JOHN KEEGAN ON WORLD WAR I

A Military Historian Puts a Vivid Cast on World War I
By MEL GUSSOW

During World War II, John Keegan and his family were evacuated from London to Taunton in the western English coumntryside. While German bombs fell on London, he grew up listening to stories about his father's service in World War I. "He was a very gentle person, a most unlikely soldier," he said in an interview, "but it was the most important experience of his life." And hearing about it became one of the most important experiences of his son's life.

There never was a possibility that Mr. Keegan might one day find himself in battle. A bout with tuberculosis in his teen-age years left him partly lame, disqualifying him for the military. Now 65, he says he has never regretted not being a soldier.

"I was a child of the war and I was fascinated by it," he said. "I took a tremendous interest in what was going on around me and was old enough to read news magazines." Later, after studying military history at Oxford University and teaching at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he followed a natural course and became a military historian.

For years he has been considered one of the best, a master of war and military tactics. With his 14 books and his experience as a military correspondent of The Daily Telegraph in London, he has devoted his life to the single subject of war.

His 1976 book, The Face of Battle, which focused on the common soldier and the common officer, is a cornerstone of military history. In his other works he has analyzed conflicts from the United States Civil War to World War II. Now, in his new book, The First World War (Alfred A. Knopf), which has received enthusiastic reviews, he deals in depth with an event that has recently become an object of greater public attention in novels as well as in nonfiction.

"The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict," he writes. It "ended the lives of 10 million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European conflict" and led directly to World War II.

Without it, he said during a recent visit to New York, "Bolshevism and Fascism would have been minor movements," and "Hitler might have lived out his life as a Viennese dropout."

What distinguishes Mr. Keegan's work from that of other historians is that he has approached his subject not as an academic but more as an investigative journalist, one with a novelist's eye for conjuring the atmosphere and immediacy of men in battle. The First World War is a vivid, step-by-step account with, in typical Keegan fashion, a strong sense of narrative. If the book seems to the reader like reliving the war, it was even more disturbing for the author to write.

As it came time to write about each skirmish, he was always aware of the approaching loss of life. He said that he would think to himself, "Here come another 200,000 casualties." This was particularly true when he reached the Battle of Passendale [sic!] in Belgium. In his book, he calls this 1917 clash "the most notorious land campaign" of the war.

"I knew exactly what was coming up," he explained as he sipped a glass of bourbon at his Manhattan hotel. The rugged-looking writer speaks with the self-assurance of a television commentator. "It was a dreadful battle because it was fought in West Flanders, very near the sea. More than three years of shelling had destroyed the drainage system. So when it rained, and it rained heavily in the fall of 1917, the ground became a swamp. You get these awful descriptions of men plodding forward up to their thighs in mud. The soldiers get hit, they fall down and they drown in mud." Nearly 70,000 British soldiers died in that battle and 170,000 were wounded.

Although Mr. Keegan writes with astonishing immediacy, he con- fessed in "The Face of Battle" that his was an outsider's view of war: he had very little idea of what it was like to be on the front lines.

Now, several wars and many books later, does he still feel that way?

"If anything, it must be worse than my imagination suggested," he said. In his work for The Telegraph he has occasionally been near battles, once in Lebanon, another time on maneuvers on the battleship Missouri. More often he has visited battlefields of the past, a necessary part of his research. He has been everywhere from Gettysburg to Gallipoli, hoping to find some- thing unexpected. For example, he was surprised to discover the smallness of Gallipoli: so much fighting in so limited a space.

Mr. Keegan says that many of his early images of war came from films and novels. One of his criticisms of Stanley Kubrick's World War I movie "Paths of Glory" is that the film was "too neat and tidy." In contrast, he said, "the first half-hour of 'Saving Private Ryan' is the most terrifying, realistic thing ever done in the cinema." When it comes to fictional representa- tions of battle, one of his favorites is "A Farewell to Arms": "It is an absolutely marvelous book. Professional historians who read it can't shake off the influence."

His new book paints detailed portraits of men at war. One of the most intriguing characters is the British general Douglas Haig who managed to ignore the casualties and "to be untouched by the suffering." "He was a strange man, a very cold fish," Mr. Keegan said. "A good general but a defective person."

Mr. Keegan wrote his book at his home in a farming village in Wiltshire, a calm, bucolic environment. Nevertheless, he had to fight his own depression and "overcome a series of emotional barriers" as he wrote about such horrendous events. But he pushed on, always keeping his equilibrium about his research. "Dr. Johnson said the writing of history only involves powers of the lower imagination. Its demands are much less than those made by lyric poetry."

Each of his books has been preoccupied with a central theme. He wrote "about groups of men" in Six Armies in Normandy (1982) and about generals in The Mask of Command (1987). Then he moved from naval history to The History of Warfare (1993) and The Second World War (1990), which was pegged to the 50th anniversary of that conflict. He viewed that war as "a great morality play, a story of good against evil which isn't true at all about the First World War."

"We may not have gone into the Second World War for moral reasons," he continued, "but overridingly toward the end it became a war of moral imperative." He said he was convinced that were it not for World War I, there might not have been World War II. And at various times in the first war, he said, if either side had demonstrated "a willingness to stand down, they could have stopped the crisis."

"The war interrupted and in many ways destroyed one of the most creative periods in European life," he continued. "It didn't have the same effect on the United States."

His book is filled with odd but relevant details. For example, he notes that the use of the steel helmet in World War I was the first reversion to armor since the 17th century. At the same time, there was an abundant use of horses, one for every three men: "Horse fodder was the single largest item shipped to the British Army in France." One of the great advantages of gasoline is that "it's much more compact than hay and oats."

Two enemies, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II, were cousins who spoke to each other in English. When war broke out, he said, "it was the collapse of their professional world: they bade farewell to each other with tears running down their faces."

In a sense, the use of trenches prolonged the campaign by setting up a permanent line of defense. While the English and French suffered privations in trenches, the Germans comfortably settled into them and in some cases brought in furniture and electricity and made them seem like homes at the front. "The only moment when either side could have hoped to win a quick outright victory was right at the beginning, in the first month or two. Once they started digging those trenches, they were in for a long war."

On the other hand, tanks -- a new weapon -- shortened the war. It is remarkable, he said, how quickly tanks went from conception to reality, in contrast to Tomahawk cruise missiles, which were 20 years in conception. "The Germans tried to make a tank, but it was a very bad one. They thought other factors like command were more important, that intellect could battle the opponent." Mr. Keegan disagrees: "Ultimately, technology is decisive."

Asked if war was an art, he said, "Boxing can be elegant, but when one or both fighters decide to go for the knockout, then there's nothing elegant or artistic about it. When two armies mutually decide to go for a knockout, it's brute force and willpower." But he believes that in certain cases war, at least a limited war, is a necessity: "Sometimes you have to fight, however reluctant you may be."

Mr. Keegan has vigorously objected to Clausewitz's conviction that war is a continuation of political relations by other means. For him, war and politics are distinct and separate.

He once wrote, "Politics must continue, war cannot." By that he means world wars.

In that sense, his study of the bloodiness of the past has made him more sanguine about the future: "We're not going to have wars like the First or Second World War."