It is unusual for an historian to write a work critical of the methods of his own institution; it is even more unusual for
a
military historian to write a work that is pacific and anti-military. I see both of these characteristics in Keegan's work. The author goes at great length to stress his own lack of practical experience with battle and his lack of sympathy with the idea of the Great Battle as the foundation for military history writing. Drawing from a liberal mode of thought, he seeks not to re-humanize battle or to see the face of battle, as one is led to believe, but instead to dehumanize battle and thus to call forth a pacifist argument against warfare in the modern age. By arguing that battle has become so mechanistic and deadly as to be fought between things rather than men, he paints the portrait of modern battle as so impersonal as to be abolishing itself from practice. Warfare is no longer fought between individuals on the battlefield.
In essence, Keegan is calling for a moralistic treatment of warfare. He criticizes much military history writing for depicting battle stereotypically, with emphasis on the outcome. In countries that have never faced national extinction, war remains something apart from society's heart. Keegan insists that battle is inherently a moral conflict. As such, military schools, with their attempts to make war into a science, cannot prepare an individual for actual battle. Such attempts at rationalization, Keegan objects, in fact only dehumanize the future officer. Thus, battle accounts tend to describe the course of battle; such rhetoric of history offers little or no analysis of the events and players.
Keegan wants to put a human focus on battle. He argues that the action of fighting has remained a constant over the centuries, which he attempts to show in a treatment of three episodes of battle--Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Although the face of battle has remained unchanged--men still must conquer their fears of death, endure, persevere, etc.--the scope of battle has been magnified--battles last longer, involve more men and machines, and are fought over a wider area. It is precisely this increase in scope, along with an increase in personal danger to the individual combatant, that has served to change the very nature of warfare. No longer is battle a contest between two equal parties, who respect and empathize with each other. The personal, hand-to-hand combat of the past has been replaced by a battle of machines--instruments of
destruction. The enemy is now demonized into something other than human; the enemy becomes them, an impersonal, nonhuman party. War is no longer noble, Keegan would say; it is only bloody, for men are sacrificed in the thousands to the instruments of destruction. Due to the impersonalization of warfare, many soldiers must now be coerced if they are to fight at all; forced to take part in such horrors, the soldier loses his humanity and displays a large degree of cruelty to his fellow man. For these reasons, Keegan concludes by arguing that men can no longer abide the stresses of battle placed on them by a warfare of instruments of destruction--that battle has already abolished itself. This conclusion seems problematical at best. While Keegan explores the human experience of battle, he ignores the forces that lead to battle. By portraying battle as an evil god of destruction borne in and of itself, he fails to acknowledge the inhuman acts of cruelty and aggression that in fact precipitate warfare.