La Vie En Rose for 2007 November 14

Some people can't admit when they are wrong. I like to think I am not one of them. I have been making disparagingly remarks about "traditional military history" and "john keegan" (always accompanied by a yawn) ever since I read First World War and found it distinctly lacking in what, for me, makes the first world war interesting; instead my brain was paralyzed by epic descriptions of battles down to minute details...

Imagine my surprise when I read an article in one of these historigraphical review books and someone to whom I really should pay attention cited Keegan's Face of Battle as one of the landmark examples of "new military history."

Around the same time I reached a point in my nano novel where I realised that I don't know enough about the technical details of trench warfare to write a battle scene. And I'm still working on my historiography. Enter Keegan.

I stayed up until--I don't know what time--reading the section on the battle of the Somme. to be fair to my previous position, someone else I did well by paying attention to mentioned that Face of Battle was really impressive and FWW pales in comparison. I'm really tempted to read the sections on Agincourt and Waterloo just because they look interesting but you know, maybe in December. Maybe I still would have found parts of the book tedious while wearing my cultural historian brain. But while wearing my novelist brain I wanted to dance in joy if it weren't for the horror, the horror.** Thank you, John Keegan! I wanted to cry out. Everything I could possibly want to know for writing a scene about the battle of the somme contained in 50 pages of densely written, superbly researched text. It's amazing how a different perspective changes things. So maybe I should practice more stepping out of these intellectual boxes to try to understand why people find interesting the things they do, instead of scoffing in superiority.

**Keegan writes,

Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same range of emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz—guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger—and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalion failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page…

There's the visual picture of an officer coming across "line after line of dead men lying where they had fallen." It's hard to read the number of casualties—21,000 killed or missing in one DAY—and imagine each of these a person with a life that was suddenly and abruptly cut short. This is the sort of moment that makes me want to shut my books and never open them again, run away and do something more cheerful. But why? Anyway, I don't, and I'm sure that says something about me—but not whether it is good, or bad. Or both.