There is so much about this book that is remarkable: its innovative approach may no longer have the original impact but it is still unusual for the explicit presence of its author in an erudie academic text. By acknowledging the value of his own experience, perceptions and shortcomings, Keegan lends his work huge credibility and is consistent with his desire to describe the personalised experience of battle without resorting to anecdotal compilation. Essentially, Keegan covers five elements of battle history: its historiography, respective accounts of Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme, and a synthesis of all four of the preceding elements. The result is a powerful account of human experience in late medieval and modern battle in NorthWest Europe and, by extension, more generally. ( )

John Keegan’s The Face of Battle has spawned an entire field of “face of battle” studies of other groups of soldiers, battles, and campaigns. It is the experience of battle and the individual and group psychology of men in battle that interested Keegan. His face-of-battle approach set itself up against traditional operational history, which he called the “battle piece.” Keegan had a number of criticisms of the battle piece, including: an unrealistically uniform depiction of human behavior on the battlefield; abrupt, discontinuous movement of one portion of the narrative to another; stratified characterizations of individuals and their motivations as well as a focus on senior leaders; and, most importantly, a dramatically over-simplified account of human behavior. Keegan proposed to approach the “battle piece” from a new direction with an aim of capturing the experiences of ordinary soldiers in battle in order to investigate more deeply the human behavioral aspects of battle, both that of individuals – for example, the role of small-unit leadership, fear, and motivations for fighting on individuals – as well as that of large groups (e.g., Keegan noted that his approach might offer the ability to study “the long-term effects that a major battle…may exert on national and cultural attitudes.”) Keegan examined soldiers’ experiences through a series of competitions (e.g., infantry vs. infantry, infantry vs. cavalry, artillery vs. cavalry) and he clearly emphasized the “fog of war” and limited perceptions of the battle as a whole; few if any of a battle’s participants have a sense of the totality of the battle and its context, physical and otherwise. Keegan thus largely turned away from generals and strategy, undertaking a soldier-centric perspective on battle in which individuals and small-unit tactics matter and provide a view of what the experience of battle might have been like. Keegan’s approach was clearly groundbreaking, because in many ways it reintroduced the individual into battle, disaggregating the masses of men who have fought in battle and opening the way for an entirely new way of examining men’s experiences in battle. Keegan offered an approach that could be used to uncover what a battle might have been like for those who were not present. Keegan and those who have chosen to duplicate and enlarge upon his efforts have usefully sought to expand the areas of attention for military historian.

Having described what we might call Keegan’s “face of battle” approach, what is it not? It is not really a cultural or social history of the military, and does not rely primarily on the agency of individuals. Keegan emphasized a contingent view of history, examining the ways in which the timeless aspects of human nature and mass violence adapted to the historical contexts of key battles. From a viewpoint thirty years after its publication date, it is certainly possible to criticize Keegan’s work as being undertheorized or underconceptualized, but it is undeniable that Keegan’s work pioneered a new subfield of military history that still has great utility today. Keegan’s “face of battle” approach has been criticized most recently in Kimberly Kagan’s The Eye of Command, which argued that while The Face of Battle was a necessary break from more traditional operational histories, in examining the battle accounts of many individual soldiers, it lacked the ability to provide a sense of causality, for example, the ability to explain why certain events happened or why a battle’s outcome turned out as it did. Kagan argued that only by examining the wider understandings and contexts of the commanders in a battle can this sense of causality be restored. In a sense, both Keegan and Kagan are right; battles are experienced – very differently – by both generals and soldiers, and both have very different understandings of why they are fighting. Both views are critically important to historians. Neither perspective in isolation can provide a total understanding of why a battle occurred or what happened in that battle. Only by examining the experiences of both can we hope to reach a full understanding of a battle and its context. With The Face of Battle, Keegan undoubtedly opened the door to begin examining military history not merely from the perspective of great captains and grand strategy, but from the perspective of the common soldier.

Recommended as a classic work of military history.

Review copyright 2009 J. Andrew Byers ( )

John Keegan's book is a wonderful written history on three specific battles but it is much deeper than that. Mr. Keegan challenges those of us who write military history to dig deeper and go farther to bring out the often overlooked perspective of the fighting individual. How did the weather affect the troops? Were the troops fed the night before battle? Did they believe in the jus ad bellum? In stead of writing from the armchair general - Keegan gives us a fresh view of what it was like to fight in the trenches of the Somme or the fields at Agincourt. Highly recommended by a fellow, albiet junior historian. ( )

comparing Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme--what the soldiers experienced—in high-styled British prose

3683. The Face of Battle, by John Keegan (read 21 Jan 2003) I finally read this famous book, which examines with great insight the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. This is one of the best books of military history I have read and was most worthwhile and great to read. Possibly the best book I read this month. ( )