Face of Battle, The

In this major and wholly original contribution to military history, John Keegan reverses the usual convention of writing about war in terms of generals and nations in conflict, which tend to leave the common soldier as cipher. Instead he focuses on what a set battle is like for the man in the thick of it - his fears, his wounds and their treatment, the mechanics of being taken prisoner, the nature of leadership at the most junior level, the role of compulsion in getting men to stand their ground, the intrusions of cruelty and compassion, the very din and blood.

Although he ranges over centuries to the present for examples, and through an awesome body of war literature in his critique of traditional military history, the author devotes almost two-thirds of the book to three battles fought about a hundred miles and five hundred years apart. In a style never histrionic, but intense, lucid, and dramatic, he makes us reflect on whether it was more terrifying to stand under the cloud of arrows at Agincourt, face the leveled muskets of Waterloo, or plod on into the rain of steel at the Somme.

Set battles, with their unities of time and place, may be a thing of the past, but this anatomy of what they were for the men who fought them is an unforgettable mirror held up to human nature.