The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme
Publisher: Penguin | ISBN: 0140048979 | edition 1978 | PDF | 351 pages | 3,48 mb
" I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. I have questioned people who have been in battle - my father and father-in-law among them; have walked over battlefields, here in England, in Belgium, in France and in America; have often turned up small relics of the fighting - a slab of German 5.9 howitzer shell on the roadside by Polygon Wood at Ypres, a rusted anti-tank projectile in the orchard hedge at Gavrus in Normandy, left there in June 1944 by some highlander of the 2nd Argyll and Sutherlands; and have sometimes brought my more portable finds home with me (a Minie bullet from Shiloh and a shrapnel ball from Hill 60 lie among the cotton-reels in a painted papier-mache box on my drawing-room mantelpiece). I have read about battles, of course, have talked about battles, have been lectured about battles and, in the last four or five years, have watched battles in progress, or apparently in progress, on the television screen. I have seen a good deal of other, earlier battles of this century on newsreel,some of them convincingly authentic, as well as much dramatized feature film and countless static images of battle: photographs and paintings and sculpture of a varying degree of realism. But I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like..."
