“Battle, therefore…is essentially a moral conflict. It requires, if it is to take place, a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties and, if it is to result in a decision, the moral collapse of one of them.”

Much of military history has typically focused on battles, particularly the decisions of the generals or kings and their strategic goals. Keegan doesn’t mind the focus on battle: battle, after all, is to some extent what a military is for. What he objects to is the focus on leaders. As he points out, in a battle a general and a soldier may have very different, even hostile, goals.

The Face of Battle is therefore a study of the psychology of warfare, from the perspective of the individual combatant. What drives a soldier to risk death? A general might think of soldiers as members of their army, but it turns out most soldiers think of themselves as equals within a small group of 6 or 7 fellows: they fight for personal survival and out of fear of incurring the contempt of the rest of the group. Indeed, in the last century, modern armies have been reorganized around just that principle.

At its heart, The Face of Battle argues that battle is a psychological conflict. Until modern wars, most casualties were incurred when an army broke and ran; that was when truly horrific losses could be inflicted. As long as an army kept fighting, however, there limits to the damage weapons could do. Indeed, when a story describes one army as colliding with another, that almost never happens: one will almost inevitably flinch, even flee, the psychological impact rather than the physical one determining the outcome of a battle. Rarely was an army that had not yet fled truly unable to keep fighting – rather, once it had broken psychologically, so much damage could be done it lost its ability to fight.

The question of battle psychology is clearly an interesting one. Killing others, and risking death yourself, puts enormous psychological strain on most people, with effects we still don’t entirely understand. As usual with Keegan, I find his style a bit dense, but the book’s focus on three major battles – Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme – helps make it clearer by imposing more of a narrative structure on much of the book. An interesting and insightful reflection on the nature of war.