War No More?

By Paul Gray

THE FACE OF BATTLE

by JOHN KEEGAN 354 pages. Viking. $10.95.

For the past 14 years Military Historian John Keegan, 42, has been lecturing on battles to young British officer cadets at Sandhurst. Along the way, a thought struck him: "I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath." Sensibly, he did not try to make up for this gap in his experience by seeking out a battle and joining up. But he also found the massive literature on warfare oddly bloodless.

From the time of Caesar's Commentaries onward, military historians have tended to treat armed combat as a means to larger political ends or the chessboard on which generals tested strategy. There are, to be sure, shelves of How-I-Suffered-in-the-War stories. But Keegan wanted something more, a broad, systematic answer to the question that most bothered his Sandhurst students: "What is it like to be in a battle?"

In trying to answer the question Keegan dwells extensively on three famous battles, unified in space by about 100 miles but separated in time by five centuries: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. At Agincourt a tired, hungry English band of about 5,000 archers and 1,000 foot soldiers met a French force of some 25,000 on Oct. 25, 1415. In Shakespeare's Henry V the English king naturally dominates the stage. Keegan is more interested in the ragtag soldiers and what sustained them: prayer, a hope of booty from French casualties, ransom for prisoners and plenty of strong drink. Against all odds, the English won. Keegan dwells on the small, sometimes accidental events that determined that outcome. The British archers (the lowest caste of warriors in the late medieval hierarchy) planted long pointed stakes in their midst. When the French cavalry attacked, their horses were either impaled or trapped by a spiky forest that seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

In dealing with Waterloo, Keegan argues that the battle was decided less by Wellington and Napoleon than the enormous confusion that enveloped the 70,000 troops on each side: blinding smoke, choking fumes, ear-shattering noise. Again and again, French cavalry attacked standing squares of British infantry and were driven off because their horses shied from crossing living barriers. But what caused the British soldiers to stand their ground? Keegan notes that they were safer in masses; to break and run was to become an easy target for French horsemen. Also, the leaders were in the thick of the fighting, where they could see their men and be seen in return. Keegan suggests that the officers' chief function was to be wounded with conspicuous--and inspirational--bravery.

No Illusions. Oceans of ink have been spilled over the third example in The Face of Battle, the Anglo-French attack on the German western front at the Somme on July 1, 1916, a day of appalling slaughter and irrationality. Perhaps inevitably, Keegan's approach produces little here that has not already been worked over. The lone soldier meant next to nothing in trench warfare. The generals, at least, had no illusions: great masses of men had been assembled for the simple purpose of being slaughtered. In the process, it was supposed, they would wear away enemy strength. (Some 60,000 men, nearly half of the British force, were killed or wounded the first day.) "Anger," Keegan notes, "is the response which the story of the Somme most commonly evokes among professionals." As best he can, Keegan explains this inexplicable day and its ghastly outcome: the messianic naivete of the raw British soldiers, the communications system that cut British head quarters off from the troops at just the point where no man's land began.

Though Keegan's book has already been published to much acclaim in England, he sometimes writes as if his only readers were fellow military-historians and British war buffs. The American reader is likely to find many passages ripe for skimming (one World War I division, he notes, "contained the 5th and 6th Battalions, South Staffordshire Regiment, 5th and 6th North Staffordshires, 4th and 5th Lincolns, 4th and 5th Leicesters . . ."). Such local obstacles are nettlesome but also well worth fighting through, for Keegan's larger observations and themes may fuel debate for some years to come.

The men at Agincourt hacked away at each other to the vanishing rhythm of one-on-one combat. The violence they faced, however dreadful, was not different in kind from what they risked in daily life. By contrast, the men at the Somme were ciphers to be erased by heavy artillery and the machine gun.

Nothing in civilian life prepared them for the depersonalized horrors of modern war. On that basis Keegan argues that modern warfare is obsolete because men are not capable of enduring it. "The suspicion grows," he concludes, "that battle has already abolished itself." This position is weakened by the fact that he limits his discussion to warfare in Europe and includes little that occurred after World War I. World War II, for in stance, was frequently harder on civilians than soldiers. It is, of course, impossible not to wish Keegan's argument well. But it still seems perilously optimistic to suggest that warfare will end without a fight.

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