Keegan, John

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1997
JOHN KEEGAN
to be Doctor of Laws

John Keegan is a historian of war. As he himself has said, "To some right-thinking people, the study of war condones its practice, perhaps even encourages it." If that is so, there are people in this very audience who do not like what John Keegan does. He writes about the face of battle, of humans struggling not only with perceived enemies but also with themselves. He writes no bloodless history. It is a history of honor and of cowardice, of victory by razor thin margins, and of violent death.

But as he himself has said, in a truly remarkable triumph of optimism over experience, "I do not believe that man is naturally aggressive." And further, "I do not believe that war is intrinsically a political act." With these provocative assumptions as his guide, Keegan ventures to tell us of human nature caught in the act of war. His approach is to rescue military history from abstraction and theory, from pedantic analysis and wooden reconstruction of events. He takes us to the battlefield and with the eye of a thousand cameras, recreates the battle as no one person saw it, but as men in trenches or tanks experienced it. It is the raw reality that some historians now call the "Keeganesque" approach to writing the history of battles.

Perhaps his most famous of twenty books is his much heralded The Face of Battle. For fifteen years, it has been the required text for UNB students taking their introduction to military history. It is, according to C.P. Snow, "The most brilliant evocation of military experience in our time." According to fellow historian, J.H. Plumb, "in this book, which is so creative, so original, one learns as much about the nature of man as of battle." After 20 years, it remains a seminal work, a profound influence on the writing of military history. In fact it can be said of all of his books that he has bridged the gulf between popular history and sound scholarship better than any other living writer.

He has, as we would expect, all of the credentials for doing what he does so well. He was educated at King's College, Taunton, Wimbledon College, and Balliol College, Oxford. For 26 years he taught military history at The Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He has been visiting scholar at Princeton, Cambridge, and most recently Vassar College in the United States. And between academic appointments for the past ten years, he has written for the Daily Telegraph as defence editor. Next year he will deliver the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures, chosen to do so - said the announcement -- as "the world's foremost military historian."

There is a reason why we honor John Keegan in 1997. This is the twenty-fifth year of the military history program at the University of New Brunswick. Recently described as the leading program in modern military history in Canada outside of the Royal Military College itself, UNB's program regularly graduates students skilled in writing the history of war, many of them influenced to a considerable extent by John Keegan's brilliant example. It is altogether fitting that we recognize his enormous impact upon the shape of our program and the development of modern military history generally. In so doing, we should remember that John Keegan does not write of war to glorify or justify it. War is irrational, he says, and so too are those who would resort to violence for their own purposes. John Keegan has shown that we best learn of the horror of war by staring it in the face. It is a subject we ignore at our peril.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3