The Face of Battle

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating history
Review: I knew very little about military history before reading this book, but after this I felt I understood at least some basic principles. Keegan discusses three famous battles in history and why they were significant: the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of the Somme, the archetypal "trench warfare" battle of World War I, and the Battle of Waterloo.

Keegan shows how the battle of the Somme really boiled down to the British artillery versus the German machine gunners hiding in their underground bunkers. The large artillery with their 2000-pound shells could blow craters 30 feet deep, but even this wasn't deep enough to "dig out" the deepest German machine gunners. Hence, when the British artillery bombardment stopped and the infantry made their charge, there were enough German machine gunners left in the their bunkers to come back up to the surface and still decimate many of the British infantry companies.

An interesting figure Keegan quotes is that artillery accounts for 90% of the casualties in a ground battle.

In the case of Waterloo, Keegan shows how the supposedly fearsome cavalry charges could effectively be nullified by men with single-shot flintlocks only if they stood their ground, remained in formation and coordinated their fire, and didn't panic and allow themselves to be dispersed by the cavalry charge. If they did this and fired from close enough range to be accurate, the cavalry charges could be broken up, disintegrated, and defeated.

The battle of Agincourt pitted men with medieval weapons against each other one on one. No weapons of mass destruction here, but he says in the middle of the worst fighting areas the bodies could still be piled six or seven high. He also offers some interesting insights into the psychology of the medieval knight, and states that plundering the bodies was one of the main economic motivations for such a pitched one-on-one battle, something I hadn't heard before.

Overall, a very readable book on the subject with many interesting insights into military strategy and psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Rivetingly Accurate Look At Nature Of Combat Experience
Review: One of the most wonderful aspects of John Keegan's impeccable writing style is that it is always used in service to the telling the story at hand, in this case a quite unique and fascinating look at the literal face of battle itself, that is, at the nature of the experience of combat from the soldier's perspective. Of course, since most of his other tomes he argues masterfully about the integrating elements of warfare regarding specific campaigns and battles in a specific conflict such as World War Two or the First World War (see my reviews), here he focuses brilliantly on the nature of organized violence itself, and how it is perceived and witnessed by the men who are so engaged. In a very real sense, he has reversed the usual logic about conducting war from the overall perspective and strategies of the generals and admirals overseeing the engagement of forces to focus instead on the horrific and mind-boggling perspective of the soldier on the ground, the "cipher" so often taken for granted and ignored in historical treatments. For this reason alone any serious student of military history should enthusiastically devour this book.

Yet, of course, as we devotees of Keegan's works have come to expect and admire, there is much more of value in this thin but provocative volume. Keegan memorably details and describes the horror, pain, and confusion of the battlefield, and redefines the nature of our understanding of what it means to be a soldier, from the nature of a soldier's fears to the physical and emotional assault on his person, covering everything from wounds to trauma to shell shock. He accurately and articulately describes the operation of everything from field hospitals to makeshift prisoner of war camps, and the atrocious realities involved in experiencing either. Similarly, he briefly explores the nature of leading men into combat, and the qualities of personality that make one a leader under such traumatic circumstances, how it is that some men can make his fellows stand their ground when everything around them screams for them to flee.

Combat is surely one of the most extreme of human experiences, and as Keegan so deftly demonstrates, it is also one of the least understood. I have always told people I thought the most honest and accurate description of combat were depicted in the last few battle scenes in the movie "Platoon", where an ungodly amalgam of terror, confusion, and unpredictable staccato punctuations of sudden violence and death were interruptions to the horror of a night spent sitting frozen by fear in a foxhole, waiting and almost hoping for any kind of movement to end the suffocating suspense and yet at the same moment praying for nothing to happen at all. Now I can add this book to the suggestion list, for whether Keegan is describing the terror of the archer attack at Agincourt, the ball and musket charges at point blank range at Waterloo, or the hailstorm of rapid-fire machine guns used to such horrific effect against the trench charges in the First World War, Keegan has captured the insanity, bravery, and futility of the experience of war better than anyone else to date. I highly recommend this book to any student of war or military history.

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Summary: HQDA "Recommended" Reading
Review: The book is "recommended" reading for Army military personnel. The tape is convient to listen to while dealing with "rush hour" on I95S @1600hrs!

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: I came across a review of Keegan in the NY Review of Books and picked him up for my 16 year old son, a military history buff, so that he could enjoy some intelligent military history and good writing. Not to be left behind, I'm reading Keegan too. He is a rare breed--his writing is excellent, clear and humane, soemtimes even poetic, yet academic as well---detailed and thoughtful. He is honest about war, which is refreshing, and not defensive about it, which is also refreshing. The book's purpose is to explore the individual's experience of battle at different historical periods--starting with the battle of Agincourt and ending with the battle of the Somme. It made vivid and concrete what had always been abstact or unthinkable for me. It illuminates strategy--how to achieve an end with an army composed of humans, not robots. It also asks important questions about how technology has come to move soldiers out of actual close-up battle and what that implies for modern warfare.

Rating:
Summary: A tour de force.
Review: As much as he shows war has differed in some of his other books, in the Face of Battle, Keegan shows much of how it has remained the same. Soldiers have sat from the beginnings of time in conditions much worse than at the sides of pretty women at home. They have been forced to fight drunk, often by coersion. They have had a rough lot....

Intuitively, I like this book and its investigations of Azincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme better than some of Keegan's others: perhaps because how the bluk of men FIGHT is more interesting (and more important) than the lives and strategies of the men who command them. I would reccomend this book to anyone.

If one wanted to read additionally along the same lines as of this book, I would suggest the book "Infantry Soldier" which is one man (I'm sorry.... I've forgotten the author) accounting for his life from 1939 until he was injured in the Battle of the Bulge for the U.S.

Rating:
Summary: The Face of Horror
Review: Agincourt, Waterloo and Somme were just names of battles for me, one-line-paragraphs in my high-school history books. They seemed distant events on far-away places and, certainly, were coloured in my imagination with classic movie-scenes. But, after reading this book, I found that in all battles a certain bit of humanity is lost and won. The heaps of corpses on Agincourt, the smoke and strangely silent noise of Waterloo, the unthinkable first minute of the attack out of the trenches...somehow I felt, deep in my heart, "the horror, the horror". And this is what I think is the biggest achievement of "The Face of Battle".

Moreover, this book lead me to read more about the effects of War and found after it Fussell's "The Modern Memory and The Great War", Graves, Owen and Rosenberg, which is commendable because they are mostly unknown in this part of the world.

Rating:
Summary: Raw war, interesting analysis, but not Earth-shattering
Review: This book succeeds tremendously in presenting each battle on its own. The raw, terrible face of war is shown. I was most fascinated by the portrayal of Agincourt (especially since I saw Branaugh's Henry V on TV a couple months later, giving an interesting contrast), but the other battles are also gripping accounts. My disappointment was the comparison between the battles. These parts didn't seem to be as insightful as they are in Keegan's other works that I've read. This doesn't detract from the enjoyment, and this book from any other author would garner 5 stars. From Keegan, with his pedigree, I can only give it 4 stars. Still highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece History
Review: All disciplines, whether Astronomy or Zoology, have a classic work(s) that are regarded as reference-quality. This book rests firmly in that prestigous company. An introduction to understanding Military History sums up this book's main purpose; but it's actual achievment goes much deeper. Instead, the reader will never read Military History the same way again. There is very little else to be said. If you have any interest in this subject, all roads lead to The Face of Battle.

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Summary: The sad tale of the man on the battle line
Review: This is perhaps the most important book about war the I have ever read, because it tells the story of the men who had to kill and be killed at the focus of battle. Keegan writes about what, to me at least, seems a logical and obvious subject--how the men on three famous battlefields conducted the business of war. The soldiers at Agincout, Waterloo, and Verdun, fought at battlefields that will still be discussed a millenium from now. And the ways that they fought, killed, and died will be discussed using "The Face of Battle" as a major reference source. No book I've read since describes in such a cool yet humane manner the way that men kill and are killed on the battlefield.

Keegan's great gift in this book is to show how the soldiers who endured these battles went about their bloody business, without resorting to propaganda or jingoistic "War is Hell" slogans. These men killed because they had to kill to survive, because the officers they loved and respected pointed at the enemy and ordered them into the breach. They killed because they had no choice, because not killing meant death. They died because that is what men do on battlefields.

Keegan does a masterful job of showing the full picture of the battlefield without resorting to overt emotional pleas or obvious patriotic displays. What this book shows is that battle is far worse, and has always been far worse, than the average citizen expects. That Keegan has so overwhelmingly succeeded in showing what the horror of battle was, is, and always will be is a testament to his powers as a historian and his understanding of war as a central event in human affairs.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasure to read
Review: I must disagree with a couple of previous reviewers -- of course, this is entirely subjective, but I did not find the book difficult to read, or at all tedious. In fact, I found the prose style both rich and wonderfully clear. It was the best non-fiction writing I'd come across in years.

Beside the pleasure I took in the writing style, it was a great relief to find battle descriptions of such clarity. I speak as someone with no previous background in military history at all, and I was a bit wary that I wouldn't be able to follow what Keegan was writing about. That was not the case, and let me tell you, it was like a cool drink of water after crossing a parched desert.

My previous attempts to read about battles, in other books, had simply left me puzzled. Take Elizabeth Longford's description of one of Wellington's India campaigns, for instance. After reading several pages of densely written sentences three times, I could only conclude that it had something to do with a river.

I'd always assumed my lack of understanding was my own fault, till I picked up this book. Keegan is beautifully, wonderfully CLEAR about everything -- so clear that I actually found myself disagreeing with one of his conclusions about Agincourt. I couldn't have done that if he hadn't laid out everything so logically.

I'm partway through "The History of Warfare" right now, but I think this will remain my favorite of his books.