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.