and i was wondering if sir, john keegan was riding at the phase of the battle which talks about many said is the first book to be released by a military historian to emphasize the common soldier as opposed to the general and the tactics and everything and i wondered what your opinion of that is. thank you very much. >> thank you david. >> i certainly agree, he was a close friend of mine and he change the way that we look at military history, it's overwhelmingly which division went this way and that way at the phase a battle which is now dead. it made us think about the reality of what war is like instead of thinking of it in terms of numbers of which division, i think all of us writing about the history of war which is that i would like to say history of war, not military history. we owe a debt to john, we read it quite recently and it still reads fantastically well, he looked at all the things about what battle is really liking for example not everybody is a hero there has been any given battle probably about a quarter of your guys when you say okay charge a quarter of your guys hav

. >> john keegan has appeared on the program in 2003. to booktv.org, use the search function at the top of the page and you can watch that full interview. how is your book different than his? >> i wrote a book about the outbreak and history of world war i but catastrophe in my book is what i tried to do is look at the matter in which hell the war started and what the first battles were like because there was a phrase of a terrific history where he says no period of the war matches the extraordinary excitement and sensation and i thought this was so and i get letters from people asking am i going to write things about others. i thought i said all that i had to offer but for instance a lot of history in the past was terribly nationalistic. i think nowadays we try to get away from that and see things more in global terms. i.e. report as a sort of major factor. they had about a thousand battalions each and even the belgians had more troops than we did. i got frustrated. everybody thinks it was the bloodiest period but it wasn't. the french a