In his Carnet d'un combattent, the French First World War veteran Louis Mairet was unequivocal: ‘I told the truth. Let them contradict me if they dare!’ Mairet was not the only former soldier to claim that his direct experience of war ensured that his account was authentic. What is more, many historians have similarly privileged the accounts of those men and women who had been at the Front. Lindert, writing about the German experience of the First World War, talks of the ‘air of unimpeachable authority’ that surrounds such writings. Similarly, the writings of certain British ex-soldiers – notably Graves, Owen and Sassoon – have achieved canonical status. Their views of the war have been accorded a privileged status, most notably by Fussell and Hynes, the latter talking explicitly of ‘the authority of direct experience’. Such views have not gone unchallenged in certain quarters, but these critics, such as Joan Scott, have had much less impact, certainly on popular perceptions of the nature of the Great War. There is an obvious – but ultimately superficial – attraction to the proposition that the greatest ‘truth’ is to be found in the account of the man or woman who lived through the events being described. Unfortunately, such a proposition is based on two myths: that of the single, perfect memory and that of the single, accurate autobiography. Together they form an understandable but simplistic view of memory as a filing cabinet or hard disk filled with accurate pictures or representations of directly experienced past events; and of autobiography as a faithful account of the original event, based upon those equally faithful memories, to be put authoritatively to an audience of those who were not there but wish to know ‘what it was like’. Drawing upon findings from a range of disciplines, this chapter will discuss certain aspects of the problematic nature of memory and narrative and the implications for our understanding of the so-called ‘realities’ of war.

As Michael Roper has amply demonstrated, historical understanding can be greatly enhanced by using insights (in this case) from psychology. In The Secret Battle he argues the importance of psychoanalysis, derived from the ideas of Freud, and particularly as developed by Klein.