Historians can be a sad bunch when it comes to primary
sources. We talk of gold, of ‘treasure trove’, and last month I even called the
letters of a colour sergeant ‘the Holy Grail’. There’s something magical about
reading the words of people who were actually there, and knowing that at last
we’re getting close to the truth.
Or not.
Before cameras and sound recordings, primary
sources are entirely human things. People can mishear, misunderstand, misremember,
misscribe or mistranslate, and once Caxton came on the scene they could even
misprint as well.
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| 'The Wicked Bible' of 1631. Spot the misprint... |
Our frailty runs even
deeper than that. Goebbels’ speeches are primary sources, so is Bismarck’s ‘
Ems telegram’, and if Holborn’s portrait of Anne of Cleves is of debatable accuracy
then so is Henry VIII’s reported reaction to it. People are subjective at the best
of times, dishonest at the worst, and anyone who’s ever attended a trial knows that
primary sources can be the most unreliable of all.
Some are better than others, of course. A will is a will, an
Act of Parliament is an Act of Parliament, and carefully typed memoranda about ‘sonderaktions’
or sterilizations were quite enough to hang both authors and recipients at
Nuremberg. Yet even official sources of information are still human.
There are misprints in Hansard, lies on birth certificates, non-existent voters
on electoral rolls, and if the phrase ‘massaging the figures’ is modern, the practice itself is not. The 1664-5 London’s Bills of Mortality show a mysterious
rise in the vaguer causes of death – as if trying to avoid a panic by
concealing the true numbers of those who actually died of Plague.
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| From the collection at the Wellcome Library, London |
It doesn’t even have to be deliberate. I don’t think there’s
a single lie in the ‘General Orders’ issued during the Crimean War, for instance
– but neither is there anything that reflects the real truth. The coffee ration
sounds excellent – unless we know it consisted of green beans which the men had
no fuel to roast. The issue of fuel seems sensible and timely – unless we know
the roads were impassable between Balaklava base and the lines, and that most
men received nothing at all.
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| William Howard Russell |
Newspapers were
better informed, and William Howard Russell’s descriptions in The Times still remain
the best and most quoted source on the suffering of our soldiers. Yet Russell
was still a journalist, and his hastily filed reports of battles are as riddled
with sensationalist errors as the worst tabloid of today. His nadir is
undoubtedly the night battle of the 1855 Grand Sortie, where he announces the
death of an officer who was still alive (Colonel Kelly), reports the wounding
of one who was very much dead (Captain Vicars), and ascribes a heroic
rock-throwing role to one who had been wounded in the arm an hour earlier and
was incapable of lifting so much as a handkerchief (Major Gordon).
It’s understandable. Russell wasn’t in the battle himself,
he had to rely on what people told him, and in this instance we can argue he’s
not really a primary source at all. His failings should not affect the reputation
of the
London Times, the unquestioned Paper of Record for such official facts
as court appointments, ship arrivals, casualty rolls, and of course the lists
of ‘Hatch, Match and Dispatch’.
And then again…
For my latest Crimean novel I wanted someone to survive the sinking
of
Resolute in the Great Storm of 1854, but while N.A. Woods of the Morning
Herald claimed nine men survived the wreck, all other
sources reported the ship lost with all hands. I turned to the one unquestionable authority - the
London Times.
There it was, the official report I was looking for. While
other ships had a list of survivors after their names, poor
Resolute was
recorded simply as ‘totally lost’. I resigned myself to the rewrite, but as I glanced down the
rest of the column this little item caught my eye:
It’s a letter from the one officer to survive the wreck of –
the Resolute.
It still needn’t shake our faith in primary sources. The
newspaper was a secondary, it only printed what it was given, and it was the
survivor’s letter that set the record straight. Official records can always be
trumped by actual letters, diaries, and memoirs, the story that comes to us
straight from ‘the horse’s mouth’ of people who really know. We must make allowances
for bias, of course (especially in a war) but primary sources are still the only direct
route to the truth.
So they are, but it can still be the devil’s own job finding
it. I’ve been lucky with my earlier novels in that historians have been over
the ground before me, but Soldiers of the Queen deals with the later Siege of
Sevastopol, which is almost entirely virgin territory. Usually there’s been
nothing but primary sources to work from, and I soon learned what any policeman
or barrister could have told me at the start: that no two witnesses ever agree
on what they see.
It’s been a nightmare. I’ve tracked down over a dozen first-hand
accounts of the Grand Sortie, for instance – and no two of them tell the same
story. I’ve always tried to avoid contradicting eye-witnesses in my writing,
but for Soldiers of the Queen I’ve sometimes had no choice. In one case I’ve
even chosen to go against the only eye-witness – a sin so heinous that I wanted
to use this post to explain it.
The witness concerned is that same Colonel Kelly whose
demise was so prematurely reported by Russell, and who was in fact captured by
the Russians on the night of the Grand Sortie. He was alone at the time, and
the explanation he wrote to his wife is thus the only one we have:
‘I was surrounded by eight or ten Russians, who leaped into
the trench as I was passing to form up the men, having come from some distance
on the right… I owe my life, under God,
to a Polish soldier of the name of Stein, who prevented me from being
bayoneted after I was on the ground.’
It seems straightforward enough – until we read the account
published thirty years later by Alexander Kinglake, official chronicler to the
Expedition to the Crimea:
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| Alexander Kinglake by Harriet M. Haviland |
‘[Kelly] had gone but a little way further, when – standing together
in the trench – he saw a group of seven or eight soldiers whom he took in the
darkness to be men of his own regiment – the 34th. So going close up to them,
he directed these men to ‘fall in’ with the other men under Jordan. He was met
by an uproar of outlandish cries, and found that he had been accosting the
enemy. He brought out his revolver, and pointing it at the head of the nearest
foe, pulled hard, though in vain, at a trigger held fast by the safety catch.
Whilst lowering his weapon in order to push back the bolt, he was felled by numbers
of blows… and when on the ground was bayoneted in the right shoulder, in the
left hand, and in the right leg…’
Kinglake’s story stands up to examination. The night of
March 22nd was very dark indeed, and that Kelly’s mistake was a plausible one I
was able to confirm from a letter of Private William Stray, who described a ‘narrow
escape’ of his own in the same battle:
‘a number of Russians were together in one part of the
trench, and the night being very dark I mistook them for our own men, and I
thought they took us for Russians, they were firing on us, and under that mistake
I ran up to them shouting damn your eyes, you are firing on your own men, but I
soon found out my mistake.’
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| Extract from William Stray's letter |
It’s credible then – but it contradicts the version of Kelly
himself, and surely the primary source should be taken above the secondary? Yet Kinglake was scrupulous, he corresponded
profusely with every witness he could find, and the only possible source for
this anecdote has to be Kelly himself. Why on earth would Kelly change his
story all these years after the event?
The answer, I think, is a very human one. The mistake of
approaching the enemy, the failure to release the safety catch – the whole
thing is deeply embarrassing, and Kelly may well have balked at revealing the
truth to his wife. But what is humiliating to a man in his thirties can become a
wonderful after-dinner story in his sixties, and I see nothing strange in Kelly
finally giving Kinglake the true version of what happened.
Yet there remained one niggle: Kelly was at some pains to
assure his wife that he had not been bayoneted while on the ground, yet
Kinglake insists that he
was. Kelly didn’t mind admitting he’d been wounded, so
what on earth was so embarrassing about having received those wounds on the
ground?
I’m afraid I think I know that too. Colonel Reynell Pack of
the 7th Royal Fusiliers cheerfully recorded in his memoirs that Kelly was ‘most
careful of himself’ and used to go to the trenches ‘swathed and wrapped up like
a mummy’. The story circulating at the time was therefore that the Russians had
only failed to kill Kelly because the bayonets
‘did not penetrate through his
numerous garments’…
I might have put that down to ordinary inter-regimental
bitchiness, except for the confirmation of an even more impeccable source. One of Kelly’s own letters actually describes his attire for the
trenches like this:
‘a flannel vest, then a chamois one, and over that my shirt….
Then I had my flannel drawers, and over them my chamois ones; then came my
regimental trousers with my long blue knit stockings drawn over them. Over my
shirt… a blue sailor woollen jersey…a pair of sailor’s flushing trousers… Mr
Philipson’s coat, with a comforter round my neck… over that my greatcoat… and
over all my mackintosh…’
Reynell Pack was telling no more than the embarrassing truth. I suspect Kelly
did indeed survive by virtue of his clothing, and the only amazing thing about
it was that the Russians managed to wound him at all. His own account of his
capture turns out to be unreliable in every detail, and I went with Kinglake’s
version after all.
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| Colonel Richard Denis Kelly after the war |
Yet there’s more than one kind of reliability, more than one
kind of truth, and if Kelly’s letters didn’t explain much about the Grand
Sortie they revealed an awful lot about the man himself. The same was true of
Colour Sergeant Clarke’s letters, and is one reason why I still love
primary sources above any others. They always tell us
something, even if it isn’t
what we’re looking for - or what the writer intended.
Those General Orders, for instance, proved conclusively just how out of touch Headquarters really were. The misleading
Bills of Mortality show clearly the extent to which plague was feared. Even lies can tell us a truth, and libellous pamphlets circulated
about Marie Antoinette certainly confirm the extent to which she was hated.
Secondary sources can tell us these things, but primary sources
show them red
and raw.
Which is why I love them even more as a novelist than I do
as a historian. Primary sources can take us there, bring us close enough to
touch. I even loved typing out that little bit of Stray’s letter, because its
dreadful punctuation helps me hear his voice. Research isn’t just about ‘knowing’,
it’s about seeing, hearing, and ultimately feeling – and if I work hard enough I hope that one day my novels will do the same.
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A.L. Berridge's deeply neglected website is here.
