Review of John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993

Vogel, Robert

English

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 20
1-23-2012
War Through the Ages
Robert Vogel
McGill University
This Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Vogel, Robert (1994) "War Through the Ages," Canadian Military History: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 20.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/20
4. Bradley Smith. The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most 
Secret Special Relationship 1940-1946. Shrewsbury: 
Airlife Publishing Ltd. 1993. 
5. British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 2, 
(London 1981) pp.41-58. 
6. Smith, p.157 
7. Ibid., p.161 
8. Ibid., p.88 
9. John Bryden, Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelli-
gence in the Second World War. Toronto, Lester Publish-
ing, 1993. 
David Stafford's books include Britain 
and European Resistance 1 940-45 and 
Camp X: Canada's School for Secret 
Agents. He is currently at the University 
of Edinburgh. Dr. Stafford is a 
Contributing Editor for CMH and will 
also write a regular book review column. 
War Through the Ages 
Robert Vogel 
John Keegan. A History oJWaifare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 432 pages, $36.95. 
K eegan's A History of Warfare is a long and very uneven account of the 
"organized violence" which has dogged the 
history of humanity since the beginning of 
organized society. The attempt to encompass 
the whole of the human race in his account is 
wholly praiseworthy as are his divisions of 
warfare into four main sections - stone, 
flesh, iron and fire - which roughly 
correspond with the weapons at the disposal 
of the combatants. These sections are 
interrupted by four quite separate and often 
quite unrelated essays on topics such as 
"Limitations on Warmaking," "Fortifications," 
"Armies" and "Logistics and Supply." Keegan's 
military history is conventional; he deals 
adequately with various well-rehearsed topics 
from Alexander the Great to Hitler, adding 
little to what he and many other historians 
have said in similar but usually less ambitious 
accounts. One drawback of trying to do so 
much, however, is that the period for which 
there is most evidence, that is the last five 
hundred years, is covered in a rather 
breathless fashion in the chapter entitled 
"Fire" which attempts to encompass the 
history of warfare for the whole world from 
the first cannon to the hydrogen bomb in 69 
pages, of which thirteen are devoted to the 
Second World War. 
Had Keegan restricted himself to the 
history of warfare he would have produced a 
reasonable and sometimes stimulating 
account. Unfortunately he tries to do much 
more than that. The whole first section, some 
60 pages, seems to be a speculative essay, 
entitled "War in Human History" which has 
less to do with history and more to do with an 
attack on Clausewitz. He begins with the 
portentous statement that "War is not a 
continuation of policy by other means" [p.3]. 
Contradicting Clausewitz is hardly an earth-
shaking position. The problem is, however, 
that from there on, and for the next twenty-
five pages, Clausewitz serves as a kind of 
whipping-horse for some of Keegan's less 
carefully considered flights of fancy. 
Clausewitz becomes a symbol for all things 
that Keegan considers have gone wrong with 
ancient society. This is apparently because 
Clausewitz was a "child of Aristotle" and 
therefore believed in the supreme importance 
of "politics." Warfare, argues Keegan, is not 
an extension of politics but of"culture." That 
may be an entirely defensible position but 
139 
1
Vogel: War Through the Ages
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994
having so clearly demonstrated that 
Clausewitz was wrong he might then surely 
have left him alone and explained his own 
theory of the relationship between "culture" 
and "warmaking." But he does not do that-
he goes on berating Clausewitz not only for 
being wrong but also for being right, that is by 
showing how when people adopt Clausewitz's 
ideas, as they seem to do more often than can 
really be demonstrated from the record, they 
destroy themselves. His first example in the 
next section, entitled "War as Culture," is 
from Easter Island - in brief, the Easter 
Islanders destroyed themselves because they 
made war an extension of politics, they 
followed Clausewitz and "Clausewitzian 
warfare did not serve the ends of Polynesian 
culture" [p.28]. Next come the Zulus -
"Shaka was a perfect Clausewitzian ... In 
short the rise and fall of the Zulu nation offers 
an awful warning of the short-comings of the 
Clausewitzian analysis" [p.32]. We go on to 
the Mamelukes, who are, of course, destroyed 
by Napoleon and "Clausewitz, if he knew the 
facts did not draw the inference" (that culture 
was as powerful a force as politics in the 
choice of military means and often more 
likely to prevail), though nothing in this or 
the next section on the Samurai seems to 
prove his point; the Samurai are un-
Clausewitzian because they preserve, at least 
for a time, their own culture, (swords rather 
than guns) which surprisingly enough, was 
not influenced by Clausewitz. Nowhere does 
Keegan seem to realize that if "Culture," 
defined on p.46 as practically everything that 
human beings do and think, is indeed the 
core of all societies then of course by that very 
definition "politics" can be no more separate 
from "culture" than warfare. The relationship 
between these two products of "culture" do 
need some close examination, even if 
Clausewitz is not the last word, or even the 
most important thinker, on this subject. 
But Keegan has a different agenda. He 
begins the last section of the introductory 
chapter which he calls "Culture without War" 
by suggesting that Clausewitz really 
represents the heart of "western culture" 
because of the primacy in which "politics" 
was held by that "culture" from Aristotle 
onwards. He concedes that Clausewitz might 
140 
not have understood the importance of 
"cultural history" because Voltaire did not. 
He uses Berlin's essay on Vico to illustrate 
the relative newness of"comparative history" 
although one is not quite clear that he has 
understood the import of that essay. 
Clausewitz did not understand the importance 
of Oxus ... "Military historians now recognize 
that the banks of the Oxus are to warfare 
what Westminster is to parliamentary 
democracy. . . . " It does get very confusing 
because within a page Clausewitz is cheering 
Robert McNamara for threatening the world 
with nuclear annihilation - the ultimate 
Clausewitzian "war" - which despite the 
veneration of him by the "post -war academics" 
has not be fought. Clausewitz in this section 
is blamed almost on the same page for 
attempting to recreate an archaic "warrior 
society" and being responsible for the creation 
of "nuclear deterrence abhorrent to humane 
sentiment," ... he was also, of course, 
responsible for the huge casualties of the 
First World War. The point that the twentieth 
century has seen a substantial 
"remilitarization" is hardly a new one but it is 
not one that can be attributed solely to 
Clausewitz. Perhaps there is some need to 
look at politics after all, even if politics is only 
a reflection of "cultural" history. As he ends 
this rather muddled section, Keegan suggests 
that war can be abolished in the same way as 
the world has gotten rid of slavery, infanticide, 
human sacrifice and duelling - "'Tis a 
consummation Devoutly to be wish'd," but 
the idea that war will simply cease because 
humanity will realize that" costs clearly exceed 
benefits" seems to suggest that in the past 
people have most often fought wars out of 
calculation rather than fear, not really an 
adequate interpretation. Even more curious 
is the fact that in his interlude "Limitations 
on Warmaking" there is no reference at all to 
either cultural or political limitations to 
warfare, only limitations brought about by 
"the laws of nature" [p.71]. This interlude 
also includes a somewhat tangential 
discussion of naval warfare. 
The chapter entitled "Stone" begins with 
the question of why men fight at all and 
attempts in a few pages to summarize the 
latest debates amongst psychologists and 
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 3 [1994], Iss. 1, Art. 20
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/20
anthropologists. This useful but somewhat 
abbreviated section leads us into the general 
history of warfare and Keegan attempts from 
there on to include in his discussion as many 
societies as possible. This follows more or 
less conventional lines but the "cultural"' 
connection is everywhere vague and somewhat 
simplistic. Thus the Greek phalanx made 
warfare far more terrible than it had been in 
its more "primitive" version but the 
explanation for not seeking a "Clausewitzian" 
solution was that either "there nevertheless 
remained strong traces of primitivism in Greek 
warmaking" or that "invasion of city state's 
fields [was] ... the violation of tabu" [p.251]. 
This was hardly a very sophisticated 
interpretation of Greek culture, which 
moreover does not explain how Alexander the 
Great escaped from these limitations so 
readily. 
Keegan is a forceful writer and some of 
the sections in the book, particularly the 
ones dealing with the "horse people," are 
interesting and thought-provoking. The 
difficulty is that Keegan has tried to write two 
books at the same time. This becomes most 
obvious as he comes to the end of the section 
on "Fire" and in his "Conclusion." The 
relationship between "culture" and "warfare" 
is never really properly explored; the whole 
question of restraint, other than "primitive 
ritualization," and of international law hardly 
get any mention, except briefly on pp.382-3, 
almost as a kind of after-thought. The rather 
well-known essays which do in fact deal with 
the relationship between war and "culture," 
such as John Nef's "War and Human 
Progress," which not only deals with "culture" 
but also has some very sharp criticisms of 
Clausewitz, or A. Vagts "History of Militarism," 
which again has a very negative interpretation 
of Clausewitz and his influence, are missing 
from the bibliography and their ideas do not 
seem to have been incorporated into this 
work. The same may be said of Q. Wright's 
classic "A Study of War" and Fuller's "The 
Conduct of War, 1789-1961" with its 
devastating chapter on Clausewitz. The idea 
that Clausewitz is universally admired in 
"academic circles" hardly bears much 
examination. 
In the "Conclusion" Keegan states that 
he hopes that he has illustrated that there 
are no simple answers to what war is or that 
it has only one nature. There can be no 
disagreement with this. Keegan goes on to 
repeat that "Culture is, nevertheless, the 
prime determinant of the nature of warfare" 
[p.387] and shows that "oriental" warfare is 
characterized by special features one may 
again agree but it would be helpful to have 
some statement about the relationship 
between "oriental culture," which seems to 
include everything from the Mongol 
conquerors to Chinese, Japanese and Islamic 
civilizations and "warmaking." Their methods 
all included "restraint," unlike Alexander the 
Great and the Greeks. Yet almost on the next 
page Keegan explains that the Crusades 
"resolved the inherent Christian dilemma over 
the morality of warmaking by transmitting to 
the West the ethic of holy war ... " [p.390]. 
Still it was "oriental restraint" that succumbed 
to the "ruthlessness it was not prepared or 
able to mobilize even in self-defence" against 
the Western style of warfare. Since that very 
style of warfare has "brought disaster and 
threatened catastrophe" [p.391], the world 
must now learn from "oriental" restraint and 
from the "primitive" world also. "Politics 
must continue, war cannot" - all fine 
sentiments and ones with which few can take 
exception - we even need to keep our 
"warriors" provided they only fight against 
"ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological 
intransigents and organized international 
criminals" [p.392]. Again, who can quarrel 
with that? Keegan will get proper praise for 
voicing such sentiments, but a book 
explaining the difficult connection between 
"culture" and "warfare" over the whole of 
human history, or even only in the twentieth 
century, has still to be written. 
Robert Vogel, Professor of History at 
McGill University and co-author of the 
Maple Leaf Route, passed away on April 
1, 1994. He will be sorely missed by 
CMH and its readers. 
141 
3
Vogel: War Through the Ages
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994


War Through the Ages

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 3 | Issue 1 Article 201-23-2012War Through the AgesRobert VogelMcGill UniversityThis Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationVogel, Robert (1994) "War Through the Ages," Canadian Military History: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 20.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/204. Bradley Smith. The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship 1940-1946. Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing Ltd. 1993. 5. British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 2, (London 1981) pp.41-58. 6. Smith, p.157 7. Ibid., p.161 8. Ibid., p.88 9. John Bryden, Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelli-gence in the Second World War. Toronto, Lester Publish-ing, 1993. David Stafford's books include Britain and European Resistance 1 940-45 and Camp X: Canada's School for Secret Agents. He is currently at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Stafford is a Contributing Editor for CMH and will also write a regular book review column. War Through the Ages Robert Vogel John Keegan. A History oJWaifare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 432 pages, $36.95. K eegan's A History of Warfare is a long and very uneven account of the "organized violence" which has dogged the history of humanity since the beginning of organized society. The attempt to encompass the whole of the human race in his account is wholly praiseworthy as are his divisions of warfare into four main sections - stone, flesh, iron and fire - which roughly correspond with the weapons at the disposal of the combatants. These sections are interrupted by four quite separate and often quite unrelated essays on topics such as "Limitations on Warmaking," "Fortifications," "Armies" and "Logistics and Supply." Keegan's military history is conventional; he deals adequately with various well-rehearsed topics from Alexander the Great to Hitler, adding little to what he and many other historians have said in similar but usually less ambitious accounts. One drawback of trying to do so much, however, is that the period for which there is most evidence, that is the last five hundred years, is covered in a rather breathless fashion in the chapter entitled "Fire" which attempts to encompass the history of warfare for the whole world from the first cannon to the hydrogen bomb in 69 pages, of which thirteen are devoted to the Second World War. Had Keegan restricted himself to the history of warfare he would have produced a reasonable and sometimes stimulating account. Unfortunately he tries to do much more than that. The whole first section, some 60 pages, seems to be a speculative essay, entitled "War in Human History" which has less to do with history and more to do with an attack on Clausewitz. He begins with the portentous statement that "War is not a continuation of policy by other means" [p.3]. Contradicting Clausewitz is hardly an earth-shaking position. The problem is, however, that from there on, and for the next twenty-five pages, Clausewitz serves as a kind of whipping-horse for some of Keegan's less carefully considered flights of fancy. Clausewitz becomes a symbol for all things that Keegan considers have gone wrong with ancient society. This is apparently because Clausewitz was a "child of Aristotle" and therefore believed in the supreme importance of "politics." Warfare, argues Keegan, is not an extension of politics but of"culture." That may be an entirely defensible position but 139 1Vogel: War Through the AgesPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994having so clearly demonstrated that Clausewitz was wrong he might then surely have left him alone and explained his own theory of the relationship between "culture" and "warmaking." But he does not do that-he goes on berating Clausewitz not only for being wrong but also for being right, that is by showing how when people adopt Clausewitz's ideas, as they seem to do more often than can really be demonstrated from the record, they destroy themselves. His first example in the next section, entitled "War as Culture," is from Easter Island - in brief, the Easter Islanders destroyed themselves because they made war an extension of politics, they followed Clausewitz and "Clausewitzian warfare did not serve the ends of Polynesian culture" [p.28]. Next come the Zulus -"Shaka was a perfect Clausewitzian ... In short the rise and fall of the Zulu nation offers an awful warning of the short-comings of the Clausewitzian analysis" [p.32]. We go on to the Mamelukes, who are, of course, destroyed by Napoleon and "Clausewitz, if he knew the facts did not draw the inference" (that culture was as powerful a force as politics in the choice of military means and often more likely to prevail), though nothing in this or the next section on the Samurai seems to prove his point; the Samurai are un-Clausewitzian because they preserve, at least for a time, their own culture, (swords rather than guns) which surprisingly enough, was not influenced by Clausewitz. Nowhere does Keegan seem to realize that if "Culture," defined on p.46 as practically everything that human beings do and think, is indeed the core of all societies then of course by that very definition "politics" can be no more separate from "culture" than warfare. The relationship between these two products of "culture" do need some close examination, even if Clausewitz is not the last word, or even the most important thinker, on this subject. But Keegan has a different agenda. He begins the last section of the introductory chapter which he calls "Culture without War" by suggesting that Clausewitz really represents the heart of "western culture" because of the primacy in which "politics" was held by that "culture" from Aristotle onwards. He concedes that Clausewitz might 140 not have understood the importance of "cultural history" because Voltaire did not. He uses Berlin's essay on Vico to illustrate the relative newness of"comparative history" although one is not quite clear that he has understood the import of that essay. Clausewitz did not understand the importance of Oxus ... "Military historians now recognize that the banks of the Oxus are to warfare what Westminster is to parliamentary democracy. . . . " It does get very confusing because within a page Clausewitz is cheering Robert McNamara for threatening the world with nuclear annihilation - the ultimate Clausewitzian "war" - which despite the veneration of him by the "post -war academics" has not be fought. Clausewitz in this section is blamed almost on the same page for attempting to recreate an archaic "warrior society" and being responsible for the creation of "nuclear deterrence abhorrent to humane sentiment," ... he was also, of course, responsible for the huge casualties of the First World War. The point that the twentieth century has seen a substantial "remilitarization" is hardly a new one but it is not one that can be attributed solely to Clausewitz. Perhaps there is some need to look at politics after all, even if politics is only a reflection of "cultural" history. As he ends this rather muddled section, Keegan suggests that war can be abolished in the same way as the world has gotten rid of slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice and duelling - "'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd," but the idea that war will simply cease because humanity will realize that" costs clearly exceed benefits" seems to suggest that in the past people have most often fought wars out of calculation rather than fear, not really an adequate interpretation. Even more curious is the fact that in his interlude "Limitations on Warmaking" there is no reference at all to either cultural or political limitations to warfare, only limitations brought about by "the laws of nature" [p.71]. This interlude also includes a somewhat tangential discussion of naval warfare. The chapter entitled "Stone" begins with the question of why men fight at all and attempts in a few pages to summarize the latest debates amongst psychologists and 2Canadian Military History, Vol. 3 [1994], Iss. 1, Art. 20http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/20anthropologists. This useful but somewhat abbreviated section leads us into the general history of warfare and Keegan attempts from there on to include in his discussion as many societies as possible. This follows more or less conventional lines but the "cultural"' connection is everywhere vague and somewhat simplistic. Thus the Greek phalanx made warfare far more terrible than it had been in its more "primitive" version but the explanation for not seeking a "Clausewitzian" solution was that either "there nevertheless remained strong traces of primitivism in Greek warmaking" or that "invasion of city state's fields [was] ... the violation of tabu" [p.251]. This was hardly a very sophisticated interpretation of Greek culture, which moreover does not explain how Alexander the Great escaped from these limitations so readily. Keegan is a forceful writer and some of the sections in the book, particularly the ones dealing with the "horse people," are interesting and thought-provoking. The difficulty is that Keegan has tried to write two books at the same time. This becomes most obvious as he comes to the end of the section on "Fire" and in his "Conclusion." The relationship between "culture" and "warfare" is never really properly explored; the whole question of restraint, other than "primitive ritualization," and of international law hardly get any mention, except briefly on pp.382-3, almost as a kind of after-thought. The rather well-known essays which do in fact deal with the relationship between war and "culture," such as John Nef's "War and Human Progress," which not only deals with "culture" but also has some very sharp criticisms of Clausewitz, or A. Vagts "History of Militarism," which again has a very negative interpretation of Clausewitz and his influence, are missing from the bibliography and their ideas do not seem to have been incorporated into this work. The same may be said of Q. Wright's classic "A Study of War" and Fuller's "The Conduct of War, 1789-1961" with its devastating chapter on Clausewitz. The idea that Clausewitz is universally admired in "academic circles" hardly bears much examination. In the "Conclusion" Keegan states that he hopes that he has illustrated that there are no simple answers to what war is or that it has only one nature. There can be no disagreement with this. Keegan goes on to repeat that "Culture is, nevertheless, the prime determinant of the nature of warfare" [p.387] and shows that "oriental" warfare is characterized by special features one may again agree but it would be helpful to have some statement about the relationship between "oriental culture," which seems to include everything from the Mongol conquerors to Chinese, Japanese and Islamic civilizations and "warmaking." Their methods all included "restraint," unlike Alexander the Great and the Greeks. Yet almost on the next page Keegan explains that the Crusades "resolved the inherent Christian dilemma over the morality of warmaking by transmitting to the West the ethic of holy war ... " [p.390]. Still it was "oriental restraint" that succumbed to the "ruthlessness it was not prepared or able to mobilize even in self-defence" against the Western style of warfare. Since that very style of warfare has "brought disaster and threatened catastrophe" [p.391], the world must now learn from "oriental" restraint and from the "primitive" world also. "Politics must continue, war cannot" - all fine sentiments and ones with which few can take exception - we even need to keep our "warriors" provided they only fight against "ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological intransigents and organized international criminals" [p.392]. Again, who can quarrel with that? Keegan will get proper praise for voicing such sentiments, but a book explaining the difficult connection between "culture" and "warfare" over the whole of human history, or even only in the twentieth century, has still to be written. Robert Vogel, Professor of History at McGill University and co-author of the Maple Leaf Route, passed away on April 1, 1994. He will be sorely missed by CMH and its readers. 141 3Vogel: War Through the AgesPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994

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