Traditional battle narratives are a distorting literary convention

Keegan opens by dissecting what he calls the 'battle piece,' the standard rhetorical mode historians had used for generations to describe combat: soldiers advance with 'measured tread,' endure a 'hail of fire,' and either triumph gloriously or fall heroically. He argues this convention, inherited largely unchanged from classical and Napoleonic-era writing, tells readers almost nothing about what actually happened on the ground, because its vocabulary was built to satisfy literary and patriotic expectations rather than to describe mechanics accurately. Even scrupulously factual official histories, Keegan notes, could describe horrific slaughter in flat, bureaucratic prose that obscured the human experience just as thoroughly as flowery heroics did. His response is to insist that any serious battle history must break from this convention entirely and reconstruct events from the specific, granular experience of participants. Takeaway: the language historians use to describe battle shapes, and often distorts, what readers understand about it.