Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [8]
Selection is what determines the ultimate product, and that is why I use material from primary sources only. My feeling about secondary sources is that they are helpful but pernicious. I use them as guides at the start of a project to find out the general scheme of what happened, but I do not take notes from them because I do not want to end up simply rewriting someone else’s book. Furthermore, the facts in a secondary source have already been pre-selected, so that in using them one misses the opportunity of selecting one’s own.
I plunge as soon as I can into the primary sources: the memoirs and the letters, the generals’ own accounts of their campaigns, however tendentious, not to say mendacious, they may be. Even an untrustworthy source is valuable for what it reveals about the personality of the author, especially if he is an actor in the events, as in the case of Sir John French, for example. Bias in a primary source is to be expected. One allows for it and corrects it by reading another version. I try always to read two or more for every episode. Even if an event is not controversial, it will have been seen and remembered from different angles of view by different observers. If the event is in dispute, one has extra obligation to examine both sides. As the lion in Aesop said to the Man, “There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.”
The most primary source of all is unpublished material: private letters and diaries or the reports, orders, and messages in government archives. There is an immediacy and intimacy about them that reveals character and makes circumstances come alive. I remember Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s desk diary, which I used when I was working on The Zimmermann Telegram. The man himself seemed to step right out from his tiny neat handwriting and his precise notations of every visitor and each subject discussed. Each day’s record opened and closed with the Secretary’s time of arrival and departure from the office. He even entered the time of his lunch hour, which invariably lasted sixty minutes: “Left at 1:10; returned at 2:10.” Once, when he was forced to record his morning arrival at 10:15, he added, with a worried eye on posterity, “Car broke down.”
Inside the National Archives even the memory of Widener paled. Nothing can compare with the fascination of examining material in the very paper and ink of its original issue. A report from a field agent with marginal comments by the Secretary of War, his routing directions to State and Commerce, and the scribbled initials of subsequent readers can be a little history in itself. In the Archives I found the original decode of the Zimmermann Telegram, which I was able to have declassified and photostated for the cover of my book.
Even more immediate is research on the spot. Before writing The Guns I rented a little Renault and in another August drove over the battle areas of August 1914, following the track of the German invasion through Luxembourg, Belgium, and northern France. Besides obtaining a feeling of the geography, distances, and terrain involved in military movements, I saw the fields ripe with grain which the cavalry would have trampled, measured the great width of the Meuse at Liège, and saw how the lost territory of Alsace looked to the French soldiers who gazed down upon it from the heights of the Vosges. I learned the discomfort of the Belgian pavé and discovered, in the course of losing my way almost permanently in a tangle of country roads in a hunt for the house that had been British Headquarters, why a British motorcycle dispatch rider in 1914 had taken three hours to cover twenty-five