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

The Face of encounter - Essay ExampleIve been through two wars and I know. Ive seen cities and homes in ashes. Ive seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces look up at the skies. I tell you, war is HellGeneral Sherman had seen war up blind drunk and his admonition rings horribly true, and bears the ring of truthfulness gained through his heart realizes. However, the knowledge of the actual experience of war that most people have gained is most likely through secondhand exposure by way of literature or newspaper accounts or military histories.In his book The Face of Battle John Keegan, a respected military historian and lecturer on war at the majestic 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 complete of any human experiences, for those who have not experienced it firsthand. Paradoxically, Keegan himself is str ictly in an academic who has had no face-to-face experience of war himself, but 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 there has been a shortage of descriptions of war which can give to a reader any sort of realistic and visceral apprehensiveness of the process and all of its horrible 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 distinct categories. They can every be described as poetic and imagistic, desiccated and academic, wholly inaccurate and useless for gaining understanding, vague and confusing, similarly temporal, local and subjective, and perhaps worst of all of a self-serving.For a prime example of the poetic and imagistic expression of the war literature the author provides a spectacular example written by General Sir William Napier concerning a