What the "face of battle" approach does do, if applied liberally, is emphasise the important of psychology, morale and fear as factors in battle, and help us "recreate" the experience. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No Englishman before him had written such energetic, many-sided, informative and explicative military history; even a century after its publication, its standard could prompt a doyen of English academic historians to describe British Battles and Sieges as ‘the finest military history in English and perhaps in any language’. Churlishly, it fails to pay tribute to the pioneering quality of his work. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2013. When it quickly became clear that soldiers were dying needlessly in some of the attrition battles of WWI, why were those particular offenses not stopped? Dr Christopher Duffy, by heroic labour among little-known Prussian and Austrian archives, has pushed use of the technique backwards into the eighteenth century; but it is not until the coming of the wars of the French Revolution that we find any extensive deposit even of officers’ memoirs and not until the First World War that we hear the voice of the common man (though infant murmurs can be detected during the American Civil War). But Sandhurst is a studiedly unmilitary place. He cannot easily accept, therefore, as the typical survey-course text of Military History from Hannibal to Hitler might ask him to, that the battle of Cannae, 216 B.C., and the Battle of Ramillies, A.D. 1706, still less the Battle of the Falaise Gap, 1944, are all the same sort of battle because each culminated in an encirclement of one army by the other. The Face of Modern Battle Modern Skirmish Wargame Rules. In this book Keegan has selected three historical battles of some superficial similarity - battles fought in central Europe by ethnically similar groups of generally similar military power. He showed how terrain, the commanders' personalities, the politics of the eras involved, and the mindset and preparation of the fighting men all contributed to the outcome of these engagements. To suggest that most military historians do accept those conventions is not to accuse them of that beginner’s error, the transmission of traditional accounts (‘For want of a nail the kingdom was lost …’); nor is it to impugn them of unreflectingly adopting the modes of thought of this or that great historian of the past. As he notes, he was someone who had never seen battle himself, teaching those who would. Strongly economic in flavour too is a great deal of naval history, built as it must be around the study of weapon systems, of the big-gun battleship of the First World War and the aircraft carrier of the Second. How and why did the fatality rate (men killed as a proportion of those entering battle) change over the centuries, or from battle to battle? The Face of Battle Travel to walk the sites of the battlefields you studied in the first half of the course. I do not think therefore that my Oxford contemporaries of the 1950s, who had spent their late teens combing the jungles of Johore or searching the forests on the slopes of Mount Kenya, will hold it against me if I suggest that, though they have been soldiers and I have not and though they have seen active service besides, yet they remain as innocent as I do of the facts of battle. And what are its usages and assumptions? It is not a description of tactics and battle plans but rather the reason that men fight, how they summon courage, or run away. 1 Skull of a Swedish soldier killed in 1361, 2 The effect of archery on cavalry at short range, 1356, 3 A ‘wall of bodies’ of the dead and wounded, fifteenth century, 4 Men-at-arms at the mercy of archers, fifteenth century, 5 A square of Highlanders receiving cavalry at Waterloo, 7 A German attack on a British line of ‘scrapes’, autumn 1914, 8 Russians charging a German or Austrian trench, autumn 1914, 9 A French counter-attack at Dien Bien Phu, spring 1954. All formations disintegrated; the men broke up their columns into a single thick and ragged skirmishing line and inched their way forward up the bare glacis of the fields until they were within some six hundred yards of St-Privat. That certainly reflects Clausewitz’s view. Indeed, in that sub-world of imaginative writing which Gillian Freeman has called the undergrowth of literature, calculated indulgence in imagination and sentiment have produced, and regrettably continue to produce, some very nasty stuff indeed, which at its Zap-Blatl-Banzai-Gott im Himmel-Bayonet in the Guts worst may justifiably be condemned by that overworked phrase, ‘pornography of violence’. French officers, certainly, show a readiness, in reminiscing over the wars in Indo-China or Algeria, to dwell on the numbers of deaths their units have suffered or inflicted–usually inflicted–which I have seen bring physical revulsion to the faces of British veterans, and which I do not think can be wholly explained in terms of the much greater ferocity of the French than the British army’s most recent campaigns. In it he describes three different historical battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, if memory serves) and describes what we know (or can guess) about what the battle experience was like for the men involved. In this book Keegan has selected three historical battles of some superficial similarity - battles fought in central Europe by ethnically similar groups of generally similar military power. In Europe’s wars of decolonization, the object of ‘the other side’ has, of course, been to avoid facing a decision at any given time or place, rightly presuming the likelihood of its defeat in such circumstances; and ‘the other side’, whether consciously fighting a war of evasion and delay, as were the communist guerrillas in Malaya or the nationalist partisans in Algeria, or merely conducting a campaign of raiding and subversion because they implicitly recognized their inability to risk anything else, as did the Mau Mau in Kenya, has accordingly shunned battle. As it is, he seems to suggest that it is by no means abnormal (‘Then was seen with what strength and majesty the British soldier fights’) that a leaderless brigade of infantry (the brigadier and his three colonels had been disabled) should overcome, at the cost of over half its number, a very much stronger combined force of infantry, cavalry and artillery led by one of the foremost soldiers of the age (Soult was already a marshal). A second building includes the ticket centre, museum store and a restaurant. The length and tone of this critique may be thought unfair to Napier, who was merely trying, in a limited space and for an audience unaccustomed to thinking of private soldiers as individuals worthy of mention by name, to describe what by any reckoning was one of the high points of the British effort in the wars against Napoleon–which had, for Englishmen of his own time and class, the same quality of national epic as did the struggle to overthrow Hitler for their descendants five generations later. The exhibition title is drawn from John Keegan’s classic military history, which reorients our view of war from questions of strategy and … The players command their forces with numerous combat, tactical and game options, utilizing skill rather than blind chance. The Face of Battle is a military history by John Keegan that describes and assesses three battles in British history: Agincourt, Waterloo, and Somme. The late John Keegan, who was the senior military history lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, for years, wrote this book as a historical exploration of three key battles. But if so, and he as a veteran was in a position to say, he owed it to the reader, one may think, to make that clear. Now there is no doubt a certain brutal reality in this approach, just as there is a certain rough-and-ready applicability about the seven or eight or nine ‘immutable and fundamental’ Principles of War (Concentration, Offensive Action, Maintenance of the Aim, etc.) And to say that is not to imply disbelief that the episode happened, nor that it happened much as described. The Face of Battle – John Keegan (1976) The Face of Battle by John Keegan January 1, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment This 1976 military history book seeks to answer what can we know not just of battles themselves, but in the experience of fighting and participating in battles. The troopers of Grouchy, d’Hautpol, Klein and Milhaud swept forward in turn. But when we have made allowances for permissible over-writing, when we have stripped away the verbal superstructure of the passage, we are still left with a picture of events to which it is difficult wholly to lend credence. Of course, the atmosphere and surroundings of Sandhurst are not conducive to a realistic treatment of war. Most, I suspect, would agree that it is only an exceptional man who can. The narrative implies that they stood their ground, neither falling beneath nor running clear of the French onslaught. The level of detail is intense but valuable and illuminating. A powerful medium for developing an understanding of how military historians think about conflicts, this book also provides a quasi-teleological progression through three eras of battles that seems to be somewhat borne out by the continued trends since it was written. ‘Of course, killing people never bothered me,’ I remember a grey-haired infantry officer saying to me, by way of explaining how he had three times won the Military Cross in the Second World War. It is in fact the oldest historical form, its subject matter is of commanding importance, and its treatment demands the most scrupulous historical care. If anything was needed to vindicate the French faith in the chassepot, it was the aristocratic corpses which so thickly strewed the fields between St-Privat and St-Marie-les-Chênes. A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbrück in Germany in the last century, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain, and an English follower of his, Lt-Colonel A. H. Burne, proposed the applicability of a principle he had tested on every major English battlefield (Inherent Military Probability) and which, used with circumspection, is a rewarding as well as intriguing concept. Nevertheless, the factors he isolates as significant–the ‘ancient friendship’, the voice from the ranks and the chance which caught the Russian squadrons wheeling as they were struck by the charge–do not of themselves supply a sufficient explanation of how so small a force came to rout so large a one at such little cost. While the great armoured hosts face each other across the boundary between east and west, no soldier on either side will concede that he does not believe in the function for which he plans and trains. The third, from Michael Howard’s Franco-Prussian War, describes the attack of the infantry of the Prussian Guard against the French positions at St-Privat, 18 August 1870: So the skirmishing lines of the Guard, with thick columns behind them, extended themselves over the bare fields below St-Privat and began to make their way up the slopes in the face of the French fire…The result was a massacre. Focused on the psychology of the soldier to a commendable degree. The militant young have taken that decision a stage further: they 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. What, in the path of a manoeuvre which would have been regarded as a tour de force if executed on a peacetime parade-ground, were all those thousands of Russians doing with themselves? The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 4/7/2017 - 1/28/2018 Friday, April 07, 2017 - Sunday, January 28, 2018 1. Anti-militarists would call it de-personalizing and even dehumanizing. In The Face of Battle, originally published in 1976, historian John Keegan examines the various ways in which warfare has evolved over five centuries of European history. A battle must obey the dramatic unities of time, place and action. Players are always involved in the action during the game. Stendhal, Thackeray and Hugo each offer us a version of the battle of Waterloo–as seen through the eyes of a shell-shocked survivor, of a distracted bystander, of a stern and unrelenting Republican deity; while Tolstoy, in his reconstruction of the battle of Borodino, which had for nineteenth-century Russians the same historical centrality as Waterloo for contemporary Western Europeans, not only brought off one of the most spectacular set-pieces in the development of the novel-form, but also opened the modern case for the prosecution against the Great Man theory of historical explanation. The point of the book is to give a history of battle from the perspective of the soldier instead of the commander. ‘Elevated’ should of course be understood here in a very relative sense, for though academic interest in civil-military relations, particularly in those between the German army and the German state, has produced a large, satisfying and in parts distinctly exciting literature, it is elsewhere prone to clothe itself in the drab garments of sociology at its most introspective; while the history of strategic doctrine, with some notable exceptions, of which Jay Luvaas’s Military Legacy of the Civil War is a glittering example, suffers markedly from that weakness endemic to the study of ideas, the failure to demonstrate connection between thought and action. An enlightening erudition of three monumental battles in English history: Agincort; Waterloo; and the Somme. A brief, and wholly typical, extract will convey the flavour; it descrites a minor trench-to-trench attack by infantry, supported by artillery, on 8 August 1916, at Guillemont, in the second month of the Battle of the Somme: Some confusion arose on the left brigade front, where the 166th Brigade (Brigadier-General L. F. Green Wilkinson) was replacing the 164th–a very difficult relief–and although the 1/10th King’s (Liverpool Scottish), keeping close behind the barrage, approached the German wire, it lost very heavily in two desperate but unavailing attempts to close with the enemy. Classifications Dewey Decimal Class 355.4/8 Library of Congress D25 .K43 1976 The Physical Object Pagination 354 p., [4] leaves of plates : … Now, as Romantic prose passages go, this is clearly a very remarkable achievement, rich in imagery, thunderous in rhythm and immensely powerful in emotional effect; it almost vibrates on the page, towards its climax threatens indeed to loosen the reader’s hold on the book. Just what does it tell us about the Fusiliers’ advance; and is what it tell us credible? The almost universal illiteracy, however, of the common soldier of any century before the nineteenth makes it a technique difficult to employ. This was evident during the first 78 pages of the book when Keegan writes an essay about war history. 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. Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan (1934–2012), was one of the most distinguished contemporary military historians and was for many years the senior lecturer at Sandhurst (the British Royal Military Academy) and the defense editor of the Daily Telegraph (London). He, after all, has been trained to detect what is different and particular about events, about individuals and institutions and the character of their relationships. My wife Susanne would have typed it all, had I not insisted that her hands were already overfull with her own writing and the care of four children; and were the title and subject of this book not so inappropriate, I would have dedicated it to her, for all she has done. Driving forward, the two cavalry wings crashed through the serried ranks of Sacken’s centre, pierced them, re-formed into a single column once more in the Russian rear and then plunged back the way they had come through the disordered Russian units to cut down the gunners who had done so much harm to Augereau’s men. It is rather to argue that what has been called the ‘rhetoric of history’–that inventory of assumptions, and usages through which the historian makes his professional approach to the past–is not only, as it pertains to the writing of battle history, much more strong and inflexible than the rhetoric of almost all other sorts of history, but is so strong, so inflexible and above all so time-hallowed that it exerts virtual powers of dictatorship over the military historian’s mind. Even then the impetus of this fantastic charge did not slacken. He has extremely high health and attack, and hits multiple units per attack, but is one of the slowest enemy units in the game. Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in irregular and intercultural wars over the centuries. Combat corps à corps is not of course a subject which historians, any more than other sorts of writer, can be accused of ignoring. That weakness is not, however, peculiar to this sub-branch of military history. It examines the physical conditions of fighting, the particular emotions and behaviour generated by battle, as well as the motives that impel soldiers to stand and fight rather than run away. It will be obvious that any of these viewpoints, adoptable readily enough by the schoolboy or undergraduate, are reconciled much less easily by the student-officer with the stern, professional, monocular outlook he is learning to bring to bear on the phenomena of war. But is this featureless prose appropriate to the description of what we may divine was something very nasty indeed that happened that morning at Guillemont fifty-eight years ago to those 3,000 Englishmen, in particular to those of the 1/10th Battalion of the King’s Regiment? —Michael Howard, The Sunday Times (London), "A totally original and brilliant book" —The New York Review of Books"The book which changed how military history is written. by Pimlico. But given–even if they would not give–that battles are going to happen, it is powerfully beneficial. John Keegan was for many years Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. And although there is a German ‘literary’ literature of military life, it is very much more a literature of leadership, as in Bloem’s Vormarsch, or of the exaltation of violence, as in Jünger’s Kampf als innere Erlebnis, than of adventure, exploration, ethnography, social–sometimes even spiritual–fulfilment, the themes which characterize the novels of Ernest Psiachari or F. Yeats-Brown, or the memoirs of Lyautey, Ian Hamilton, Lord Belhaven, Meinertzhagen and a host of other major and minor servants of British and French imperialism in this century and the last who, by design or good luck, chose soldiering as a way of life and found their minds enlarged by it. In addition to this, he attacks very slowly, rendering his highly devastating Area Attacks useless in the presence of meatshields and 350+ range cats. Modern military historians have certainly shown themselves to be as keen as the next man in pursuit of the ‘minor and apparently trifling’, at least as far as the noncombatant aspects of their subject are concerned; one has only to think of a book like Quimby’s Background to Napoleonic Warfare, which dissects the pre-Revolutionary French drill regulations with Thomist rigour, or S. P. G. Ward’s Wellington’s Headquarters, which might almost be used as a text in an enlightened school of management studies, to be satisfied on that score–and to be filled with a sense of humility at one’s own scholarly shortcomings. We are most of us capable of compartmentalizing our minds, would find the living of our lives impossible if we could not, and flee the company of those who can’t or won’t: zealots, monomaniacs, hypochondriacs, insurance salesmen, the love-sick, the compulsively argumentative. 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