What battles have in common is human: the behaviour of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honour and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration–for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.

In this major and wholly original contribution to military history, John Keegan reverses the usual convention of writing about war in terms of generals and nations in conflict, which tend to leave the common soldier as cipher. Instead he focuses on what a set battle is like for the man in the thick of it–his fears, his wounds and their treatment, the mechanics of being taken prisoner, the nature of leadership at the most junior level, the role of compulsion in getting men to stand their ground, the intrusions of cruelty and compassion, the very din and blood.

Although he ranges over the centuries to the present for examples, and through an awesome body of war literature in his critique of traditional military history, the author devotes almost two-thirds of the book to three battles fought about a hundred miles and five hundred years apart. In a style never histrionic, but intense, lucid, and dramatic, he makes us reflect on whether it was more terrifying to stand under the cloud of arrows at Agincourt, face the leveled muskets of Waterloo, or plod on into the rain of steel at the Somme.

Set battles, with their unities of time and place, may be a thing of the past, but this anatomy of what they were for the men who fought them is an unforgettable mirror held up to human nature.