Chronicling a Filthy 4,000-Year-Old Habit

By LANCE MORROW

Genghis Khan sat with his Mongol comrades-in-arms debating the question, What is life's sweetest pleasure? One man ventured that it surely was falconry. Genghis Khan -- who was not Genghis Khan for nothing -- answered, "You are mistaken. Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, and use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt . . ."

The Khan's agenda -- war and atrocity -- is still pursued, although with less candor about the pleasure involved: some tribal or nationalist rationale ("Greater Serbia!") is proclaimed. Even after the cold war has ended as big-battle war seems to have become extinct -- the Gulf War perhaps a last set piece of tank warfare -- parvenu nations tinker in their basements with homemade nukes. Even more ominous is the global inundation of handy conventional weapons, a planetary democratization of firepower trickling down to Third World villages and the hip pockets of American schoolchildren.

Margaret Mead argued that "war is only an invention." She refused to regard it as an inevitable part of human baggage, the curse of the reptilian brain. John Keegan is agnostic in the nature-nurture argument. "All we need to accept," he writes in A History of Warfare (Knopf; 432 pages; $27.50), "is that, over the course of 4,000 years of experiment and repetition, warmaking has become a habit." Whether it is a filthy habit or, as sometimes happens, a dirty necessity, war obviously has transcendent excitements, temptations and mysteries. And it is the oldest drama: the epic of the limbic system.

Homer gave to each death in battle a vivid, ghastly intimacy, a perfect uniqueness that would flash-freeze the instant: no two deaths the same. Keegan has a similar eye for the memorable in war. The eye is connected to the mind of one of the century's most distinguished military historians.

Keegan shares the usual civilized revulsion at war: a richly knowledgeable antipathy in his case. His gaze is clear, steady and morally complicated. He has been drawn all his life to military culture and the subject of war. Complications from a teenage case of tuberculosis left him lame, unfit for military duty. But he went on to teach military history at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, for many years -- a soldier's life by association, at an intellectual remove.

Keegan is instinctively sympathetic to warriors and ruthlessly unromantic about the specifics of their work. He remembers "the look of disgust that passed over the face of a highly distinguished curator of one of the greatest collections of arms and armor in the world when I casually remarked to him that a common type of debris removed from the flesh of wounded men by surgeons in the gunpowder age was broken bone and teeth from neighbors in the ranks. He had simply never considered what was the effect of the weapons about which he knew so much, as artifacts, on the bodies of the soldiers who used them."

A History of Warfare represents a synthesis of what Keegan has absorbed in more than three decades of studying war, teaching military men and listening to them. Like his 1976 work The Face of Battle, his new book is alive with sudden, unexpected details and delights of knowledge -- a treatise, for example, on how to make a composite bow, that revolutionary asset of the horse warrior; a detour into the institutionalized vengeance of Maori warmaking; or a splendid interlude on the effects of geography on war, including a disquisition on why Adrianople, Edirne in modern Turkey, has been the most fought-over place in the world (it stands at the land bridge between Europe and Asia). If Keegan spends too little time on war in the 20th century, his unusual design -- a layering of material in chapters called "Stone," "Flesh," "Armies," "Iron" and so on -- permits him to range across time and distance to brilliant comparative effect. He roams from the Japanese suppression of firearms during the Tokugawa seclusion (an early success of gun $ control, unrepeatable and totalitarian) to the Aztec "Feast of the Flaying of Men"; from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz (whom he detests as the ideological godfather of modern war-as-policy); and from the dark, irrational roots of Roman military violence to the question of why the horse nomads left the steppe to go marauding.

One of Keegan's charms has always been his independence, his sometimes brusque contempt for the merely academic: "How blinkered social scientists are to the importance of temperament," he remarks while discussing the attractions of warrior life and military culture. "I am tempted, after a lifetime's acquaintance with the British army, to argue that some men can be nothing but soldiers."