The Face of Battle Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

The Face of Battle - Essay ExampleIve been through two fights and I know. Ive seen cities and homes in ashes. Ive seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is HellGeneral Sherman had seen war up close and his admonition rings horribly true, and bears the ring of truthfulness gained through his heart contracts. However, the knowledge of the actual experience of war that most flock have gained is most likely through secondhand exposure by way of literature or newspaper accounts or military histories.In his entertain The Face of Battle John Keegan, a respected military historian and lecturer on war at the Royal military Academy at Sandhurst, attempts to put a human face upon the experience of war in ways perhaps never attempted before.The purpose of his book is to describe experience of war, the most extreme of all human experiences, for those who have not experienced it firsthand. Paradoxically, Keegan himself is strictly i n an academic who has had no personal experience of war himself, save only knows it secondhand through readings and personal information gained from relatives.Keegan points out in the poignant and illuminating introduction to the books main thesis that the writing of history on that point has been a paucity of descriptions of war which can give to a reader any sort of realistic and visceral understanding of the process and all of its surly mechanisms.In his overview of the worlds literature on war he shows that almost all writings on the subject can be pigeonholed into a number of obvious categories. They can either be described as poetic and imagistic, desiccated and academic, wholly inaccurate and useless for gaining understanding, vague and confusing, too temporal, local and subjective, and perhaps beat of all of a self-serving.For a prime example of the poetic and imagistic style of the war literature the author provides a spectacular example written by General Sir William Napier concerning a