I recently finished Bernard Cornwell's lengthy series about Rifleman Richard Sharpe and the Napoleonic wars -- the last volume of which focuses, naturally, on Waterloo -- and then followed that up with Cornwell's newest, about the nearly mythical Battle of Agincourt. So it seemed time to reread Keegan's much praised first book, half of which is dedicated to a ground's-eye view of those two battles. The third battle he covers in detail is the Somme in 1916, where some of the fighting covered much the same ground as Henry V's army in 1415. Keegan was an academic military historian at Sandhurst for many years (he was prohibited from military service for medical reasons) and some of his considered opinions about the nature of strategy and related matters have been deeply unpopular in certain military quarters. He has also been a vocal supporter of Bush's war in Iraq. But those are political issues and they do not change the fact that this volume is a masterpiece of military inquiry and interpretation from the point of view of the ordinary infantryman. (Although his personal opinions permeate his writing here, too.) His analysis of effectiveness and the consequences of the wide variety of types of combat at Waterloo -- infantry vs. cavalry, infantry vs. artillery, cavalry vs. cavalry, etc -- is especially illuminating. The third section, on the Somme, is a different matter. I admit my knowledge of World War I is relatively limited, especially compared to medieval warfare, but the greatly increased pace of social change and technological innovation during the 19th century seems to make the Somme so very different -- in the geopolitical aims of the participants, in the kind of men who served both as privates and as officers, in the major change in the role of the commanders (from war leader to office-bound executive), not to mention enormous differences in communications, transportation, and medicine -- that it's difficult for me to identify a single point of comparison. It's like comparing Phoenician exploration in the Mediterranean with the Space Program. The final section, "The Future of Battle," since it was written more than a quarter-century ago, is best read as an historical curiosity. Keegan is still around, of course, and still writing books, but back then he had not the slightest idea of what warfare would become in the early 21st century. He laughs a bit over the U.S. Army's introduction of Specialist grades to replace privates and corporals, but the contemporary junior soldier must be (and is) far more technically sophisticated than his counterpart even in Vietnam, much less at the Somme. Keegan is an excellent analyst of the past, and the book is highly recommended for that reason, but he has never proven to be much of a prognosticator.

The Face of Battle is the best known work of one of the world's preeminent military historians, John Keegan. One finds The Face of Battle on virtually every general military history reading list. In it, Keegan steers away from the traditional subjects of strategy and generalship and examines the ordeal of the individual soldier on the battlefield. He presents case studies of three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. All fought by English-British armies in a small geographic area of northern France and southern Belgium, but separated sufficiently in time to demonstrate how technological and to a lesser extent sociological developments brought about different battlefield experiences for these soldiers in different eras.

In an introductory section, Keegan gives an overview of military historiography through the ages, and demonstrates that with rare exceptions, military historians have been preoccupied with strategy and generalship, and not the travails of the individual soldier. Some reviewers have remarked that they could have done without this section, and gotten straight to the accounts of the three battles. I, however, enjoyed the opening section, and was interested in Keegan's comparison of Caesar to Thucydides, and his critiques of David Chandler, Michael Howard and others.

Keegan makes it clear at the very beginning that he has never been in a battle nor seen one. He does, however, have observant and sympathetic eyes and ears for those who have experienced battle. Of the three studies, I found that of Agincourt to be the most evocative, possibly because its scale was small enough, compared to the other two, to visualize the entire battle, which occurred in a few hours in an area covered only by several hundred yards. Among the vivid images related by Keegan is the one of the reaction of the horses of the French cavalry, when enduring the initial salvo of arrows from the English archers: "Animal cries of pain and fear would have risen above the metallic clatter."

There is a final section, wherein Keegan contemplates the future of battle. It is somewhat dated due to its Cold War frame of reference. Keegan's final conclusion, that we may have seen the "abolition of battle," has drawn criticism. Since Face of Battle was published in the 1970s, there has been no shortage of wars. But there has been a shortage of the set-piece type of battle, restricted in time and space, to which Keegan's attention is drawn in The Face of Battle.

With The Face of War, John Keegan set out to look at the experience of battle in the face, from the ground level as fighting men actually experience it. To do this is uses three great battles: Agincourt, fought in 1415; Waterloo, 1815; and the Somme, 1916. Since his aim is to describe what it was like to fight rather then retell the overarching story of the battles and the wars in which they were fought, Keegan only briefly sketches the overall picture of how each battle was fought at the beginning of each chapter. Then the real meat of his book begins.

Keegan himself is best at pointing out what makes each battle different from the others, so I'll just describe some of the overarching themes. With each battle, the technology and tactics of the armies involved grow more complex, and so each battle is larger in both numbers and scope than those that come before. Keegan follows the generals--Henry V, Wellington, Napoleon, and Haig--to show how much they could have known or influenced the battle at any given time, and it's remarkable to see that despite the 20th century's great advances in communications and technology, the generals of World War I were often as helpless to change the tide of battle--or more so--than the armored Henry or mounted Wellington. And throughout the book, Keegan gives great attention to the experience of normal soldiers, whether archers or dismounted men-at-arms at Agincourt or countryside Tommies going over the top at the Somme.

Keegan concludes his study with some summary and speculation. He argues in the end that the battle, as a set event, has been abolished by the various factors outlined in the body of the book, and goes on to theorize that the rising cost of warfare and the diminished capacity of modern people to take part in war--not to mention the advent of nuclear weapons--may one day abolish war itself. This is just a kernel of an argument he would later develop in his History of Warfare (also recommended), and you can take it or leave it, because the rest of his book is outstanding military history that, while not doing away with a grand narrative entirely, focuses on how human beings react to a day of battle.

Highly recommended.

_The Face of Battle_ closely examines three pivitol battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). In his examination, Keegan outlines the overall strategic objectives and how the battlefields were chosen (typical fare for military history), but also seeks to understand the "intangibles" of combat - how and why soldiers act as they do, and how these actions and decisions influence the outcome of battle. I have a mixed reaction to the book.

The first quarter of the book almost put me off it entirely - in it Keegan discusses military history as a discipline, its purposes and the problems in analyzing and researching it, and provides a some hisoriography. While I understand Keegan's purpose in this, I wish it had been edited out. The discussion of the battles themselves is where Keegan shines.

With each battle, Keegan addresses not only the social context of the military of the times (that, for example, archers were considered beneath mounted warriors, and therefore were not actively engaged by them), but also the role of command and control and relative effectiveness of combat arms (infanry versus cavalry, infantry versus infantry, or artillery versus cavalry for example.) In looking at these battles, I found it interesitng that, with time, combat became increasingly lethal, the distance between combatants increased (along with the size of the battlefield) while the social heirarchy had changed little. (In fact, Keegan's discussion of the officer class in the British Army and the war's effect on officer selection was the best part of the book in my opinion.) Also of interest was the role discipline and command and control of units played in the success or failure of battle.

While Keegan is a first-rate historian, I had to deduct a star for the painful start. Nonetheless, his treatment of the heirarchy within armies and the evolution of tactics and deployment of small units given new technologies is first rate, as was his analysis of the increasing importance of small arms and infantry and its inverse relationship to the importance of a mounted officer class.

Really gives the reader a sense of what it may (the author states that he has never seen combat himself) be like to be in the middle of the carnage.

Well worth reading.

I will agree with most of the previous reviewers that this book has a lot of merit. However, it has numerous errors & omissions.

Of the 3 battles, I noticed the most problems with the 3rd battle, The Somme. The omissions involve naming generals, such as Haig, without any context as to who they are or for which country they fought. Maybe this is geared for hard-core WWI history buffs. While I know WWII history pretty well, for instance, I know who Eisenhower or Montgomery were, I myself and I think most people, would need a refresher on their WWI counterparts.

Errors; He claims that in the US army "Private" has largely been replaced by "Specialist". Not true. It is the next step up, "corporal" that has been mostly replaced by "Specialist".

Second he off-handedly makes a claim about how only the British army treats marksmanship as a worthy goal. I so beg to differ. After all, while the British army fought the US Revolution & the war of 1812 in nice tight formations that fired in unison so that their inaccurate fire would be like a giant shotgun blast. The Americans, with their slow-to-load but accurate deer rifles picked off the British officers & non-comps. After all, these Americans depended on their marksmenship to put meat on the dinner table.

He also uses some slight-of-hand to make baseless estimates of the ratio of soldiers shot in the legs & arms vs torso. He claims that the ratio is reasonable because of the relative frontal area that each represents.

He makes claims about the American army in Vietnam being "addicted to pot". By any useful definition of addiction, the army, while on the average, using it heavily was not addicted to pot. Beer maybe, coffee yes, pot no.


He also doesn't really address the "post-heroic" armies, where folks in trailers sit many miles away from the battle while they direct remote control vehicles equiped with sensors and missles. Where robots, and not
humans clear houses and land of booby traps and mines.

There is good content on the first two battles, Agincourt and Waterloo and some insight to The Somme, but to what end? I'm not sure.

Very anglocentric. There are a lot of good military history books to read and most people would get more out of reading other books than this one.

I found this to be thoroughly researched, well-written, and focused. The book covers the aspects of combat facing the individual and the effects close combat has on the individual in ways few others try. A definitive work on the subject of personal combat experience.

I have read many recent historical works of John Keegan including has book on WWI and the Price of Admiralty. I enjoyed them both. So, I was very disappointed when I tried to get into the Face of Battle. The language was so stilted, the use of commas and long run-on sentences going in differnet directions was so painful that I almost stopped reading it. The book has an excellent premise: how to describe three important battles in three very differnt centuries from the perspective of the soldiers actually doing the fighting rather than the 10,000 foot view employed by contemporary military historians who were not participants in the battle. Unfortunately, Keegen spends the first third of the book explaining what a good military historian (like himself) can or should do, focusing on the unique quality of British military historians (they are less biased because the wars were mainly fought on someone else's soil. The book improves as he gets into the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, but a good editor could have made this a much better read. I realize this book was written in 1978, so perhaps it was, at the time it was written, in line with Keegan's academic proclivities. Not a book I would recommend to anyone other than an academic.

THis work lives up to the highest academic standards that I have come to expect of Keegan.He provides new insights in three epic battles ,He wets your appetite for history ,he makes it real and interesting

Keegan puts you on the scene at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. One of the earliest departures from the bird's eye, general's view, The Face of Battle captures the battles from a physical, sensory, even biological perspective. Keegan creates a model for historians to assess the ebb and flux of the battle by providing an almost socratic approach to combat inquiry.

My personal favorite is the narration of Agincourt. In this battle, the author looks at the reality of whether bodies could pile up as high as they are reputed to have done along the line of contact. He examines the effectiveness of arrows and notes that at the range given the primary effect would have been to enrage the adversary's horses and not, as is often thought, to inflict casualties. Especially fascinating was the brutal crush of fellow soldiers pressing the forward ranks into the "funnel" created by the forest, which made anything other than forward movement nearly impossible. Similarly, he captures the mayhem created in the ranks by returning cavalry, after a failed charge. And let us not forget, it isn't very easy to relieve oneself in a full suit of plate, especially with dysentary!

Keegan puts you on the scene at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. One of the earliest departures from the bird's eye, general's view, The Face of Battle captures the battles from a physical, sensory, even biological perspective. Keegan creates a model for historians to assess the ebb and flux of the battle by providing an almost socratic approach to combat inquiry.

My personal favorite is the narration of Agincourt. In this battle, the author looks at the reality of whether bodies could pile up as high as they are reputed to have done along the line of contact. He examines the effectiveness of arrows and notes that at the range given the primary effect would have been to enrage the adversary's horses and not, as is often thought, to inflict casualties. Especially fascinating was the brutal crush of fellow soldiers pressing the forward ranks into the "funnel" created by the forest, which made anything other than forward movement nearly impossible. Similarly, he captures the mayhem created in the ranks by returning cavalry, after a failed charge. And let us not forget, it isn't very easy to relieve oneself in a full suit of plate, especially with dysentary!

A fine worm's eye view of battle. The author has painstakingly recreated what it was like for a soldier on the field of Agincourt, Waterloo and the battle of the Somme. It's a grand tutorial in basic tactics.

A fine worm's eye view of battle. The author has painstakingly recreated what it was like for a soldier on the field of Agincourt, Waterloo and the battle of the Somme. It's a grand tutorial in basic tactics.

This is the first work that I and most others discovered Mr. Keegan's great mind for military history. It is an overview of the evolution of warfare from the middle ages to the present but more than that it seeks to answer the question of what motivates the common soldier to fight instead of following his instinct to run. Mr. Keegan's admiration and adoption of the common soldier's lot is moving and commendable in itself. He brings out the hero in the common man and for that all us common men can thank him.

This is the first work that I and most others discovered Mr. Keegan's great mind for military history. It is an overview of the evolution of warfare from the middle ages to the present but more than that it seeks to answer the question of what motivates the common soldier to fight instead of following his instinct to run. Mr. Keegan's admiration and adoption of the common soldier's lot is moving and commendable in itself. He brings out the hero in the common man and for that all us common men can thank him.

John Keegan is one of our best writers of military history and The Face of Battle is simply Keegan at his very best. He attempts to explain what humans actually do under the stress of battle and why. The book contains keen insights and some surprises. For example, while running away may intuitively seem highly sensible from the standpoint of self-preservation, it is in fact one of the most dangerous things a soldier can do. Or the US Army study that showed a shockingly high percentage of US army infantry never fired their rfiles when under fire - that study led directly to a sharp increase in the emphasis on the psychological molding of soldiers in US Army training camps.

Absolutely the highest recommendation.

John Keegan is one of our best writers of military history and The Face of Battle is simply Keegan at his very best. He attempts to explain what humans actually do under the stress of battle and why. The book contains keen insights and some surprises. For example, while running away may intuitively seem highly sensible from the standpoint of self-preservation, it is in fact one of the most dangerous things a soldier can do. Or the US Army study that showed a shockingly high percentage of US army infantry never fired their rfiles when under fire - that study led directly to a sharp increase in the emphasis on the psychological molding of soldiers in US Army training camps.

Absolutely the highest recommendation.

`The Face of Battle' by renowned English military historian, John Keegan is one of those books I would always keep in stock if I were managing a bookstore. In its own field of `analytical' military history, it is probably one of the two or three most important works available to the average reader (that is, not including classified material and training material reserved for the world's professional military at West Point, Sandhurst and what have you).

This is the kind of book you always want to find as quickly as possible when you become interested in a new field. Like `Principles of Gardening' by Hugh Johnson, `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child and Snedecor and Cocheran's `Statistical Methods', these are the books which, while not complete, are the kinds of works which can inspire on in a subject as well as simply provide good information. They are the kinds of books that should be at the top of all bibliographies that survey their subjects.

When my method of choice for misspending my youth was playing wargame simulations when practically the only way to do this was with cardboard counters on a 28 by 32 inch hexagonally gridded map, I stocked up on all sorts of glossy picture books on maps and descriptions of classic battles. One of the most common statements in these books was the importance of `mixed arms', meaning that a combination of infantry, mobile (horsepower or motorized), and indirect fire (slings, archery, artillery, rockets) was always more effective than one type of force going it alone. Unfortunately, none of these books did a good job of explaining how this really worked. Keegan's book addresses this and many other similar important aspects of military operations.

And, he addresses these matters for battles in three very different eras of military technology and sizes of military forces. The most salient difference between the three battles is that each later battle took place with forces and venue easily a whole order of magnitude larger than the one before. The French and English forces at Agincourt, for example, faced one another across a front of about a third of a mile. The Napoleon's French and the allies commanded by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo faced one another on a front of about 3½ miles (not including the curl of the right flank when the Prussian IV Corp. arrived in the evening. On the Somme, the British faced the Germans on a front of at least 15 miles. The weapons were also different by a less precise order of magnitude. The queen of the battlefield at Agincourt, which famously beat the much larger French army was the English longbow. The dominant weapon at Waterloo was the artillery which, in battles up to the American Civil War, was a direct fire weapon, placed in front of the infantry or at least interspersed with infantry battalions. The dominant weapon at the Somme was the indirect firing artillery and the machine gun. The tank did not play a major role in the battle of the Somme and it is clear in this book that the original objective of the tank was as a counter to the deadly effectiveness of the machine gun, which dominated infantry battles even more than the famous artillery of the time.

It is not too surprising that an English military historian should choose to write about three battles where an English army or English lead coalition was one of the two major combatants. The first is also not surprising because, as Keegan points out, the Battle of Agincourt was remarkably well documented compared to other military actions of the period. Once Agincourt is chosen, it's an easy jump to another important English battle that is also distinctly different in technology and size. It is easy to talk about Waterloo to an English speaking audience since such a large part of that audience would know Waterloo better than almost any other battle with the possible exception of Gettysburg where, unfortunately, the English army did not make an appearance.

It is easy to see why the last of the three was the battle of the Somme, as the most important elements were those which colored the whole history of this war. That is, trenches, artillery, infantry, and the machine gun. One surprise is that in spite of the 100 years between Waterloo and the Somme, the battle for the Somme was actually simpler to analyze. Cavalry had disappeared from the field as an effective force and the tank had not yet arrived to replace it, artillery had fallen back to indirect fire positions, and the most important contact was between advancing infantry and entrenched machine gunners. This was after the brief `age of rifles' which dominated the 19th century wars of colonization and before true mechanized warfare.

The truest measure of the book's importance is that it gives us tools with which we can analyze other battles, providing the narrators of other conflicts are kind enough to give us the right information. But now we know what to look for, thanks to Keegan's very important book, to which all his later works seem to be applications of the same point of view.

Absolutely essential for any fan of history.

`The Face of Battle' by renowned English military historian, John Keegan is one of those books I would always keep in stock if I were managing a bookstore. In its own field of `analytical' military history, it is probably one of the two or three most important works available to the average reader (that is, not including classified material and training material reserved for the world's professional military at West Point, Sandhurst and what have you).

This is the kind of book you always want to find as quickly as possible when you become interested in a new field. Like `Principles of Gardening' by Hugh Johnson, `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child and Snedecor and Cocheran's `Statistical Methods', these are the books which, while not complete, are the kinds of works which can inspire on in a subject as well as simply provide good information. They are the kinds of books that should be at the top of all bibliographies that survey their subjects.

When my method of choice for misspending my youth was playing wargame simulations when practically the only way to do this was with cardboard counters on a 28 by 32 inch hexagonally gridded map, I stocked up on all sorts of glossy picture books on maps and descriptions of classic battles. One of the most common statements in these books was the importance of `mixed arms', meaning that a combination of infantry, mobile (horsepower or motorized), and indirect fire (slings, archery, artillery, rockets) was always more effective than one type of force going it alone. Unfortunately, none of these books did a good job of explaining how this really worked. Keegan's book addresses this and many other similar important aspects of military operations.

And, he addresses these matters for battles in three very different eras of military technology and sizes of military forces. The most salient difference between the three battles is that each later battle took place with forces and venue easily a whole order of magnitude larger than the one before. The French and English forces at Agincourt, for example, faced one another across a front of about a third of a mile. The Napoleon's French and the allies commanded by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo faced one another on a front of about 3ý miles (not including the curl of the right flank when the Prussian IV Corp. arrived in the evening. On the Somme, the British faced the Germans on a front of at least 15 miles. The weapons were also different by a less precise order of magnitude. The queen of the battlefield at Agincourt, which famously beat the much larger French army was the English longbow. The dominant weapon at Waterloo was the artillery which, in battles up to the American Civil War, was a direct fire weapon, placed in front of the infantry or at least interspersed with infantry battalions. The dominant weapon at the Somme was the indirect firing artillery and the machine gun. The tank did not play a major role in the battle of the Somme and it is clear in this book that the original objective of the tank was as a counter to the deadly effectiveness of the machine gun, which dominated infantry battles even more than the famous artillery of the time.

It is not too surprising that an English military historian should choose to write about three battles where an English army or English lead coalition was one of the two major combatants. The first is also not surprising because, as Keegan points out, the Battle of Agincourt was remarkably well documented compared to other military actions of the period. Once Agincourt is chosen, it's an easy jump to another important English battle that is also distinctly different in technology and size. It is easy to talk about Waterloo to an English speaking audience since such a large part of that audience would know Waterloo better than almost any other battle with the possible exception of Gettysburg where, unfortunately, the English army did not make an appearance.

It is easy to see why the last of the three was the battle of the Somme, as the most important elements were those which colored the whole history of this war. That is, trenches, artillery, infantry, and the machine gun. One surprise is that in spite of the 100 years between Waterloo and the Somme, the battle for the Somme was actually simpler to analyze. Cavalry had disappeared from the field as an effective force and the tank had not yet arrived to replace it, artillery had fallen back to indirect fire positions, and the most important contact was between advancing infantry and entrenched machine gunners. This was after the brief `age of rifles' which dominated the 19th century wars of colonization and before true mechanized warfare.

The truest measure of the book's importance is that it gives us tools with which we can analyze other battles, providing the narrators of other conflicts are kind enough to give us the right information. But now we know what to look for, thanks to Keegan's very important book, to which all his later works seem to be applications of the same point of view.

Absolutely essential for any fan of history.

Its impossible not to see how much this landmark influenced military history. So many authors publishing works today were inspired by Keegan many years ago. The main strntghs of Keegan's work is the approach he brings to studying military history. The first portion of the book is taken up with a fascinating discussion of the history of battle piece writing. Keegan shows what has been done, and how many works tell us very little about the events which they purport to describe. Too many books have approached the subject of battle writing from the top down. What the general(s) were doing. The strategy of war itself, the intricate planning and preparation for battle.

Many historians busy themselves more with minute descriptions of topography, showing us that yes, they actually went to the place in question! Many more don't even bother as much! Keegan tries to tell us that this tradition follows heavily on the old Roman writings of Caeser and others. These were often works of propagandistic nature, meant to embellish the campaigns of the writer. The Greek school, older than the Roman provides a more varied and individualistic perpective. Keegan tells us that it is the later method that we should try more to write in our study of military history.

Unless we begin to understand what the mechanics of battle are, from the actual participants themselves, we may never truly understand what warfare is. This means paying closer attention to chroniclers and memoirs, and often reading inbetween the lines to glean more detail out of their accounts. Many times these works implied certain knowledge and thus tended to express their accounts in ways which a targeted audience of the day would easily understand. Over the decades and centuires we have lost that imtimate association with the events and we must re-learn what was implied in many first-hand accounts. This can lead to distortion if not carefully done. As modern historians we can often read what we want into these older works, and the results can be further disruptive toward our greater understanding.

Keegan's systematic approach toward three distinct battles from the Middle Ages to WW1 is intended to provide a large cross-section of historic warfare. By choosing three distinct battles from history, we can chart the differences and similarities of warfare over the ages. We can also reappraise what have often become standard, famous accounts of well known battles. In each battle Keegan breaks the action down to various tactical componets, allowing the reader to see how different parts of armies were suppose to work against each other.

For Agincourt there are only a few established chroniclers to choose from, but a careful reading of their descriptions armed with the intent to analyse their words in a more tactical sense can still provide useful information which might challenge long established views.

With Waterloo there are a plethora of memoirs which were put together by Sibourne to describe the British aspect of the battle. Keegan intertwines them quite usefully to get at different details of the battle, but it is unfortunate that he limits his eye-witnesses to only English written works. Subsequent research has shown that many French, German and Dutch/Belgian accounts were written in their own languages. If Keegan had included some of these an even greater perspective of Waterloo might have emerged. This dates his research somewhat, but it does not openly detract what he sets out to do.

So many military historians have barrowed from the Keegan method that plagarism no longer really matters. The research methods of this book have become part of the military history lexicon. While the three battles discussed are all well known, each has unique aspects brought out, and the nuts and bolts human elements examined brings out many hidden details. All combines to provide a more thorough and complete understanding of what battles were like. All serious students of military history should read this book.

As an un"blooded" new infantry officer, I am quite interested in what to expect should I find myself facing combat. This book tackles that issue in a direct manner. Keegan has written a very readable description of what soldiers face on a battlefield; from the sensation of up-close killing to the plight of the wounded and captured. He does not moralize (except perhaps at the end where it's appropriate). He wrote this in the mid-1970s and at the end he predicts that war has made itself obsolete. Obviously we've managed to find ways around the nuclear threat. I highly recommend this book to those wanting a realistic, scholarly approach to this topic.

Military historians have analysed army manoeuvres, troop movements, strategy, and logistics but have seldom turned their attention to how soldiers felt during a battle. With this book, published in 1974, Keegan addresses that topic.

After explaining his objectives, he describes in detail what three battles of north western Europe felt like to their participants. He devotes one chapter each to Agincourt in 1415, to Waterloo in 1815, and to the Somme in 1916. He avoids describing strategy but does sometimes describe tactics as this is what soldiers actually carry out. Where relevant he describes the battlefield, e.g. the sheltering woods near Agincourt, the slopes of Waterloo, and the no man's land of the Somme. Keegan then examines the different kinds of encounter: archers versus infantry and cavalry, infantry versus cavalry, artillery versus artillery, infantry versus artillery, cavalry versus artillery, and so on and so forth.

While this approach sounds coldly analytical, Keegan fleshes out each section with insights of how men would have reacted in each of these situations. For instance, the French knights of Agincourt were unharmed by the initial volley of English arrows that slowly fell on them but being goaded into an attack, they charged. Too late the first line to reach the enemy realized the obstacles in the way left them wide open to attack, and to the shame of being killed not by knights but by mere archers, i.e. peasants and tradesmen. For Waterloo, Keegan gives accounts of the wounds a soldier could expect and how these were often fatal because they could not be dressed in time to prevent infection; Waterloo soldiers dreaded any wound. Not so at the Somme where enormous progress had been made in field surgery so that wounded soldiers had a better chance of surviving their wounds, provided they could be gotten off the battlefield. On the vast expanse of the Somme, covering two thousand square miles, this was not immediately evident.

In his last chapter, Keegan tries to predict the future of battle. His most important and relevant insight is that how field soldiers feel and behave under fire decides the outcome of the battle. It is the men (and now women) under immediate threat of death that will win or lose. Keegan sees, perhaps with too much optimism, the end of battle because the size of the battlefield has grown beyond what soldiers can immediately comprehend. But then maybe he is right after all, at least to some extent. The United States and the Soviet Union did not go to war against each other, and it's hard to imagine the US going to war against China or any other great power. But today we have the US in Iraq and Russia in Chechnya, while China flexes its muscles within sight of Taiwan. Battle has not been abolished, but perhaps it has stopped expanding in size.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

My generation's war was Viet Nam, which I avoided with a teaching deferment and a high lottery number. As a result, "The Face of Battle" was an eye-opener for me, since it captures the real, not Hollywood, experience of battle for the common soldier who draws a sword, fires a weapon, or attacks an insurmountable position. Those who want to know what Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme were really like should read this book. The lucky survive. Bravo, John Keegan!

John Keegan has written many books about the conduct and outcome of wars. In this, he focuses on the question: what is it like to be in a battle? Why do studies show that even at the height of a battle, typically no more than one in four soldiers ever fire their gun? And why, on the other hand, do so few soldiers run away?

To answer the questions, he studies three different battles, representing three different types of combat: the hand-to-hand combat of Agincourt, the single-shot guns of Waterloo, and the mechanised destruction of the Somme. He talks about the kind of men who found themselves in each battle and the kind of experiences they had. You learn about the overwhelming noise of Waterloo, about how the raw recruits of Kitchener's army made it necessary to rely on artillery barrages to win the Somme, about the technical miscalculations that made this strategy go desperately wrong.

It's striking and moving, and unlike any other book about battle -- Victor Davis Hanson's recent "Carnage and Culture" does almost as good a job of capturing the experience of battle, but without the same level of compassion. Recommended.

This book provides a great account of Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme. The author has a unique talent of presenting these battles through multiple perspectives. He provides a revealing historical context, and experience of the solider, as well as the tactical aspects of the fights. His description of Agincourt is amazing. The other two accounts are more than worth your time. I think this is one of the best military history books I've read, and strongly recommend it for anyone interested in warfare, history in general, or just looking for an engaging read!

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 analyze and describe each piece of battle, taking pain to break them into small components and presenting them to the reader with a forceful languaje.

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 beging of the review, Mr. Keegan is not only an historian, he is an educator, so to complete his work, as an epilogue, he discuss the future of battle and the art of War.
Reviewed by Max Yofre.

Someone had to write this book - interesting that it was John Keegan.

War may be about great leadership, and Keegan has a book like that, or it may be about feints and flanking maneuvers, and Keegan has handfuls like that, but at some point someone has to pull all the statue-builders and map-gazers off their seats and remind them that war, throughout history, has always come down to an actual living, breathing human being facing a charging sword inches away or a raking machine gun, heard but never seen.

What is going on when a man stands to face a charging horseman or goes over the top from a muddy trench to a likely death? Would a horse, no matter how trained, charge directly into a mass of armed men? Would they flinch? Would the horse turn? Could they really be routed in ways so colorfully portrayed in paintings of war when it seems simply impossible to fit so many horses or men into so small a space, to leap through the mass of other flesh? What did it really mean to be struck a sword's blow or a by musket's ball? What became of a man wounded in no man's land, or captive, or a slaughterer of captives. Keegan's questions range from the deepest questions of humans facing death to the pragmatic problems of daily needs and mud and dirt and flesh. This book is apparently unique among military histories in raising and contemplating them.

Keegan offers an oddly heightened awareness of these questions by noting right at the beginning that he has not, in fact, ever been a soldier. He has been called upon to teach and to mentor them as one of the most esteemed military historians of our era but he has not stood in those boots. But much more so than any foot soldier or general he has studied "battle" enough to understand that the confusion that underlies these encounters can only be distilled from a distant perspective. Although he honors and acknowledges the first-hand accounts of participants, by simply noting the level of confusion, the restrictions and overload on sensory input, and the inevitable role of the survivor's ego, he reminds us that much more is happening than personal viewpoint or formalist analysis could describe.

Keegan chooses to look at three battles from history: Agincourt, Waterloo and The Somme. All three are what historians apparently term "set battles" but each called upon its participants to face death, or glory, or simply the esteem of their neighbor, in different ways. While he maintains his focus on the individual soldier, Keegan does a fine job of making each of these three historically momentous battles come to life in full scale.

Written in a style that is relaxed but incisive, "The Face of Battle" is a fascinating work.

True, the introduction is long and somewhat useless. True the author disgresses and repeats himself. But just for the chapter on Agincourt, read this and you will know what it was to be in this battle, in the midst of men fighting and dying.
A masterpiece.

Skip the lengthy and slow introduction, and don't trust Keegan on the American Civil War; he makes outright inaccurate comments regarding it.

But when Keegan gets to the three battles he discusses in detail, Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, he does a wonderful job. A combination of tactics, technology and mentalities gives the reader plausible accounts of what each of these conflicts must have been like for participants. Primary sources are well used. This would be a wonderful resource for historical fiction and fantasy authors, looking for ideas on how to write a realistic battle scene.

John Keegan, professor at Sandhurst, England's equivalent of West Point, wrote this treatise of war from the standpoint of the foot soldier circa the mid-1970's. Within this perspective he compares and contrasts the technological advancements in combat weapons from the battle of Agincourtin 1415, to Waterloo in 1815, and finally to the battle of the Somme in 1916. In each instance he relates how standoff and kill technique has been with us as long as man has been able to propel missiles at his enemy. The difference over time is the number of people that can be killed by one shot or blast.

The archers at Aginsourt were successful not only due to their skill, but because of the terrain and the weather. The artillery at Waterloo was more devastating due to the range of its blast and the tight formations of the soldiers. And, the Maxim guns of the Germans at the Somme, after winning the "race to the parapets", were even more effective because the English leadership did not insist that their infantry run across no-man's land rather than walk.

Keegan goes into detail upon detail, all layered in a contextural fabric, that leads the reader to see war in a way not previously envisioned. An excellent book and one of the first he wrote in the course of many.