The Face of Battle, by John Keegan

"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 analyzes and describes each piece of battle, taking pain to break them into small components and present them to the reader with a forceful language.

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 beginning of the review, Mr. Keegan is not only an historian, he is an educator, and so to complete his work, as an epilogue, he discusses the future of battle and the art of War.

Reviewed by Max Yofre.

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