The Face of Battle by John Keegan

Somewhere I saw this book highly recommended as one of the best books on war ever written. So I decided to give The Face of Battle by John Keegan a try. 

I'm not a huge fan of war books, but this one was interesting. 

He decides he will tell military history differently than it has been done in the past. He wants to look deeply into the face of the men who faced the battle. He states early on that he intends "to discuss 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 incidence of accidents as a cause of death in war and, above all, the dimensions of the danger which different varieties of weapons offer to the soldier on the battlefield." (p. 77) He uses three battles as jumping off points for these discussion: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. He presents them in chronological order and also in order of magnitude. By starting with the much smaller, earlier battle of Agincourt, he provides a helpful place to compare later battles.

One plus, I got to read about battles I have only cursory knowledge of. And, he made it interesting.

He begins with the medieval battle of Agincourt on October 1415. It a small (by modern standards) battle that lasts only one day. It involves the French and the English and occurs at the end of the Hundred Years War. The killing and violence are horrifying, but Keegan makes note of the three most motivating factors: alcohol, King and religion, goods and glory. Although he thinks the last is probably the most important. At a time when even the battle-hardened looked to their priest for permission to kill, knowing that God and the King fought by your side was highly motivating. It didn't hurt (apparently) to be drunk, either. But knowing you would be rewarded in this life pushed men into a level of violence our modern sensibilities simply cannot comprehend. 

Then he moves to another French and English battle, Waterloo, on June 18, 1815. It's scope is much larger than the battle of Agincourt, covering over 2 square miles.  Despite the Duke of Wellington's desire to dismiss any literary or historical accounts of it, the battle looms large in the imagination. And it's no wonder. 

"For the first time in the history of the British army, each veteran of the battle was awarded a commemorative medal. He was to be known as a Waterloo Man and his single day of service on 18 June1815, was to count two years pension. This alone was sufficient to convince even the most unimaginative private soldier that he had survived an extraordinary event; officers were in no doubt of it from the moment the battle closed..." (p. 117). 

When Napoleon returned to France after his exile and the restoration of King Louis XVIII, the powers of Europe decided he would not return to power. They mustered four large armies to meet him, made up of the Austrians, Russians, Prussians, Belgiums, and an Anglo-Dutch army formed on a core English army. Napoleon, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to attack on of the first arrive, the Belgiums. After quickly dispensing them, he turned to the Anglo-Dutch army and attacked head on. That's exactly what the Duke of Wellington assumed he'd do. Although he initially tried a feint to the left, the battle commenced in the middle. The battle is generally considered to have five phases, although that was not obvious to the participants. Obviously in a battle this size the descriptions of the fighting and the wounded stagger the imagination. But once again, the French are dispatched and history moves on.

Moving forward into the future, Keegan describes the battle of the Somme. This is the horrifying trench warfare of World War I. Suffice it to say that this battle encompassed a much larger geographic location and lasted much longer than the others. 

From AI:

Core Themes of Keegan’s Analysis

The Brutality of Industrial Warfare: Keegan emphasizes how modern machinery—specifically automated machine guns and high-explosive artillery—turned the battlefield into a mechanized slaughterhouse that completely overwhelmed human endurance. [1, 2]
The Failure of the Bombardment: He details how the preliminary British artillery barrage failed to cut the thick German barbed wire or destroy deep underground concrete dugouts, leaving the defending German troops intact and ready. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The Human and Institutional Cost: Focusing on July 1, 1916, Keegan notes the devastating loss of 60,000 British casualties in a single day. He highlights the tragic optimism and courage of the volunteer "Pals" battalions who advanced into certain doom. [1, 2, 3, 4]
The Role of the Officer Corps: Keegan explores how the British public-school ethos shaped junior officers, maintaining a fragile sense of duty and social cohesion even as entire platoons were wiped out. [1]

For a book about warfare, I liked it far more than I thought I would. Unfortunately I waited too long to summarize it and didn't want to actually re-read it to get this summary. Ergo the AI addition at the end.

Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott

A fellow teacher recommended Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott, stating that it had a great impact upon her. Since I greatly respect her, I figured her recommendation was as good a reason as any to buy it and read it. 

I had to read it twice. 

It's very dense. Even the title, Beauty for Truth's Sake, is enigmatic. What does that even mean? Even after reading the book twice, I'm still not sure that I can explain it. 

Caldecott is making the case for re-enchanting education. He believes we went wrong when we separated Faith and Reason. 

He begins with a discussion of the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, which together compose the seven liberal arts. As understood by the ancients, it was the study of these things that would lead a student to the ultimate good, which was the study of God. In this world, faith and reason worked together to free the student up for that most good, true, and beautiful. "The assumption of this system of education was that by learning to understand the harmonies of the cosmos, our minds would be raised toward God, in whom we could find the unity from which all these harmonies derive: Dante's 'love that moves the sun and the other stars.'" (53) But western civilization long ago lost the connection between faith and reason and so God and the study of theology became worthless pursuits. 

By losing sight of the purpose of education according to Plato, we have lost sight of our very humanity. Plato describes the power of learning on the soul: "the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming to that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good." (22) Knowledge, then, is its own end. It is be valued because it leads us to beauty. And truth resides in beauty. John Newman states, "I have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself as being the acts and work of the Creator." (29) True beauty is the harmony found in the universe. To miss or denigrate beauty is to lose both truth and goodness as well. And all beauty is found in acknowledging the Creator.

Caldecott then discusses the poetic imagination and our need to awaken it. This means understanding how the medievals saw at the world. Theirs was a cosmos infused with divine symbolism. "Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner according to its own order of existence; and thus, from one order to another, all things are linked and correspond with each other so that they join together in a universal and total harmony which is like a reflection of the Divine Unity itself." (48) It was this elimination of the symbolic and poetic understanding that caused the great divorce between science and religion and art from science.

The author then goes onto discuss how the ancients imbued that first of the quadrivium, arithmetic and numbers, with symbolism. He starts with mathematics and shows how numbers pointed the mind of man to God. It begins with 1 - the ultimate symbol of unity that exists in God, himself. Then 2, which clearly delineates the symbiosis of the Father and the Son. But it is 3 that completes the picture of the Trinity and the love that flows between Father and Son. Caldecott spends quite a bit of time on more number symbolism, including the "golden ratio," and the ways the medieval world used number theory to point the people to the truth of God. 

From arithmetic, he moves to the next topic of the quadrivium, geometry. Specifically he shows how circles and other geometric shapes point to the unity of the Trinity. Not only do circles and triangles capture the beauty of the godhead, but proportion as well. Caldecott states, "A single relationship unites the Father to Christ, Christ to his disciples. Christ is the proportional mean between God and the saints." (81) He even relates pi, and its unending string of numbers, to the infinite love of God for his creation. If the Holy Spirit is the circle connecting the two points of Father and Son, then his measure is πd, an infinite number times the distance between Father and Son. We reside in the middle of that circle!

Next in the quadrivium is music and to this Caldecott turns. According to the ancients, the universe is singing! And "to understand the universe is to appreciate its music, the harmonies between its parts, the rhythm of if movement, and the proportion of its elements." (94) This music becomes physically manifest in architecture as well. Unfortunately, we have lost sight of the verticality seen in medieval architecture, with its intentional pointing to God. We have focused on the horizontal, that is man to man and to his environment. Even the tallest skyscrapers are simply horizontal buildings stacked upon each other. He calls for an architecture based on verticality, permanence, and iconography. Not only buildings, but the natural world is singing. "The animals, plants, and minerals, the stars and elements, were universally thought to 'praise' their maker, either simply by their very existence, or when called upon to do so by man (who gives them a voice they do not possess in themselves)." (107)

This universal singing leads naturally to astronomy, the fourth branch of the quadrivium. C.S. Lewis brilliantly reminds us that "The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night in all ages." (110) We live in an enchanted creation and we miss it because it is all too familiar. Unfortunately early astronomers missed the mark in their insistence on an earth-centered system, and so lost some credibility. The problem was that the astronomers so believed in the mythical symbolism of creation that they worked backward from that presupposition. Rather than let the actual data guide them and then discover the beauty, they tried to impose their own vision of the beautiful, distorting what God had actually designed. In attempting to "save appearance" they created increasingly complicated descriptions of what was actually a beautiful system: the sun at the center (light) and the elliptical orbits of planets which contain two centers, just as we orbit our lives around the visible and the invisible God. Much beauty exists in the truth of the created order. The ancient astronomers lacked the faith to wait for that beauty to be revealed. 

The final subject of astronomy should lead most naturally to the study of God, but in our secular and disenchanted world, we have become buffered selves, disengaged from the world. "Without those ties, without that embeddedness, nature was drained of grace, and our connection to the transcendent God became less a matter of imagination or intellect or feeling than of sheer willpower." (124) To re-enchant the universe, we must return to revelation and worship. If we define "liturgy" as "a formal ritual enacted by those who understand themselves to be participating in an action with the divine..." (Wikipedia), then liturgy may be our salvation.

Can we see liturgy itself, then, as the "lost key" to humane education that we have been searching for in this book; that is, to the reintegration of all things, all subjects, in a vision of sacred order? Would a renewed appreciation of liturgy help to anchor theories about number and symbolism and quality more profoundly in real life, enabling us to introduce some much needed harmony into our own souls too? (126)

Caldecott reminds us that all societies are religious societies and all contain a creation story, a doctrine of the end times, and a liturgy or set of rituals to organize time and space. Ours has moved away from true religion to a secular and God-denying counterfeit religion. We must therefore start with remembering. We were created by God and that knowledge should evoke in us gratitude. That gratitude should turn into worship. This, then, should engender an appreciation of the seven liberal arts as a way to give ontological depth to our universe and point to a harmony that harmonizes our souls with the soul of the Creator. Modernity rejects this vertical dimension and so leads to a fragmented and dissipated self. It is the very definition of hell. The man whose soul seeks to harmonize itself with its creator flies on wings of both reason and faith, all bound up in love. Reason will lead to faith as beauty is revealed and faith will naturally engage in reason to reveal more beauty. It is, as Dante tells us, love that moves it all.