BBC - Soldiers A History of Men in Battle (1985) Part 1 The Face of Battle

Wars are conflicts between states and societies. Soldiers are the human means through which wars are fought. Soldiers, the major BBC series on the history of warfare, tells its story through the different types of soldiers who have fought each other since warfare began.

“War changes men and it changes Man; it alters our world and our history, our political systems, our social attitudes, our perceptions and our moralities. By showing how men go into it, pass through it and emerge from it, 'Soldiers' tells us something we need to know.” - Frederick Forsyth

Part 1: The Face of Battle

The face of battle known to the knight was one seen at close hand, often at arm's length from the enemy. The onset of mass-produced weapons confronts the soldier of the industrial world to apprehend danger through his nerve-endings, guessing at the risks he runs and sustaining his courage not by seeking to fill his enemy with fear greater than his own - since the enemy is unseen - but by denying his own fear to himself through an act of will. In the first episode Frederick Forsyth takes the battlefield of Waterloo as a vantage point to illustrate how, over the centuries, the experience of battle has changed for soldiers in combat.

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