The Face of Battle
A study of combat from the ordinary soldier's point of view, reconstructing what actually happened to the men who fought at Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the first day of the Somme (1916). Written by a Sandhurst lecturer who had never seen battle, it is widely credited with founding the soldier's-eye school of military history. Page count is the standard in-print Penguin Books paperback (ISBN 9780140048971), 376 pages per Penguin Random House; the 1976 Viking hardcover ran 354.
Twenty pages in you have met no archer, no horse, no mud, just an essay on how historians write about battles: "the first 20 pages are a real slog," one reader warns. The fighting, once it arrives, cooperates suspiciously with the thesis, three English and British engagements with not a defeat among them, and "I couldn't help feeling that what the book really needed was an analysis of an actual defeat." Agincourt runs on guesswork, "so much speculation and so few citations that it basically illustrates how useless Keegan's battle methodology is for pre-modern military history," a detractor jabs. The closing forecast of battle's future, vintage 1976, even admirers find "not up to author Keegan's usually consistent writing standard."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
