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Continent of Conquest

Date: July 14, 1996, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Pauline Maier
Lead:

FIELDS OF BATTLE
The Wars for North America.
By John Keegan.
Illustrated. 348 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Text:

Americans have always seen themselves most clearly through the eyes of others. Alexis de Tocqueville immediately comes to mind, but in the 19th century Americans turned more often to the writings of British travelers, whose approval they wanted but did not always get. Frances Trollope's comments on the uncouth manners of Jacksonian Americans were not appreciated, and Charles Dickens's occasional unflattering remarks seemed downright ungrateful given the warm welcome he had everywhere received.

John Keegan, a British historian who is now the defense correspondent of The Daily Telegraph in London, ran no risk of repeating Dickens's bad show. ''Fields of Battle,'' a hybrid military history and memoir, opens and ends with the words ''I love America.'' Mr. Keegan's personal observations are interspersed with his war narratives, and suggest that almost everything about the country pleases him. He admires American civilization in general, finds comforting the sameness that greets him wherever he goes, and likes, of all things, American airports. He praises the wastefulness of our educational system: ''Education ought to be wasteful,'' he says. ''It ought to offer chances to the greatest possible number'' since ''no social scientist ever born has been able to predict who will benefit from education or when.'' Even the markers at historical sites are ''splendid.''

So positive an attitude toward Americans was, he says, uncommon in the England of his childhood. But his parents were Irish Catholics living in England's West Country, members of a minority, who told him about a wonderful world across the Atlantic ''where the permanencies which set us apart -- established religion, monarchy, empire, fixed division between one class and another, unequal opportunity in education -- did not apply.'' Americans came into his life on film and as the source of food parcels in the early years of World War II, then as soldiers who arrived in England in 1942, when Mr. Keegan was 8. They were confident, plain speaking, ''did not defer'' and ''got things done.''

In 1957 he visited America under a grant to tour Civil War battle sites. He did not return until 1977, but since then has visited the country two or three times a year. Now, when ''American exceptionalism'' has become unfashionable here, he draws on a lifetime of observations to insist that American culture is in fact distinctive, and that one reason lies in the vast land we occupy. ''A people who live in space, not time,'' for whom space consumes time (in airports, at car-rental returns, on interstate highways) and is measured by units of time (places are ''an hour'' or ''a day'' away), become ''different from others,'' particularly Europeans, whose wilderness disappeared 4,000 years ago.

That somewhat elusive idea -- borrowed from the writer George Steiner -- might seem strange from a pre-eminent military historian. Mr. Keegan is best known for his first book, ''The Face of Battle'' (1976), whose introduction rethought the nature of military history. It argued against conventional battle accounts, which oversimplify the dynamics of troop movements while attributing too much control to leaders. Inspired by the work of the American general S. L. A. Marshall, who showed that an individual's behavior in battle was determined by small-group dynamics, Mr. Keegan proposed to write a battle history that focused on the common soldier.

He now has some 17 books to his credit, including what is probably his most ambitious work, ''A History of Warfare'' (1993). His works contradict the notion, common among those who have read only ''The Face of Battle,'' that Mr. Keegan is essentially another post-1960's, anti-elitist, ''from the bottom up'' sort of historian. If any one conviction characterizes his work, it is his belief that war is an expression of culture, an idea easily accepted today by most educated people but difficult for those military historians who assume (like many colleagues in engineering and science) that their subject has a timeless universality.

After ''The Face of Battle'' made Mr. Keegan a celebrated author, he became a much sought-after lecturer in America. His extensive travels no doubt made him aware of how space can eat time here. They also allowed him to see more of the country than most Americans have seen, which he did with a novelist's eye and a cultural anthropologist's sensitivity. ''Fields of Battle'' includes one fascinating description after another of how Americans do things differently from the English or French -- in designing military cemeteries, locating military academies, organizing university life. It also bears witness to what were, in retrospect, revolutionary changes in American life over the past 40 years.

The substance of the book, however, lies in its account of wars that are often forgotten by modern Americans, with their shallow sense of history (we do not live in time) -- those fought on our soil in the 18th and 19th centuries. North America, Mr. Keegan says, is ''a continent of conquest,'' the evidence for which lies in the strings of old forts sprinkled throughout the nation. ''Fields of Battle'' includes vivid descriptions of conquerors who needed to know the land to conquer it, and so were often map makers like Samuel de Champlain or surveyors like George Washington. Its focus, however, is on fields, not faces -- on geography that explains how specific battles were fought and why in war after war fighting recurred in much the same places: near Chesapeake Bay, for example, or along the water route linking the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers via Lake Champlain.

Mr. Keegan retells some often-told tales with great skill. He describes the exploration and conquest of French Canada, as well as the entire French and Indian War, in one chapter. In another he covers the Revolutionary War, and summarizes its causes more accurately in a few lines than some writers have done in entire books. ''Fortifying the Confederacy,'' on the Civil War, concentrates on Gen. George McClellan's ''Peninsular Campaign'' of 1862, in part because that campaign revisited sites from the Revolutionary War.

The best of these military accounts, however, is the last -- on the wars with the Plains Indians, and particularly George Custer's ''last stand'' in 1876. Mr. Keegan holds readers at the edge of their seats watching Custer ride across the crest of hills lining the valley of the Little Bighorn, then order his men to form a front facing the Indians swarming toward them from all sides. Here the soldier-centered battle narrative of his 1976 book reappears: ''Terrified men must have clustered together, opening wider gaps; parts of the line may have been overrun altogether.'' He sheds no tears for Custer's ''seedy and shady'' men -- too many were raw recruits who should never have been brought into battle -- or for Custer, who was ''not a nice man.'' And the Sioux Indians' insistence on holding lands greater than those of France or Spain, denying their use to millions of poor people, often Eastern European and Russian immigrants, was, he says, an instance of the selfishness of the rich.

The book concludes with a detailed portrait of the Wright brothers. They were ''excellent practical engineers,'' Ohio bicycle manufacturers who managed to solve the problem of flight, which had puzzled men for centuries -- just the kind of can-do Americans Mr. Keegan admires. Their achievement, too, was ''quintessentially Ameri-can'': ''America needed the aeroplane and the aeroplane was made for America'' in that it had the ''potentiality to defeat distance, the enemy of American collective life.'' Ardent Christians, the Wright brothers hoped the airplane would, by bringing people together, end warfare. But ''human ingenuity all too swiftly serves the devil.''

It can also be used to fight evil. And so, while as children the Wright brothers played with a toy version of Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter, young John Keegan in war-torn England played with a model of the American Flying Fortresses that Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the Royal Air Force to help it strike back at Hitler. Soon American airmen followed, joining a fight for the control of Europe on the side of the French and British, who had once fought each other for control of America, and on the side of a nation whose colonial rule Americans had fought to end.

''America . . . saved my world,'' Mr. Keegan says, ''the European world threatened by two pitiless dictatorships which overshadowed my childhood and growing up. . . . I think of America always with admiration and heartfelt gratitude.'' It's difficult to imagine a more eloquent thanks than this gracious book, artful and filled with surprises, that explains to Americans their country and their past and reaffirms in a moment of national self-doubt the enduring strengths of American culture.