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Summary: You Are There
Review: My generation's war was Viet Nam, which I avoided with a teaching deferment and a high lottery number. As a result, "The Face of Battle" was an eye-opener for me, since it captures the real, not Hollywood, experience of battle for the common soldier who draws a sword, fires a weapon, or attacks an insurmountable position. Those who want to know what Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme were really like should read this book. The lucky survive. Bravo, John Keegan!
Rating: 
Summary: Military history from the grunt's perspective
Review: Scholarship is lacking in this book, but that is not its objective. Keegan takes a look at some major battles and tells them from the perspective of the soldier rather than the leaders. This is perhaps the most "human" work of military history in print.
Rating:
Summary: Military history from the grunt's perspective
Review: Scholarship is lacking in this book, but that is not its objective. Keegan takes a look at some major battles and tells them from the perspective of the soldier rather than the leaders. This is perhaps the most "human" work of military history in print.
Rating:
Summary: Face of Battle
Review: Skip the lengthy and slow introduction, and don't trust Keegan on the American Civil War; he makes outright inaccurate comments regarding it.But when Keegan gets to the three battles he discusses in detail, Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, he does a wonderful job. A combination of tactics, technology and mentalities gives the reader plausible accounts of what each of these conflicts must have been like for participants. Primary sources are well used. This would be a wonderful resource for historical fiction and fantasy authors, looking for ideas on how to write a realistic battle scene.
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Summary: When faced with cold steel
Review: Someone had to write this book - interesting that it was John Keegan. War may be about great leadership, and Keegan has a book like that, or it may be about feints and flanking maneuvers, and Keegan has handfuls like that, but at some point someone has to pull all the statue-builders and map-gazers off their seats and remind them that war, throughout history, has always come down to an actual living, breathing human being facing a charging sword inches away or a raking machine gun, heard but never seen. What is going on when a man stands to face a charging horseman or goes over the top from a muddy trench to a likely death? Would a horse, no matter how trained, charge directly into a mass of armed men? Would they flinch? Would the horse turn? Could they really be routed in ways so colorfully portrayed in paintings of war when it seems simply impossible to fit so many horses or men into so small a space, to leap through the mass of other flesh? What did it really mean to be struck a sword's blow or a by musket's ball? What became of a man wounded in no man's land, or captive, or a slaughterer of captives. Keegan's questions range from the deepest questions of humans facing death to the pragmatic problems of daily needs and mud and dirt and flesh. This book is apparently unique among military histories in raising and contemplating them. Keegan offers an oddly heightened awareness of these questions by noting right at the beginning that he has not, in fact, ever been a soldier. He has been called upon to teach and to mentor them as one of the most esteemed military historians of our era but he has not stood in those boots. But much more so than any foot soldier or general he has studied "battle" enough to understand that the confusion that underlies these encounters can only be distilled from a distant perspective. Although he honors and acknowledges the first-hand accounts of participants, by simply noting the level of confusion, the restrictions and overload on sensory input, and the inevitable role of the survivor's ego, he reminds us that much more is happening than personal viewpoint or formalist analysis could describe. Keegan chooses to look at three battles from history: Agincourt, Waterloo and The Somme. All three are what historians apparently term "set battles" but each called upon its participants to face death, or glory, or simply the esteem of their neighbor, in different ways. While he maintains his focus on the individual soldier, Keegan does a fine job of making each of these three historically momentous battles come to life in full scale. Written in a style that is relaxed but incisive, "The Face of Battle" is a fascinating work.
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Summary: Into the Battlefield.
Review: 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 myself), 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 draw a model on how a battle should be told.
He applies this model to three outstanding battles: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. He analyze and describe each piece of battle, taking pain to break them into small components and present them to the reader with a forceful languaje. 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, 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 menace 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 translates 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 beging of the review, Mr. Keegan is not only an historian, he is an educator, so to complete his work, as an epilogue, he discuss the future of battle and the art of War.
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Summary: Great account of 3 British battles
Review: This book provides a great account of Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme. The author has a unique talent of presenting these battles through multiple perspectives. He provides a revealing historical context, and experience of the solider, as well as the tactical aspects of the fights. His description of Agincourt is amazing. The other two accounts are more than worth your time. I think this is one of the best military history books I've read, and strongly recommend it for anyone interested in warfare, history in general, or just looking for an engaging read!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: True, the introduction is long and somewhat useless. True the author disgresses and repeats himself. But just for the chapter on Agincourt, read this and you will know what it was to be in this battle, in the midst of men fighting and dying.
A masterpiece.
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