History lesson | 19 November 2011

When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study it because for most people causes and ideas are irrelevant. They have to find ways of surviving whatever history, circumstance, events inflict upon them. I was of course born after the two world wars; Carr was born in 1892, as Victoria’s empire began to wane.

On Radio 3 this week a group of historians and biographers have been looking again at Carr’s book, 50 years after its publication in 1961. What Is History, Today? they asked (produced by Katherine Godfrey). Only Professor Richard Evans gave us a convincing explanation of what Carr was trying to do. He was warning his readers, explained Evans, that historians are always writing with the beliefs and prejudices of their time, and that you must study the historian and his world before you study his interpretations of events. This, though, for Carr did not diminish history’s importance as an academic subject but rather enhanced it by opening it up as ‘an exciting and challenging discipline, alive to current theories and new ideas’.

Carr himself was all too aware of how looking back on events could show you just how wrong you once were. As a former diplomat he had championed appeasement, believing Hitler not to be a serious threat to the rest of Europe. Later, as the assistant editor of the Times, he wrote articles in support of the wartime alliance with Stalin’s Russia. Does this discredit him? Not at all, argued Dr Elizabeth Buettner in her contribution to the week’s essays. Carr’s recognition of history’s complexity led him to highlight the stories of nations beyond western Europe, and to perceive the coming importance of Asia and Africa. He was dismayed by those who ignored the march of progress in those countries both touched and untouched by Britain’s empire. He recognised that the loss of white supremacy in Africa could look to others like progress. He was writing, she reminded us, before the advent of chicken tikka masala, when meat and two veg still reigned supreme in the kitchens of England. But he could see ahead, in spite of looking back.

Who knows what Carr would have made of Radio 2’s curious Remembrance Day drama, Victor, on Saturday evening. Was it a documentary based on one man’s war, or a fictionalised account of the experiences of Everyman in time of war? Or did it tell us something about our own rapidly changing attitudes to war (poppy sales have dramatically increased this year as has attendance at Remembrance Day services)?

The hour-long programme (produced by Andy West) told the story of 92-year-old Victor Gregg’s experiences as an infantry soldier from 1937 until he was demobbed. But did Victor really exist or was he a fictional portrait, made up of several lives? It was impossible to tell because of the way his story was told, interlarded with an intrusive narrator (played by John Hurt) and an underlying musical score.

Victor’s reminiscences took us from the lies that encouraged him to sign away his life in 1937 (‘It is 20 years since the Great War,’ intones Hurt as the narrator, ‘and strips of khaki ghosts still hang above the rooftops, one for every chimneypot’) to being trained how to use a bayonet. Victor, we were told, fought in Libya and at El Alamein; he was parachuted into Holland on D-Day, and ended up in Dresden as it was being fire-bombed by the Allies. Could this really be the story of just one soldier? (I looked him up on the web and discovered that Victor is definitely for real and has written a book about his experiences as a rifleman.)

Victor’s voice was incredible, so blunt (‘The army’s task is to train you to be a psychopath…They’ve got to condition you to be a murderer’), so totally honest about what he did, killing hundreds of men. ‘If you’ve got any sense,’ he explains, ‘you never knife a person while facing him because the blood will spurt out all over you…You go behind him and the blood all goes into nothing, don’t it?’

So why diminish his authority as a witness by making us doubt whether or not he ever existed? Why intrude upon his story with Hurt’s poetic narration and some beautiful, but out of place, music, specially written and sung by Thea Gilmore?

It was as if Victor’s personal account of historical events was deemed too terrible for our ears without being softened, muted, made to seem unreal. Yet it is precisely what he remembers that makes sense of history, or rather non-sense of the textbook history that Carr was railing against. Victor gave us a perspective on war that is personal and yet also universal. If that’s not history, what is?