Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America.

THIS book, if presented as a report to the Prussian General Staff, would probably have got its author cashiered. It is chatty, discursive, and it doesn't cover what its subtitle -- The Wars for North America -- says it will. The War of 1812, the Texas war of independence, and the Mexican War do not appear, and of the wars that do -- the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the last Indian wars on the Great Plains -- only the Revolution is discussed comprehensively. What we really have is Thoughts on America, and Some of Its Battles, and many of the thoughts are indirect. To explain the culture of New France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the author tells us what it was like living for a summer as a teenager in rural France in the 1950s.

Happily, we are not the Prussian General Staff, and the author is the British military historian John Keegan. As readers of The Face of Battle and The History of Warfare know, Keegan is a rare thing: a stylist with knowledge, a historian with sparkle and flair. So even in the long stretches of memoir, or transplanted noodling from his diary, we regularly get passages like this:

I look forward, when I deplane in Tennessee or Montana or Ohio, to something quite immaterial: a sense of timelessness, an absolute similarity of architecture and street plan, a pervading calm, a curious slowness -- Europe, not America, is the continent of fast driving and pedestrian bustle -- the certainty of identical food and service and accommodation and friendliness and uncuriosity. . . . America makes no demands on one, imposes no expectations, asks no questions. It accepts the foreigner as it accepts the native traveler, someone without origins or fixed abode or past or future, a being of the here-and-now, just passing through.

Keegan's ruminations on American travel lead to his main point, which is that the controlling factor of war in North America has been the continent's space -- "space that seems to stretch forever." During the Revolutionary War, Britain was forced to campaign around an enormous strategic perimeter. From Portsmouth, the main British naval base, to Augusta, Georgia, was 3,800 miles. From Honolulu to the Solomon Islands, the U.S. Navy's maximum stretch in 1942, was only 3,500 -- and the U.S. Navy in the twentieth century had oil-fueled ships, and radio.

When the flow of rivers or the lay of mountains gives certain geographical junctures leverage over these vast spaces, armies return to them again and again. Hence the lakes of Upstate New York were battlefields for French, British, Iroquois, and Americans; George B. McClellan built earthworks in the Civil War on the sites of battles in the Revolution (an old slave, questioned by a Union officer during the Peninsular campaign, remembered hearing cannon fire during the siege of Yorktown eighty years earlier). The most successful generals in North America were those who grasped the importance of space, and of key fortifications. Keegan singles out four for special praise: Samuel de Champlain, George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Ulysses Grant.

A short summary of Keegan's wars might be that Washington managed to scrape together the resources as well as the skills to defend his vast base of operations, while the French, the Confederacy, and the Plains Indians ultimately did not. The Confederates and the Indians failed, despite the weaknesses of their opponents. Keegan writes that McClellan, the Union's most promising and least successful commander, "was a splendid organizer, on the principle of doing everything himself and delegating to nobody, but his gifts were for solving problems presented to him by unsatisfactory subordinates, not by active and contentious enemies. . . . it could be said that he resembled MacArthur in his arrogance and George C. Marshall in his hauteur [without] the former's dynamism and the latter's strength of character." Keegan's opinion of U.S. Army officers a dozen years later is no higher. "The officers of the Army of the Indian Wars . . . look seedy and shady. In their ill-fitting frock coats, scraps of gold lace, Dundready whiskers, and wrinkled boots, they resemble, in their group photographs, nothing so much as a bunch of carpetbaggers or share-pushers on campaign to relieve honest farmers of their hard-earned dollars."

Unlike many Europeans (and Americans), he has no illusions about the Noble Savage. "The claim of less than a million people," he writes of the Sioux,

to possess territories capable of supporting not only millions more directly settled, but of still more millions outside America waiting to be fed by those territories' product, is the claim not of oppressed primitives but of the selfish rich. . . . Little wonder that the European immigrants who made their way onto the Great Plains, . . . peoples whose history was suffused with memories of oppression by galloping, sword-wielding, slave-taking Hun, Magyar, Mongol, and Turkish nomads, should have felt so little pity in their hearts for those other Mongoloid nomads whose interest in life seemed to subsist in hunting, pillage, and war.

Fields of Battle ends with an eerie epilogue, a visit to the archives of the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama. Here Keegan examines Air Operations against National Structures, a paper written in April 1939 which laid out the plans for bombing Japan -- "a sheaf of foolscap paper that spells out the future death of a society." Keegan concludes on an ambivalent note. "War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war; but I love America." Anyone who shares his interest, and his reservations, will enjoy this book.