Military history and its practitioners were long derided for their obsession with battle. The bugles and banners style of operational history, the standard approach of the discipline until the mid-1970s, has cast a long shadow of exclusion and dismissal upon military historians and their purpose. That all changed when John Keegan’s The Face of Battle was released in 1976. Keegan’s seminal work centered on the soldiers’ experience and the multi-faceted consequences, costs, and havoc wreaked on the individual in combat. Keegan uses three critical British battles, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, to disprove mythologies, track the impact of new technologies, and present a more accurate representation of the realities of combat. Keegan literally changed the game, launching first the social and then the cultural turn in the discipline, both of which have created a forever richening scholarship seeking a deeper understanding of warfare, its realities, and widespread consequences.[1]
Wayne Lee, Anthony Carlson, David Preston, and David Silbey come together in The Other Face of Battle to present the next step in Keegan’s cause while highlighting a serious flaw in his objective. This book and its four authors, all of outstanding reputation and pedigree, stand on the 40-year foundation set by the cultural turn. In a masterful homage to Keegan and with eyes to the future, Lee, Carlson, Preston, and Silbey take the iconic work and its framework into the present by asking questions that are as difficult as they are important. While Keegan spotlights the soldiers’ experience in combat between culturally linked opponents on European battlefields, this new inquiry does the opposite: it explores the jarring and much more prevalent encounter when the enemy is the “other.”
