Fortress America

Fields of Battle is more memoir than history. The accidents of the author’s American lecture tours determine his historical choices. The result is remarkably undisciplined: more about the author than his subject; more about space than time; more about apprehension than data; more about episodes than continuities. It is unanalytical, undocumented, and erroneous. When Keegan (p. 292) puts Thomas Jefferson at Bent’s Fort (Colorado) after 1834, the error indicts rather more than a lack of American copy-editing of this British reprint.

Can we, like Rousseau, ignore such errors as not affecting Keegan’s conclusion (borrowed from George Steiner) that, militarily speaking, American history is a function of space, not time; that, in America, geography dictates strategy; that, therefore, forts were the foci for the conquest of a continent from the Indians, from the French, and from the British? Certainly, Keegan’s case would be stronger if he had not omitted the Spanish and the Spanish Americans, from whom half the territory of the United States was conquered. But the author’s lecture tours have not taken him to places in New Spain. Absent lectures and concomitant readings, Keegan does not find in the history of the South, Southwest, or far West, any military event that he can attack with the historical tactic which has made him famous, the battle-piece.

In The Face of Battle (1976), Keegan defined battle as “something which happens between two armies leading to the moral and then physical disintegration of one or the other of them” (p. 302). Keegan understood (as has every intelligent commander since Alexander) that victory was as much moral as material. To this insight, Keegan added a more modern conclusion (that of S. L. A. Marshall in Men Against Fire, 1947, pp. 71–72) that the moral component of combat was determined by very small groups of men. Their band ethos, composed of interdependence, camaraderie, and self-esteem, resolved the contradictions of combat between obedience and self-preservation, between duty and fear, between honor and intelligence. In The Face of Battle, Keegan’s forceful analyses of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme humanized military history.

An American military, troubled by its all-too-human failures in Vietnam, invited Keegan to lecture on The Face of Battle. (Not to be left out of the intelligent analysis of war, in which they usually take the lead, the Marines also asked Keegan to speak, although the ethos of the Corps, which Keegan compares to that of the Brigade of Guards, had prevented its demoralization.) Under this military aegis, from 1977 onward, Keegan expanded on his only previous visit, a student tour of civil war sites twenty years earlier. To staff colleges and military academies he carried the message that men fight for their comrades, not for their countries.

Then the study of “War and Society” emerged as an academic enterprise designed to replace the obloquy visited upon “drum and trumpet” history with the cachet now afforded to “bum and strumpet” studies. Keegan was called to American colleges and universities. They embodied everything he had been taught by his parents—Catholic, Irish, outsiders in England—to admire about America. There “the permanencies which set us apart—established religion, monarchy, empire, fixed division between one class and another, unequal opportunity in education—did not apply” (p. 20). American largesse liberated Keegan from twenty-five years of service in the classrooms of Sandhurst, just as American resources had “saved my world, the European world threatened by two pitiless dictatorships which overshadowed my childhood and growing up” (p. 17). Keegan is not ungrateful: “I love America” are the first and last words of this book. His gratitude and his affection have made this work welcome to American readers nettled by earlier English visitors’ contempt (of Syracuse, Charles Dickens said, “it would make an owl weep to fly over it”). ¹ These amiable qualities infuse Keegan’s interest in the American military, and they color his perceptions of the country. Empathetic and extensive...