Analysis Of Richard Holmes's Acts Of War

War is a human invention that has been evolving over the millennia. As such, each human has been touched by the effects and results of war in one manor or another, regardless of how remote. However, few people understand the realities of war. In his book Acts of war: The Behaviour of Men in Battle, Richard Holmes tries to make understanding military life digestible for the overage person. Including, but not limited to, training, deployment, battle, everyday soldier life, readjustment to civilian life, and lasting impacts on soldiers. With the use of well organized, poorly named, dense chapters, Holmes attempts to explore what makes a war novel credible, all the while explaining the effects of war using examples that no lay-person could begin
The title does little to convey the seriousness of this part of the chapter. If anything, it creates a section that feels more like it is being treated as a joke by Holmes, instead of being addressed as the crisis it can
Some paragraphs go on for far too long, mixing more than one idea or topic. This creates sections of the chapter that feel unnecessary and often boring. The dense writing is amplified by the fact that Holmes gets a disproportionate amount of information from one person, Samuel Stouffer. Stouffer has fifteen credits to his name, leading to a sense of repetitive writing that adds to the density of Holmes’s writing (434). Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle begins with a story of Holmes’s own battle reenactment. This is an unnecessary facet that only confuses the reader and provides a source of initial annoyance with the author that lingers until the final word of the book is read. Following the useless reenactment sub-section, Holmes begins an odd series of excuses. Much of the first chapter is spent with Holmes criticizing those who have previously studied acts of war. The critiques range anywhere from sympathy leads to bias, to improper use of language in descriptions, to only focusing on the tragedy of war (8, 9, 16). Holmes then goes on to explain that he is going to be writing this book differently than other historians. But does Holmes relying so heavily on other historians negate the entire point he was trying to make? If the historians are bias and worthy of criticism, then how can they be a knowledgeable and reliable