The Face of Battle

Rating:
Summary: Realities of War vs. Romantic Rhetoric
Review: I too found this book is somewhat hard to read (thus the missing 5th star) probably due to the natural language barrier between us Americans and our British cousins.

That said - I really found this book informative and a positive addition to my military book collection. The Face of Battle gives an unbiased view of warfare, separating romantic notions with the bloody facts. A prime example of Keegan's abilities is his critique of General Sir William Naoier's famous "heroic" account, of the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers advance against the French in the battle of Albuera in 1811. While the advance of the Fusiliers is an inspirational work in it's own way (ideal for fortifying unit pride or recruiting), it is not fact based nor is it real history. Missing as Keegan points out - are the broken bodies, moments wavering & acts of cowardliness on the part of the Fusiliers.

I'll admit this book is not for everybody as it points out the savageness & realities of warfare. So at no point will you get warm & fussy feelings as you read this book. But for to those of you who want a well-balanced library - I'd highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping
Review: Keegan has provided a nearly "eyewitness" account of battle that is as gripping and gut-wrenching as it is informative and mind-opening. I was especially struck, by the account of the Battle of Agincourt. The chaos and confusion of battle, and its disasterous effects, though related in a cold, journalistic style, were nevertheless terrifying. This is my second Keegan book, following "A Histoy of Warfare", and I recommend him to any who wish to have a finer insight into the nature of battle itself and the people who fight in them.

Nevermind his often bizarre conclusions, such as his predictions of a future without war, as I believe this is his way of maintaining his academic stature. Military history has a questionable reputation within academic circles, its historians stygmatized as quacks with sand-tables, and there are times where I feel Keegan is pre-occupied trying to prove himself otherwise. While some may find his style long-winded and difficult to follow, this should not be too big a problem if you can read without moving your lips.

Rating:
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: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Female peacemonger loves this ultimate battle book
Review: I'm more a reader of fiction than of military history, but when I read a passage in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride about Keegan, I decided to try it out. (There's a professor who teaches a course about how badly designed military uniforms can actually lose a war.)

What a great experience. I read this book twice and recommend it to everyone I know. It's a short, intense look at three hugely important battles in history, switching from the soldier's viewpoint to the big picture and back. You find out all the small decisions that turn into tragic errors. War seems both more immediate and more uncomprehensibly insane.

I've since tried to read some of his more recent books, but they're a little too heavy going--for me--on battalion names and such. This is the best.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: John Keegan has written many books about the conduct and outcome of wars. In this, he focuses on the question: what is it like to be in a battle? Why do studies show that even at the height of a battle, typically no more than one in four soldiers ever fire their gun? And why, on the other hand, do so few soldiers run away?

To answer the questions, he studies three different battles, representing three different types of combat: the hand-to-hand combat of Agincourt, the single-shot guns of Waterloo, and the mechanised destruction of the Somme. He talks about the kind of men who found themselves in each battle and the kind of experiences they had. You learn about the overwhelming noise of Waterloo, about how the raw recruits of Kitchener's army made it necessary to rely on artillery barrages to win the Somme, about the technical miscalculations that made this strategy go desperately wrong.

It's striking and moving, and unlike any other book about battle -- Victor Davis Hanson's recent "Carnage and Culture" does almost as good a job of capturing the experience of battle, but without the same level of compassion. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Illuminating, well written, relevant
Review: "The Face of Battle" is a unique combination of military history and social history that is relevant to everyone. As enjoyable as military history is, most of it tends to be a combination of adventure story and propaganda. John Keegan accomplishes something different in this respect by illuminating the day to day experiences of common soliders in several historic battles. For example, Keegan's chapter on the Battle of Agincourt describes such details as the weight of the British soldiers' armor, their response to the cold weather, the discomfort they felt relieving themselves while dressed, and the fear they must have experienced at the thought of doing battle with numerically superior French cavalry.

Keegan does much to expose the reality of combat and the life of a common soldier throughout history in an objective and apolitical fashion. If you are a pascifist or a social historian, then by all means read this book to enhance your understanding of war's unpleasant realities. If you are a fan of military history, then read this book to gain a finer, more detailed understanding of war.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping
Review: Keegan has provided a nearly "eyewitness" account of battle that is as gripping and gut-wrenching as it is informative and mind-opening. I was especially struck, by the account of the Battle of Agincourt. The chaos and confusion of battle, and its disasterous effects, though related in a cold, journalistic style, were nevertheless terrifying. This is my second Keegan book, following "A Histoy of Warfare", and I recommend him to any who wish to have a finer insight into the nature of battle itself and the people who fight in them.

Nevermind his often bizarre conclusions, such as his predictions of a future without war, as I believe this is his way of maintaining his academic stature. Military history has a questionable reputation within academic circles, its historians stygmatized as quacks with sand-tables, and there are times where I feel Keegan is pre-occupied trying to prove himself otherwise. While some may find his style long-winded and difficult to follow, this should not be too big a problem if you can read without moving your lips.

Rating:
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.

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.