The Face of Battle (John Keegan, 1976)

Keegan tries to explore how it feels on a battlefield from the standpoint of the front-line participant. This is necessarily a difficult task, but it makes for a really interesting read. So much war writing is done from the perspective of the generals.

Much of the book is taken up with three case studies: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (focusing on the initial day, July 1, 1916). He selected these because they were pretty discrete battle situations, and quite a bit of documentary evidence exists. These also were selected to demonstrate the progression of the battlefield situation over the centuries.

Agincourt of course involved archers and knights; in addition to the battle itself, Keegan discusses pre-battle activities, treatment of prisoners, etc. He points out how the mayhem was limited - when the battle consists of guys swinging heavy swords at each other, the amount of damage that can be inflicted, the scope of the battlefield, and the duration of the battle are necessarily limited. Though the longbow archers were introducing change.

Waterloo was a longer battle, much noisier, and involved the risk of cannonballs coming from off in the distance and killing soldiers or taking off limbs. Keegan didn't seem to think the point of attack was all that different from Agincourt, though guns increased the range and the duration of the battle.

The Somme had some front-line similarities, but now the scope of battle was changing rapidly. The artillery and shelling came from far away; the size of the battlefield had enlarged dramatically. A guy hidden in a machine gun nest could hold groups at bay. Folks in the front line areas were constantly subject to getting nailed by shells. Very impersonal. While the artillery wasn't necessarily accurate, it was interesting to read how the British advance was supposed to be timed to follow closely behind a "curtain of fire."

Anyway, Keegan cites various primary sources, compares the three battles in detail and tries to draw some conclusions about where the concept of "battle" is headed. His conclusion is quite interesting, especially because it was written in the 1970s. Keegan doesn't think that armed conflict is over, but he does feel that the traditional set-piece battle setting is largely a thing of the past. He was writing before the fall of the Iron Curtain, at a time when the military was still preparing for a large European land war. Keegan felt that technological change has moved past what individuals can handle well. The theater of battle is immense; danger comes from all sorts of unseen places; noise and overall mayhem is everywhere; duration of major battles now can last for days. Keegan feels individuals really can't handle this effectively.

So he foresees limited actions - terrorists, for example. "The militant young . . . will fight for the causes which they profess not through the mechanisms of the state and its armed power but, where necessary, against them, by clandestine and guerrilla methods . . . the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself."

Read at the gym.