Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [37]
An incomparable and, I think, indispensable source for historians of World War II is film. I don’t mean merely for illustrations but for physical description, for the realities of place and people that one cannot get any other way, and for flashes of insight and understanding through visual means. I think I learned more about Chinese propaganda from a film of the military parade staged for Wendell Willkie in Chungking, and more about Stilwell from a film showing him lying in the dust next to a Chinese soldier at the Ramgarh training ground and demonstrating how to handle a rifle, than I could have any other way. There is a room upstairs in this institution where one can happily spend days among the reels, learning and learning.
On the same principle, there is nothing like research on the spot, but that of course, in the pre-Ping-Pong days, was denied me. As the next best thing, I went to Hongkong and Taiwan to get a feeling of Chineseness and to interview a group of Chinese veterans of the 38th Division who fought under Stilwell. Though not on the mainland, these visits were productive of insights: for instance, into the problem created by the Chinese considering it impolite to say No. I knew this caused Stilwell all kinds of agony, but I never realized how much until the wife of an American officer in Taiwan told me of her difficulty in giving official dinner parties because the Chinese always accepted whether or not they intended to come. She never knew how much food to order or how many places to set. It is equally difficult to conduct a war if your divisional commanders say Yes, they will be ready for action at a time and place, and fail to show up.
So much for research. I would rather talk about the problems of writing, not only because they interest me more but because the average layman underrates writing and is overimpressed by research. People are always saying to me in awed tones, “Think of all the research you must have done!” as if this were the hard part. It is not; writing, being a creative process, is much harder and takes twice as long.
The form I use is narrative because that is what comes naturally to me. There is of course another equally important and valid form of history which is written for the purpose of putting the material and the author’s conclusions on the record. Such an author is less concerned with communicating than with establishing the facts. He is historian first and writer second, if at all, whereas I am a writer first whose subject is history, and whose purpose is communication. I am very conscious of the reader as a listener whose attention must be held if he is not to wander away. In my mind is a picture of Kipling’s itinerant storyteller of India, with his rice bowl, who tells tales of ancient romance and legend to a circle of villagers by firelight. If he sees figures drifting away from the edge of the circle in the darkness, and his audience thinning out, he knows his rice bowl will be meagerly filled. He must hold his listeners in order to eat. I feel just as urgent a connection with the reader.
As a form, narrative has an inherent validity because it is the key to the problem of causation. Events do not happen in categories—economic, intellectual, military—they happen in sequence: When they are arranged in sequence as strictly as possible, down to the week and day, sometimes even time of day, cause and effect which may have been previously obscure will come clear. However, it is not always possible to narrate everything in straight consecutive sequence because there are always times when events are taking place simultaneously in separate places. In August 1914 the developments leading to the Battle of the Frontiers on the Western front and to the Battle of Tannenberg on the Eastern front were unfolding at the same time, putting the narrator in a quandary. The same problem was present with Stilwell when the accelerating deterioration and the launching of the last Japanese offensive took