★★★★☆ It's all down to the soldiers

The Face of Battle

John Keegan

I read John Keegan's The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme fourteen years ago, in April 2009. I can be precise about that because that's when I ordered it from Amazon. I was reminded of it two days ago by two things. The first was an essay that appeared on the web Michael Taylor on John Keegan’s The Face of Battle: A Retrospective. The second was a chain of literary free associations. I recently finished Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. Kaz Brekker and his team of Crows reminded me of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.. From there it was a short mental leap to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and from there to the only book I have read that I know to be by a Sandhurst professor, John Keegan. (To be accurate, I think I also read Keegan's A History of Warfare many many years ago, in time out of reach of an Amazon order search.)

I mention this because I feel that Kipling illuminates Keegan and The Face of Battle. Like Kipling, Keegan writes of "Famous Victories". What particularly distinguished The Face of Battle from earlier military scholarship was its focus on the soldiers as the people who won battles. And by soldiers I do not so much mean generals and kings as the common grunts. (Although, in one of his battles, Agincourt, the "grunts" on one side were French knights who would not at all appreciate being so described.) Keegan makes very clear in his first chapter, "Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things" that he thinks it is of the highest importance to see battle from their point of view. Although he doesn't entirely eschew the familiar maps of battles and discussion of tactics, he more or less implies that these things are of secondary importance compared to the psychological factors that drive the soldiers to fight and endure.

Keegan, like Kipling, grew up in the company of soldiers, yet never was one himself. The reasons were similar -- Keegan was handicapped as a result of a childhood illness, and was ineligible to serve -- Kipling was too old to serve in the first World War. You have only to read Kipling's books to see how highly he revered soldiers. Indeed, in Stalky & Co. during the visit of the "Old Boys" (meaning former students of the school), who are now mostly soldiers, they are seen as gods among men. Keegan is of course more measured, but passages like this reveal how important the soldier's point of view is to him

The insight which intimacy with soldiers at this level can bring to the military historian enormously enhances his surety of touch in feeling his way through the inanimate landscape of documents and objects with which he must work. It will, I think, rob him of patience for much that passes as military history; it will diminish his interest in much of the ‘higher’ study of war – of strategic theory, of generalship, of grand strategic debate, of the machine-warfare waged by air forces and navies. And that, perhaps, is a pity. But if it leads him to question – as I have found it does me – the traditional approach to writing about combat corps à corps, to decide that, after he has read the survivors’ letters and diaries, the generals’ memoirs, the staff officers’ dispatches, that there is yet another element which he must add to anything he writes – an element compounded of affection for the soldiers he knows, a perception of the hostilities as well as the loyalties which animate a society founded on comradeship, some appreciation of the limits of leadership and obedience, a glimpse of the far shores of courage, a recognition of the principle of self-preservation ever present in even the best soldier’s nature, incredulity that flesh and blood can stand the fears with which battle will confront it and which his own deeply felt timidity will highlight – if, in short, he can learn to make up his mind about the facts of battle in the light of what all, and not merely some, of the participants felt about their predicament, then he will have taken the first and most important step in understanding battle ‘as it actually was’.

The Face of Battle is an attempt by a man who never was a soldier to understand how the "face of battle" appears to a soldier. It is recognized as one of the classics of military history. It is instructive, I believe, to compare this with another classic of military history, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman F. Dixon. The contrast is not so great as the titles might lead you to expect.

Amazon review

Goodreads review