John Keegan, Reconsidered
My love/hate relationship with John Keegan explored in two parts.
John Keegan is one of my favorite military historians. The Face of Battle is, I think, one of the more groundbreaking military history works. In it, Keegan hones in on the boots-on-the-ground ‘enlisted man’, observing the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme through their eyes.
I can’t get enough of works like that, and Keegan’s is exceptional. As well, he writes about historiography (or the writing of history) in the opening, and I found it incredibly illuminating.
And yet, I have a problem with John Keegan.
For all his sagacity, writing tactics, and strategy, there’s a throughline in his work that nags at me: he tends to pull either from outdated sources (at the time of his work’s publication) or embrace outdated ideas and pass them off as fact.
This is not to say it is a universal issue, plaguing each of his works. I’ve only read three of his books, but in two of the three, I found myself scratching my head and wondering, how could an historian be simultaneously the very best and very worst on the same subject?
1
Keegan fundamentally misunderstands the Mongols. In his book A History of Warfare, he writes about the effect the Mongols had on their opponents (specifically the phenomenon where cities would surrender upon seeing Mongol riders outside their gates).
“What seems likely in the circumstances is that the word got around that the Mongols could not be beaten. We know that Bokhora and Somarkand capitulated at their very appearance… What made for this reputation of invincibility? The Mongols knew the use of the stirrup, which Attila’s Huns did not, but the stirrup had been in general use for 500 years. Genghis and his sons imposed a ferocious discipline on their tribesmen; the yasa, their code of law, laid own that booty was to be held collectively, and made it a capital offence for a warrior to abandon a comrade in battle, and these sanctions against personal enrichment and the habit of flight in the face of danger so characteristic of primitive warfare may allow us to regard the Mongol cavalry swarm as an army, operating above the military horizon, and not just a war band. Nevertheless, the reasons for the fear in which they were quickly held still seem elusive.”
That’s a lot to unpack.
Keegan is mystified as to why the Mongols were so feared. I suppose if one considered the Mongol military a swarm of dirty tribesmen rather than a sophisticated force, this line of thinking makes sense. But in trying to explain the widespread hysteria the Mongols caused, Keegan offers up two explanations:
The Mongols’ use of the stirrup and quality horses
An iron law that created troops too scared to flee the field.
He skips over perhaps the easiest and most human explanation: The Mongols’ tendency to massacre entire cities to send a message.
Peng Daya and Xu Ting wrote in the 1230s about Mongol devastation. Juvayin, the Persian, wrote in the 1260s about the same, as did Guo Lu and Rashid al-Din. Their narratives all describe the aftermath of a sacking, painting pictures of mounds of skulls, strewn corpses, and the fantastic stink of rot.
Historian Peter Jackson offers this explanation:
“The Mongol campaigns have become a byword for the devastation of fertile agricultural land, the sack of towns and cities, and the massacre of populations. ‘In its . . . purposeless cruelty,’ wrote E. G. Browne over a century ago, ‘. . . this outburst of savage nomads . . . resembles rather some brute cataclysm of the blind forces of nature than a phenomenon of human history’…[However], our capacity to appraise the extent of the destruction, or to understand the motives behind it, is not aided by the tendency of both contemporary and later sources to indulge in high-flown extravagance.”1
“Massacres were therefore only carried out when they were calculated to weaken the resistance... ‘Surrender or die’ meant just that – and surrender was always preferred.”
As Jackson would surely assert, Keegan falls into the western way of ‘high-flown extravagance.’
He likens them to a ‘golden horde’, a godless rabble that stamped out religion and culture wherever they went. And yet, further reading would indicate the Mongols governed quite similarly to the Achaemenid-Persians, who were famous for their religious ambivalence, so long as governmental stability was ensured.
Is it not possible that, as the Mongols swept across the known world, their prowess as conquerors and butchers reached the ears of those in their crosshairs? And, those people, being of sound mind and body, surrendered rather than face the fate of the handful of cities that were butchered out of hand. Thus, with a few acts of extreme violence, the Mongols mastered power politics.
There is also the (likely) apocryphal story where Genghis conferred with his officers about what to do with thousands of Chinese people they’d captured. Genghis was of a mind to destroy the city and massacre the people, and turn the city to pastureland for his horses. A Chinese advisor of the Great Khan saved the people by convincing Genghis of their usefulness to him as farmers, and illustrated the great wealth they could provide the Khan and his armies.
I suppose, then, some nuance must be considered with what we know about the Mongols. Part of their history is legend, and yet, because they were likely such a shock to the system of settled societies, Western writers have characterized them as a plague of locusts, not appreciating their tactical brilliance, nor, regarding Keegan specifically, giving mention whatever to one of the greatest field commanders the world has ever seen: Subudai.
Perhaps most mystifying is Keegan’s praise for Napoleon’s skill in maneuver, while overlooking the Mongols’ ability to do the same, only orders of magnitude better.
Keegan also writes about Genghis as “physically timid” because he did not lead from the front (or, “put himself in view”) in the manner of Alexander or Richard the Lionheart. This, despite his effusive praise of Napoleon as a tactician and strategist who found a way to dominate Europe while not leading from the front in the medieval manner.
He gives little thought to the notion that perhaps the Mongols were led by excellent commanders and their penchant for promoting within based on merit, combined with their development of the horse, stirrup, and bow, created a unique military machine. Keegan skirts around these factors, opting instead to consider them a bizarre mirage.
Keegan also cites fellow Brit Christopher Duffy in his assertion that we have the Mongols to thank for the eventual rise of Communism,2 which would have been news to Marx and Engels. I couldn’t help myself, and had to throw that in.
2
As a Brit, Keegan is starting on awkward footing when writing about the American Civil War.
Churchill famously wrote about the Civil War as well, and while offering some illuminating perspectives, it could largely be characterized by its distance. Keegan’s work suffers the same.
Writing about the American Civil War requires—if you'll pardon the phrase—having truly been there. By "there," I mean not just geographically present in the United States (though that would help), but intellectually engaged with the lives and experiences of the people who lived through it.
The Civil War is a cultural war as much as it is anything else, and if one hasn’t experienced the results in person, it becomes difficult to write convincingly about what the war meant.
Keegan pulls many late 1800s and early 1900s sources, which give his work an outdated color for a book published in 2009. Therefore, he seems to misunderstand the role of slavery in the causes of the war, and he tends to gloss over these causes in favor of an effort to discuss military matters (which it must be said he does generally well).
Before looking at the bad, let’s give Keegan the benefit of the doubt. He does two things incredibly well: He distinguishes between Grant and Lee’s battlefield tendencies early on. He describes Lee as tactically brilliant but limited as a grand strategist, contrasted with Grant, whom he praises as an excellent geostrategist, pointing out the excellence of Grant’s overland and Vicksburg campaigns.
He is also incisive in his analysis of the terrain’s influences on the conflict. This, coupled with his description of the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Rapidan rivers’ impact on troop maneuver, was eye-opening.
Where he struggles is reckoning with what the war was for those who endured it. It was a grappling for the United States’ very soul. As such, the reasons for the conflict hold as much, if not more, significance than the conflict itself. While he does allow that, “slavery was the system on which the foundations of Southern society rested.” He does not interrogate what that means, nor does he consider the implications of it.
If he had, he might have arrived at different conclusions near the end of the book, when he wrote, “fortunately for Americans, the Lost Cause took the form of a legend rather than a political movement.”
If Keegan had slowed to consider ‘the ideas’, he would have understood the Lost Cause was deeply ingrained in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Ku Klux Klan and other aspects of the Jim Crow-era South.
Many ideas within one, the Lost Cause insisted that the Confederacy was doomed from the start, that industry and manpower alone allowed the North to win, and so does Keegan:
“Unit for unit, and perhaps man for man, the Confederate army exceeded that of the Union in quality, so that the Union triumphed in the end only because of larger numbers and greater wealth of resources.”
Yet any serious historian would balk at the notion; all he would need to do is crack open an account of the American Revolution, the First Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Finnish Winter War, Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, or any other instance of a numerically and industrially inferior force defeating their superior.
There is little evidence that the Confederacy boasted any special advantage man-for-man, or that their unit cohesion was in any way significantly superior to their northern counterparts.
And yet, he seems to understand parts of the conflict when he describes it as “an entirely new way of warfare, a struggle between beliefs fought by populations quite untrained to fight.”
It seems to me, his selection of sources for this work is the chief cause of unevenness. Many 1880s primary sources color the work (where both Confederates and Federals were writing their ‘vindications’), and he relies on myriad secondary sources, including James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, Shelby Foote’s Civil War: A Narrative, and Bruce Catton’s The Coming Fury (Which, it must be said, I have used for the next Compendium show, but I’ve arrived at differing conclusions than Keegan about many things.)
3
I don’t know if this is a term or not, but to me, Keegan is a Eurocentrist. He compares Lee and Grant to Generals of World Wars One and Two, the Aztecs are written through a European lens, Genghis Khan is compared to Richard the Lionheart, and the Mongols are saddled with the Cold War corpse bill. A few of these individually are no cause for alarm, but taken together, they are a pattern.
While he writes and understands military strategy perhaps better than most, he seems to view military and political matters through a British prism and lacks appropriate nuance when discussing nuanced subjects.
This may, you say, be due to his alignment with outdated views, that he is a ‘man of his time’. That may be true, but we aren’t discussing works published in 1960. These are works published in 1993 and 2009. Why then, the apparent dissonance?
Eurocentrism.
He writes excellently about British military history, ex, his writing about Agincourt, which brilliantly describes the situation as Henry V would have understood it, and ascribes him credit, while also making note of the myriad French mistakes.
His work on WW1 and WW2, as best I can tell, is brilliant.
But when he wanders into waters outside continental Europe, his scholarship becomes shaky at times, leaning into old-fashioned notions.
A final observation might include delving into a fraught subject about which there are few categorical statements to be made. Keegan was always a popular historian, though he often managed academic studies within a popular work.
He wrote in Face of Battle about the deficiencies of Military History, itself a little essay on the subject. In it, I think we may find an element of our issue:
“for though academic interest in civil-military relations, particularly in those between the German army and German state, has produced a large, satisfying and in parts distinctly exciting literature, it is elsewhere prone to clothe itself in the drab garments of sociology at its most introspective; while the history of strategic doctrine, with some notable exceptions, of which Jay Luvaas’s Military Legacy of the Civil War is a glittering example, suffers markedly from that weakness endemic to the study of ideas, the failure to demonstrate connection between thought and action.”
In other words, the study of elements beyond the strictly military can become unmoored, wandering into abstraction, where ideas are studied in isolation rather than in motion.
But I would argue the opposite: military history, at its most insightful, is the study of ideas, of psychology, of social transformation. War, after all, is a crucible of human behavior.
Ideas fuel war, psychology tracks our response to its horrors, and sociology studies what happens when people return from the edge and try to rejoin the world they left behind.
Had Keegan lingered longer on the intellectual and psychological architecture behind war—rather than rushing toward the drama of movement and command—he might have drawn different conclusions about the Mongols’ strategic coherence or the Confederate South’s ideological resilience.
If you enjoyed today’s article, like, share, or restack! Your support of this publication is integral to its growth.
I also welcome your thoughts in the comments. If I’ve learned anything about history, it’s that it is a dialogue.
See you soon,
Josh
Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion, p. 153
Keegan, John. A History of Warfare, p. 214 (1993 edition)