the set-piece type of battle, restricted in time and space, to which Keegan's attention is drawn in The Face of Battle.

A Classic - Philip Draper - Honolulu, HI USA
This is the book that put Keegan on the map. It is a unique book in that it does not attempt to describe an entire conflict or campaign, or even evaluate a battle from a general's perspective. Instead, Keegan's focus is on battle itself at the level of the soldier, and he uses three battles fought in different eras by his countrymen to explore the nature of the battlefield: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. His focus on the view from the soldier was groundbreaking at the time and established that particular genre of military historiography. A true classic, it is recommended for all readers, regardless of interest or background.

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Friday, August 27, 2010