Military Memoirs: A Historical Overview of the Genre from the … · 2018-12-17 · this genre for current research in military history.1 Particular episodes in the history of this

War in History 2007 14 (3) 289–309 10.1177/0968344507078375 © 2007 SAGE Publications

Military Memoirs:A Historical Overview of the

Genre from the Middle Ages tothe Late Modern Era

Yuval Noah Harari

The article surveys the history of military memoirs in the west from theMiddle Ages to the late modern era. It examines the relation of militarymemoirs to other literary and historiographical genres, such as conversionnarratives, service records, and oral life-stories. It focuses in particular onthe rising visibility of memoirs composed by common soldiers and juniorofficers. The article then analyses the historiographical importance of thisgenre, and the unique contributions it can make to the study of military his-tory. It emphasizes the genre’s relevance to the study of military command,of military culture, and of the experience of war.

The present article aims to map the history of military memoirs inthe western world, and to assess the relevance and importance of

this genre for current research in military history.1 Particular episodesin the history of this genre have already been studied in great depth, forexample the flood of military memoirs written in the wake of the FirstWorld War.2 Similarly, scholars of particular periods in military historyhave made extensive use of it, for example scholars of early modernFrench military history and of the Napoleonic Wars.3 However, noattempt has so far been made to present a complete overview of this

1 I would like to thank Reuver Amitai, Ilya Berkovich, Amir Fink, Martin H.Jung, DiegoOlstein, and Ben-Ami Shillony for their generous help.

2 See, for example, P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975); E. Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto,1993); J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European CulturalHistory (Cambridge, 1995); A.P. Linder, Princes of the Trenches: Narrating the GermanExperience of the First World War (Columbia, SC, 1996); and J.S.K. Watson, FightingDifferent Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004).For an overview of this scholarship see Y.N. Harari, ‘Martial Illusions: War andDisillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs’, Journal ofMilitary History LXIX (2005), pp. 43–48.

3 See, for example, J.A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715(Cambridge, 1997); R. Muir, Salamanca, 1812 (New Haven, 2001).

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4 For an overview of the attempts to define memoirs, see Y.N. Harari, Renaissance MilitaryMemoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 4–18; C. Emerson,Olivier de la Marche and the Rhetoric of Fifteenth-Century Historiography (Woodbridge, 2004),pp. 33–40. See also S. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London,1998), pp. xi–xvi; A.I. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire(London, 2002), pp. 21–52.

5 For a comprehensive survey of the autobiographical writings of Greek and Romancombatants, see G. Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E.W. Dickes, 2 vols(Westport, CI, 1973), I, pp. 201–86. Autobiographical writings of combatants existed alreadyin the ancient Fertile Crescent, though whether they can be usefully classified as ‘memoirs’is disputed. See: Misch, History of Autobiography, I, pp. 37–41;T. Longman, Fictional AkkadianAutobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study (Winona Lake, IN, 1991); H.C. Melchert, ‘TheActs of Hattusili I’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies XXXVII (1978), pp. 1–22.

6 Some might well argue that Josephus’s account of the Jewish Great Revolt can also beconsidered memoirs.

290 Yuval Noah Harari

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genre’s history, or to assess its unique importance and potential contri-bution to military history as a whole.

The definition of military memoirs, as of any literary genre, is prob-lematic. Much ink has been spilled in attempts to differentiate ‘memoirs’from other ego-documents such as diaries, journals, and autobiog-raphies. From the perspective of military history, much of this debate issuperfluous. The main importance is to differentiate memoirs – whichare retrospective attempts by combatants to construct a meaningful nar-rative of their wars – from diaries, letters, and other eyewitness accounts,which are written in the midst of war with very different intentions. Myworking definition for the present article is based on previous research,which dealt exclusively with Renaissance military memoirs. According tothis definition, military memoirs:

(1) are synthetic narrative texts(2) are written retrospectively(3) are written to a considerable extent on the basis of personal memory(4) deal with a considerable time-span(5) have their authors appear as protagonists, and(6) devote considerable attention to martial affairs in which their

authors participated as combatants.4

This definition is not meant to be exclusive or airtight. It is impossibleto determine, for example, how many times a history should mentionits author as a protagonist in order to become a memoir, or when adiary rewritten by its author after several years qualifies as a memoir. Itshould also be noted that there is no demand that the texts in questionshould explicitly define themselves as memoirs.

Large numbers of texts displaying the above characteristics seem tohave been written in the Greco-Roman world by emperors, kings, gen-erals, and statesmen.5 Like the vast majority of all classical texts, so toothe vast majority of these classical memoirs have been lost. Xenophon’sAnabasis and Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War are the onlytwo classical military memoirs to have survived into the Middle Agesand the modern age.6

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Something of this classical tradition was kept alive in Byzantium,where emperors and senior officials continued to compose memoiristictexts well into the Middle Ages. For instance, Emperor Michael VIII inthe thirteenth century and Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus in the four-teenth century wrote accounts of their reigns and careers.7 In contrast,in western Europe no military memoirs are known to have been writtenduring the first centuries following the fall of the Western Empire.

The main impetus for the re-emergence of military memoirs in west-ern Europe was provided by the Crusades. These enterprises were partmilitary undertakings, part religious pilgrimages, and part adventurousjourneys to exotic and mysterious lands. They consequently providedtheir participants with a triple incentive for the composition of eyewit-ness accounts. Not surprisingly, they generated a flood of writingunequalled by any previous or subsequent medieval military enterprise.

Since medieval culture discouraged the writing of autobiographicalaccounts,8 most of the Crusaders who wrote about their adventureshardly ever mentioned themselves as protagonists. Authors of juniorrank, such as the lowly knight Robert de Clari, were particularly reluctantto dwell on their own persons too much, and their accounts include atmost only scattered autobiographical fragments.9 Yet a few texts containfar more autobiographical material, and at least two can be consideredfull-fledged military memoirs, namely Geoffroy de Villehardouin’s mem-oirs of the Fourth Crusade,10 and Jehan de Joinville’s memoirs of theSeventh Crusade.11 Joinville’s text is probably the most detailed and livelyaccount we have of the life of a medieval knight on campaign.

Another notable tradition of memoirs writing sprang up in Catalunia,where the three chronicles of King Jaume I, Ramon Muntaner, and KingPere III – the classics of Catalan historiography – comprise the mosttightly connected corpus of medieval military memoirs.12 The chronicles

Military Memoirs 291


7 C. Chapman, Michel Paléologue, restaurateur de l’Empire byzantin (1261–1282) (Paris,1926), pp. 167–77; J. Kantakuzenos, Geschichte, ed. and trans. G. Fatouros and T. Krischer, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1982–86).

8 On autobiography in the Middle Ages see: S. Bagge, ‘The Individual in MedievalHistoriography’, in J. Coleman, ed., The Individual in Political Theory and Practice (Oxford,1996), pp. 35–57; C.W. Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, inC.W. Bynum, ed., Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (London,1982), pp. 85–109; C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York, 1973);P. Zumthor, ‘Autobiography in the Middle Ages?’, Genre, VI (1973), pp. 29–48.

9 R. de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. P. Lauer (Paris, 1924). See also the writingsof anonymous authors who were most probably knights: Gesta Francorum et aliorumHierosolimitanorum, ed. and trans. R. Hill (Oxford, 1962); and De expugnatione Lyxbonensi,ed. and trans. C. Wendell David (New York, 2001). It is notable that at least Clari aims topresent the viewpoint of the rank and file, and attacks the senior commanders for theirmismanagement of the campaign and for their ill-treatment of the common soldiery.

10 G. de Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. J. Dufournet (Paris, 1969). 11 J. de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris, 1995). Also of particular interest is

P. de Nevaire, Estoire de la guerre qui fu entre l’empereor Frederic & Johan d’Ibelin, in G. Raynaud, ed., Les Gestes des Chiprois: recueil de chroniques françaises écrites en Orient auxXIIIe et XIVe siècles (Genève, 1887), pp. 25–138.

12 F. Soldevila, ed., Les Quatre grans cròniques (Barcelona, 1971); R. Muntaner, Crònica, ed.M. Gustà, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1979).

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of King Jaume and Muntaner are exceptionally useful. These two texts,written in the first person and describing at length the authors’ actionsand thoughts, give modern readers a unique insight into the mind ofmedieval senior commanders at war.

These examples inspired, however, little emulation. From the lateMiddle Ages we have a large number of autobiographical fragmentsinserted into much lengthier chronicles, for instance Jehan le Bel’s fas-cinating account of his campaign in Scotland (1327).13 We also have asignificant number of military biographies which were composed bythe hero’s companion-in-arms, and which double to some extent asthe author’s own memoirs.14 Yet full-fledged military memoirs focus-ing on the author’s own career were rare.

This resulted not merely from medieval hostility towards self-centredaccounts, but even more so from the fact that medieval aristocratic cul-ture was overwhelmingly oral. It seems that medieval combatants oftencreated and kept oral life-stories in their heads, and recounted themwhen the opportunity arouse. This can be deducted from the surprisingnumber of such oral life-stories that were preserved in medieval chron-icles. For instance, in 1388 the chronicler Jehan Froissart journeyed tothe Pyrenees principality of Béarn to conduct interviews with veteransof the campaign of Aljubarrota (1385) and other recent campaigns, aswell as with several of the most notorious freebooter captains that wereransacking southern France. He inserted some of their accounts intohis chronicle verbatim, as for example the detailed life-story of theBascot de Mauléon, told to Froissart in a tavern by the dreaded bandithimself.15 Froissart met Mauléon by chance, and the latter told him hismilitary life-story on the spot, without the help of any notes or prepar-ations. Tellingly, when Mauléon finished his tale the Bourc de Caupenne,



13 J. le Bel, Chronique de Jean le Bel, ed. J. Viard and E. Déprez, 2 vols (Paris, 1904–05), I, 35–81.For other examples see the chronicle of Jehan de Waurin, a fifteenth-century Burgundianknight who participated in many of the campaigns he described (J. de Waurin, Recueil descroniques, ed. W. Hardy, 5 vols, London, 1864–91). In Castile the fifteenth century witnessedthe flowering of the caballero school of history. Many of the caballero historians – men suchas Fernán Alvarez de Albornoz, Andrés Bernáldez, Férnan Pérez de Guzmán, Diego deValera, and Pedro López de Ayala – were veterans who composed their chronicles on thebasis of personal experiences, and incorporated autobiographical material into them. Forthe caballero historiographical school see: H. Nader, The Mendoza Family in the SpanishRenaissance, 1350 to 1550 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), pp. 20–29. In Italy, too, a largenumber of histories that were composed by soldiers and commanders include numerousautobiographical sections (see, for example, the writings of two naval commanders, thetwelfth-century Genoese Caffarus and the fifteenth-century Venetian Domenico Malipiero:Caffarus, Annali genovesi de Caffaro e de suoi continuatori, dal MXCIX al MCCXCII, ed. L.T. Belgrano, 5 vols, Genoa, 1890–1929; D. Malipiero, Annali veneti dall’anno 1457 al 1500,2 vols, Florence, 1843–44).

14 For instance in the mid-fifteenth century Gutierre Díaz de Gámez composed abiography of Count Pero Niño of Buelna. Díaz de Gámez was Niño’s standard bearer,and the resulting text is as much Díaz de Gámez’s memoirs as it is Niño’s biography. It isprobably the most detailed and insightful account we have of Iberian late medievalwarfare. G. Díaz de Gámez, El Victorial o Crónica de Don Pero Niño, in Colección de crónicasespañolas, vol. 1, ed. J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1940). For other examples of latemedieval memoir-biographies see Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, p. 192.

15 J. Froissart, Voyage en Béarn, ed. A.H. Diverres (Manchester, 1953), pp. 87–111.

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another freebooter captain, came forward and pressed Froissart to hearhis own life-story too.16

However, whereas combatants such as Mauléon and Caupenne seemto have created and recounted oral accounts of their military life, theylacked the incentive and the necessary skills to put them down in writing.The oral life-stories that came down to us were preserved only becausethey were incorporated into the written culture of learned chroniclers.

During the Renaissance, far larger numbers of military life-stories werewritten down.17 The print revolution, the influence of humanism, andgrowing literacy rates caused combatants to appreciate better theimportance of the written word, and enabled larger numbers of themto write or at least dictate their memoirs.

Particularly important was the influence of a new formal genre thatappeared in the Renaissance, namely the ‘accounts of services ren-dered’. These were standardized martial CVs, which became a regularrequirement of early modern military bureaucracies. Almost everyearly modern combatant had to produce such accounts in writing inorder to solicit rewards, pardons, transfers, and so forth. For example,at the age of 14 or 15 Alonso de Contreras, who until then had servedas a part-time helper to an army cook, drew and submitted to the com-mander of the Spanish army an account of the services he had ren-dered, asking to be enlisted as a regular infantryman.18 Many earlymodern memoirs sprang out of these accounts. Thus Bernal Díaz delCastillo first thought of writing down his memories of the conquest ofMexico after an account of services he submitted to the Spanish crownin order to solicit lands was turned down, on the grounds that Díaz waslying and that he never took part in that conquest.19 Blaise de Monlucwrote down an account of his services in 1570 after he fell from royalgrace. His account was so successful that it not only brought Monlucback to favour, but was also helpful in securing for him a marshal’sbaton. The delighted Monluc subsequently expanded this account ofservice into a lengthy tome of memoirs.20

Many of the authors still chose to present the resulting texts aschronicles, biographies, or military guidebooks, despite the fact thatthey were firmly focused on the authors’ life-stories. Thus Monluc pres-ented his memoirs as a military guidebook for aspiring soldiers, thoughoccasionally he also refers to the text as ‘an account of my life’.21



16 Froissart, Voyage, p. 110.17 For Renaissance military memoirs, see Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs; Emerson,

Olivier de la Marche. 18 A. Contreras, Discurso de mi vida, ed. H. Ettinghausen (Madrid, 1988), p. 74. See also

Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, pp. 32, 100, 190. 19 H. Cerwin, Bernal Díaz, Historian of the Conquest (Norman, 1963), pp. 77–83, 94–95.20 B. de Monluc, Commentaires de Blaise de monluc, maréchal de France, ed. P. Courteault,

3 vols (Paris, 1911), III, pp. 314–15, 356–67; I. Roy, ed., The Habsburg-Valois Wars and theFrench Wars of Religion (London, 1971), pp. 9–10.

21 Monluc, Commentaires, I, pp. 5–6, 26, 28, 80, 97; II, p. 568; III, pp. 355, 374, 408–09, 422,427. The most famous example of a memoir disguised as a biography is P. de Commynes,

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Common soldiers and junior officers in particular felt the need todress up their memoirs in more respectable guises. For instance, BernalDíaz del Castillo titled his memoirs of the conquest Historia rather thanMemorias, and claimed that it was a general and definitive history of theconquest (a claim accepted by generations of readers to this day).22

Francisco Balbi de Correggio, who served as a common soldier in thegarrison of Malta during the Turkish siege of 1565, similarly presentedhis memoirs of the siege as a general history.23 Alonso de Ercilla yZúñiga reshaped his memories of the Araucaniad War into an epicpoem, which subsequently became the national epos of Chile. It never-theless includes many personal incidents, and recounts in poignantterms the suffering and heroism of Conquistadors and Araucos alike.24

Elis Gruffydd, a Welsh common soldier from the English garrison ofCalais, went even further. He produced a mammoth chronicle of theworld in Welsh, beginning with creation, which devoted particularattention to Gruffydd’s own adventures and military campaigns. Asmodern commentators have noted, though Gruffydd adds little to ourknowledge of events in the Garden of Eden, his supposedly ‘world’chronicle is a mine of priceless information about the lives of commonsoldiers in the early sixteenth century.25

Nevertheless, at least the memoirs of more senior combatants beganto be established in the Renaissance as a respected literary genre intheir own right. The term mémoires or memorias began to be used fromthe fifteenth century to designate a unique type of historical work, andmany memoirists felt no qualms in openly focusing their writings ontheir own life-stories.26

It should be noted, though, that the individualistic revolution usuallyconnected with the Renaissance was hardly reflected in these writings.



Mémoires, ed. B. de Mandrot, 2 vols (Paris, 1901–03). This text, erroneously considered bymany scholars as the founding text of a new memoiristic tradition, purports at times to bea biography of Louis XI. (Memoir-biographies were still widespread in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. See: F. Briot, Usage du monde, usage de soi: enquête sur les mémorialistesd’Ancien régime, Paris, 1994, p. 138; Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, p. 192.) For memoirsdoubling as military guidebooks, see, apart from Monluc, also J. de Bueil, Le Jouvencel parJean de Bueil suivi du commentaire de Guillaume Tringant, ed. L. Lecestre, 2 vols (Paris, 1889).

22 B. Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ed. J. RamírezCabañas, 10th edn (Mexico, 1974). For other conquistador memoirs, see G. Vázquez,ed., J. Diaz, A. Tapia, B. Vazquez y F. Aguilar: la conquista de Tenochtitlan (Madrid, 1988).

23 F. Balbi de Correggio, La verdadera relacion de todo lo que el anno de M.D.LXV. ha succedidoen la isla de Malta (Barcelona, 1568).

24 A. de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana, ed. I. Lerner (Madrid, 1993). 25 P. Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd of Gronant: Tudor Chronicler Extraordinary’, Flintshire

Historical Society Publications XXV (1971–72), pp. 9–20; T. Jones, ‘A Welsh Chronicler inTudor England’, Welsh History Review I (1960), pp. 1–17.

26 See, for example, J. von Ehingen, Reisen nach der Ritterschaft, ed. G. Ehrmann; 2 vols(Göppingen, 1979); G. von Berlichingen, The Autobiography of Götz von Berlichingen, ed.H.S.M. Stuart (London, 1956); S. Schertlin von Burtenbach, Leben und Thaten des weilandwohledlen und gestrengen Herrn Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach, durch ihn selbst deutschbeschrieben, ed. O.F.H. Schönhuth (Münster, 1858); A. Enriquez de Guzmán, Libro de lavida y costumbres de Don Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán, ed. H. Keniston (Madrid, 1960).

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The vast majority of Renaissance military memoirs were written bynoblemen, and were conservative texts reflecting medieval attitudes andconceptions. Even those texts which openly defined themselves as mem-oirs were still very close in form and spirit to medieval military memoirssuch as those of Villehardouin or Mauléon. Their largely medieval out-look is reflected in the fact that even those titled ‘memoirs’ made noclear distinction between history and autobiography, or between publicand private aspects of war.27 Indeed, one of the most notable lapses inthese texts is the almost complete absence of the state. States were fastbecoming the central players of both internal and internationalRenaissance politics, yet the memoirists managed almost completely toignore them in their war accounts. According to military memoirs,Renaissance war was essentially similar to medieval war: it was not wagedby states, and it was not fought for state interests.28

By 1600 military memoirs were established as a legitimate and populargenre. The rise of the modern state was creating an ever-clearer divisionbetween the public and private sphere in war and peace alike, which wasreflected in clearer differentiation between history and autobiographyand between military history and military memoirs. History increasinglyfocused on the interests and doings of states, whereas the life-storiesof individuals became the acknowledged domain of autobiography.Memoirs were recognized as an intermediate literary genre, with its owncanon and rules, which presupposed the division between history andautobiography. The main raison d’être of this genre was to bridge the gapbetween history and autobiography in the case of those people whosepublic functions made their personal lives of public interest.

The composition of memoirs became extremely common amongthe European nobility, most notably in France, but also in the Germanstates, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, and the British Isles. Many of thesenoblemen were professional soldiers, and even those who were notprofessional soldiers occasionally participated in military campaigns.Consequently there was hardly a campaign fought in western Europeduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was not coveredby the memoirs of at least one such nobleman.29

A few junior officers and common soldiers of humbler origins alsocomposed their memoirs during this period.30 The Count of Quincy, a



27 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, pp. 152–55.28 Op.cit., pp. 159–74. 29 For seventeenth-century military memoirs, see M. Levisi, ‘Golden Age Autobiography: The

Soldiers’, in N. Spadaccini, ed., Autobiography in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis, 1988),pp. 97–118; H. Ettinghausen, ‘The Laconic and the Baroque. Two Seventeenth-CenturySpanish Soldier-Autobiographers (Alonso de Contreras and Diego Duque de Estrada)’,Forum for Modern Language Studies XXVI (1990), pp. 204–11; G. Mortimer, EyewitnessAccounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618–48 (Houndmills, 2002); C. Carlton, Going to the Wars:The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (London, 1992).

30 For an overview of early modern artisan autobiographies, which includes a few memoirsof commoner combatants, see J.S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography inEarly Modern Europe (Stanford, 1998).

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seventeenth-century French nobleman, calls in his memoirs for everyofficer to write his memoirs and record there the actions not only of seniorcommanders, but also of subaltern officers ‘et même celles des simples sol-dats!’31 However, since the main justification for writing memoirs duringthis period was the exalted public functions of the authors, there was as yetlittle legitimacy for junior-rank combatants to usurp that privilege.

If we look outside the traditional confines of the genre, we can never-theless locate one extremely rich source of early modern memoirs writ-ten by junior officers and common soldiers, namely early modernspiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives. Whereas it still wasnot legitimate for an early modern private to write his military memoirs,following the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation it becameincreasingly legitimate for commoners to write their spiritual auto-biographies. Indeed, some movements, such as English puritanism andGerman pietism, actively encouraged each and every person to writeconversion narratives and spiritual journals and autobiographies, so thatspiritual autobiography became an extremely popular genre in largeparts of Europe and North America, particularly but not exclusivelyamong Protestants. Since some of those who wrote such texts were vet-eran soldiers, the thousands – if not tens of thousands – of extant earlymodern spiritual autobiographies hide within them an invaluable cacheof junior-rank military memoirs.32

Many of these spiritual autobiographies have little to say about theirauthors’ military careers. For instance, though the classic spiritualautobiography of the English-speaking world, John Bunyan’s GraceAbounding, was written by a veteran of the Parliamentary army, theauthor makes only one passing reference to his war years.33 Yet otherveterans deal with their war years more extensively. The ‘spiritual’autobiography of the Quaker Edward Coxere is mainly an account ofhis adventures at sea in the wars of the late seventeenth century. His conversion to Quakerism is tucked towards the end of the narra-tive, so that one gets the feeling he may have used it as a pretext forwriting his military memoirs.34 This corpus of early modern religiousmilitary memoirs is probably both the best and the least utilized sourcewe have for the lives and experiences of early modern junior-rank



31 J. Sevin, comte de Quincy, Mémoires du Chevalier de Quincy, ed. L. Lecestre, 3 vols (Paris,1898–1901), I, pp. 1–2.

32 O.C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London, 1972), pp. 1–3, 18–35, 182–207; M.H. Jung,Frauen des Pietismus (Gütersloh, 1998), pp. 61–64; P. Caldwell, The Puritan ConversionNarrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1985), pp. ix, 1–2, 40–41; G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (New York, 1971), pp. 4–6. To get a measure ofthe number of existing texts it might be noted that in the Moravian archive of Herrnhut inGermany alone, about 10 000 unpublished manuscripts of religious autobiographies fromthe seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries are extant (for this archive and its material,see M.H. Jung, ‘Mein Hertz brannte richtig in der Liebe Jesu’: Autobiographien frommer Frauen ausPietismus und Erweckungsbewegung, Aachen: Shaker, 1999).

33 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, section 13, in E. Venables, ed., The Pilgrim’sProgress; Grace Abounding; and A Relation of His Imprisonment, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1900), p. 300.

34 E. Coxere, Adventures by Sea, ed. E.H.W. Meyerstein (New York, 1946).

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combatants. That it is at present so little used is mainly due to the factthat very few of these accounts have been published.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also witnessed the appear-ance of fictional military memoirs. A handful of veterans chose to pres-ent what seems to be their personal memories in the form of fictional orsemi-fictional memoirs, such as the sardonic Vida y hechos de EstebanilloGonzalez – the seventeenth-century equivalent of The Good Soldier svejkand Catch-22.35 Johann Grimmelshausen too must have drawn on hisown military experiences for the composition of Simplicissimus and ofMother Courage.36 The most prolific author of fictional memoirs duringthis period was Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, a veteran soldier whorenounced the military for a literary career, and composed a whole cor-pus of fictional military memoirs, which he attributed to real people.His most famous work is the Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, which pretendsto be the work of the real Comte d’Artagnan, captain of the musketeersof Louis XIV’s guard.37

The popularity of the genre was such that even authors devoid ofany military experience occasionally composed fictional military mem-oirs, which often claimed to be factually true. The most notable suchexample is Daniel Defoe, who in addition to the fake memoirs of civil-ians and travellers (e.g. Robinson Crusoe) also composed the fictionalMemoirs of a Cavalier and The History and Remarkable Life of the TrulyHonourable Colonel Jack.

The period between 1750 and 1850 was the major watershed in the his-tory of military memoirs. Whereas senior commanders down to thetwentieth century continued to write large numbers of memoirs thatwere essentially similar to those of early modern noblemen, from themid-eighteenth century junior officers and common soldiers began tocompete with their superiors in the number of texts they produced, intheir public visibility, and in the views they endorsed.

As a result first of the influence of the Enlightenment and of the cul-ture of sensibility, and later of the influence of romanticism, it becameaccepted and even fashionable for commoners and humble folk to writesecular autobiographical accounts, particularly accounts of disasters andmisfortunes. Fictional sentimental accounts and real autobiographicalnarratives concerning the lives of criminals, slaves, prostitutes, prison-ers, and other unfortunates became commonplace.38 Common soldiers,



35 La vida y hechos de Estebanillo de González, hombre de buen humor. Compuesto por él mismo(Antwerp, 1646). For earlier examples of semi-fictional military memoirs written byveterans on the basis of their personal experiences see Bueil, Jouvencel; Maximilian I,Kaiser Maximilians I Weisskunig, ed. H. Theodor Musper, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1956).

36 J.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (Darmstadt, 1956); J.J.C. vonGrimmelshausen, Mother Courage, trans. W. Wallich (London, 1965).

37 On his work, see J. Lombard, Courtilz de Sandras et la crise du roman à la fin du grand siècle(Paris, 1980).

38 A. Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America(Berkeley, 2000); J.C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French

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too, were encouraged by this atmosphere to write secular accounts oftheir adventures and misfortunes. Rising levels of literacy and cheapercosts of print further fuelled this phenomenon.

Of equal importance was the increased importance of common sol-diers in military theory and military practice, most notably in the armiesof the American and French revolutions and in the light troops that wereraised by all western armies.39 Awareness of their military significance,coupled with the new cultural trends and probably with the older ex-ample of spiritual autobiographies, gave junior officers and common sol-diers the confidence to write and publish their narratives of war. Whilemany of them toed the line of official narratives, some challenged theestablished accounts of particular wars and of war in general. Quite a fewsoldier-authors adopted an iconoclastic stance, aiming to dispel themyths and official narratives of war, and retell the story of war as the storyof the soldiers’ experiences rather than as the story of operationalmanoeuvres, strategy, and politics. Horrific descriptions of the sufferingsof common soldiers on campaign and in military hospitals, which hith-erto had received very little attention, became far more commonplace.40

This new spirit became evident as early as the War of the AustrianSuccession and the Seven Years War. Belying their reputation as mind-less automatons, a surprising number of Frederick the Great’s juniorofficers and common soldiers left accounts of their campaigns for pos-terity, which are notable for their focus on the personal experiencesand inner worlds of their authors. Perhaps the most famous of them isthe autobiography of Ulrich Bräker, which contains a detailed accountof how he was kidnapped into Frederick’s army, how he spent severalrather exciting months in that army, and how he deserted and ranback home during his first battle, Lobositz (1756).41

Less surprising is the rich harvest of junior-rank military memoirs pro-duced by veterans of the American forces in the War of Independence,and later in the War of 1812,42 and by veterans of the French Revo-lutionary and Napoleonic armies.43 It is noteworthy, however, that the



Enlightenment (University Park, PA, 1996); M. Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture ofFeeling (Houndmills, 2000); S. Knott, ‘Sensibility and the American War forIndependence’, American Historical Review CIX (2004), pp. 19–40.

39 See in particular J.A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Armyof Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Boulder, 1996); P. Paret, Yorck and the Era of PrussianReform, 1807–1815 (Princeton, 1966); D. Gates, The British Light Infantry Arm,c. 1790–1815 (London, 1987).

40 See, for example, G. Blennie, Narrative of a Private Soldier in One of His Majesty’s Regiments ofFoot, Written by Himself (Glasgow, 1820), pp. 110–19; J. Green, Vicissitudes in a Soldier’s Life, byJohn Green, Late of the 68th Durham Light Infantry (Louth, 1827), pp. 39–40, 75–77, 194–99;A.J.B. Bourgogne, Mémoires du sergent Bourgogne, 1812–1813, ed. P. Cottin (Paris, 1961).

41 U. Bräker, Der Arme Mann in Tockenburg (Dortmund, 1985).42 For the War of 1812, an excellent survey of military memoirs can be found in

J.C. Fredriksen, War of 1812 Eyewitness Accounts: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1997).

43 For a discussion of French writings, see in particular Forrest, Napoleon’s Men. For anextremely useful list of Napoleonic memoirs of all nationalities and languages, covering

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soldiers of the reactionary armies did not fall behind their revolutionaryenemies in the production of such texts. Perhaps the first British com-mon soldier who published a self-proclaimed account of his military lifeand career was Matthew Bishop, who rose to the respectable rank ofcorporal in the War of the Spanish Succession.44 British troops andGerman mercenaries in British service wrote a large number of mem-oirs in the wake of the American War of Independence.45 In 1791 thefirst biography of a British common soldier – Sergeant Donald Macleod –was published. This was, in fact, little more than an edited transcriptionof his oral memoirs. Macleod had earlier given public presentations ofhis colourful life-story, most notably in front of George III and the royalfamily. This was a telling scene, in which the king and his family silentlylistened while a common soldier spoke.46

The Napoleonic Wars in particular inspired the tongues and pens ofnumerous British common soldiers and junior officers. Hardly had theguns fallen silent at Waterloo than dozens of Napoleonic War memoirsbegan rolling off the British printing presses, and dozens moreappeared serially in journals.47 It is interesting to note that soldiersand junior officers of the light troops were at the forefront of this pub-lishing bonanza (the 95th Rifles regiment was particularly well repre-sented, with such gifted authors as Edward Costello, John Kincaid,Jonathan Leach, Sir Harry Smith, William Surtees, and ‘Rifleman’Harris). This was due partly to the picaresque nature of their exploits.Yet it probably also reflected the fact that in the light troops specialemphasis was placed on the initiative of every soldier, which encour-aged their confidence and sense of worth.

It is also interesting to note that in contrast to the early modernperiod, when some junior-rank soldiers utilized religious pretexts to write their military memoirs, the 1820s and 1830s witnessed an op-posite phenomenon. Soldiers who converted to Methodism and other



several hundred texts, see http://napoleonic-literature.com/AgeOfNapoleon/Memoirs.html. For a printed list of sources, see J. Tulard, Nouvelle bibliographie critique desmémoires sur l’époque napoléonienne (Geneva, 1991).

44 M. Bishop, The Life and Adventures of Matthew Bishop of Deddington in Oxfordshire.Containing an Account of Several Actions by Sea, Battles and Sieges by Land, … from 1701 to1711, … Written by Himself (London, 1744).

45 See, for example, M. Woelfel, ‘Memoirs of a Hessian Conscript: J. G. Seume’s ReluctantVoyage to America’, William and Mary Quarterly V (1948), pp. 553–70. For British memoirsof the Seven Years War, see S. Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas,1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2001).

46 Memoirs of the Life and Gallant Exploits of … Serjeant Donald Macleod (London, 1791).47 Some were published on the initiative of the soldiers themselves. Many other memoirs

were published with the encouragement, co-operation, and editorial intervention ofpeople from higher social echelons. For a list of such memoirs, the best sources arehttp://napoleonic-literature.com/AgeOfNapoleon/Memoirs.html andhttp://www.napoleon-series.org/research/eyewitness/c_british.html. Long lists in printcan be found in the bibliographies of C.W.C. Oman, Wellington’s Army, 1809–1814(London, 1912), and R. Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket(London, 2002). For a comprehensive list of Peninsular War memoirs, seehttp://www.menchenbooks.com/biblio/pwmemoirs.html.

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evangelical movements began publishing ‘military memoirs’ whichpromised unwary readers juicy tales of war, but were in fact quite thinon military action and rather thick on religious preaching.48 In theearly 1820s Dr John Brown, a leading preacher, convinced SergeantRobert Butler to publish his mostly religious memoirs under the titleNarrative of the Life and Travels of Serjeant Butler (1823). Dr Brown disin-genuously explained to Butler that the book would be

useful to a very numerous class of readers, who, though disinclined tolook into a book that bore a religious title, might be disposed toperuse the Narrative of a Soldier’s Life and Travels, written by himself,expecting to find in it something novel and entertaining, and, in hisopinion, this expectation would not be disappointed; and while onlyseeking amusement, they might find what, by the blessing of God,might awaken serious thought, and lead to a saving conversion.49

A further testimony to the new popularity of junior-rank memoirs isthe appearance of fictional memoirs whose heroes were junior officersand even common soldiers rather than noblemen and generals, suchas the fictional Memoirs of Serjeant Paul Swanston.50

In Germany numerous memoirs were published both by soldiers whoserved Napoleon, and by soldiers who fought against him (many hadhad the chance to do both).51 Particularly noteworthy are the memoirsof the volunteers who flocked to the flag first in 1809 and then in 1813to fight in the so-called People’s War. The similarities between some ofthese narratives and the narratives of the volunteers of 1914 are strik-ing. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, a Halle student, was stirred bypatriotic feelings and news of the victory of Aspern (1809) to leave theacademic world and volunteer for the Austrian army as an ensign, hishead full of Schiller’s Wallenstein and other romantic tales. He laterwrote a narrative of disillusionment, leading from pre-war enthusiasmand glorification of war to the disappointments of injury and defeat.52

The early nineteenth century also witnessed the spread of militarymemoirs to several new territories. In Russia the Napoleonic Warsresulted in the first Russian military memoirs, though their numbers



48 See, for example, Anon., Memoirs of a Sergeant Late of the 43rd Light Infantry, previously toand during the Peninsular War, including an Account of His Conversion from Popery to theProtestant Religion (London, 1835).

49 R. Butler, Narrative of the Life and Travels of Serjeant Butler. Written by Himself, 4th edn(Edinburgh, 1855), pp. vii–viii.

50 Memoirs of Serjeant Paul Swanston; Being a Narrative of a Soldier’s Life, in Barracks, Ships, Camps,Battles, and Captivity on Sea and Land; with Notices of the Most Adventurous of His Comrades.Written by Himself, and Now First Published (London, [1850?]). For fictional and semi-fictional memoirs of female common soldiers and camp followers, see S. Bowen,‘“The Real Soul of a Man in Her Breast”: Popular Opposition and British Nationalism inMemoirs of Female Soldiers, 1740–1750’, Eighteenth-Century Life XXVIII (2004), pp. 20–45.

51 Dozens of Napoleonic German military memoirs can be found at http://home.germany.net/101-102451/zf/misc/memoirs.html.

52 K.A. Varnhagen von Ense, Sketches of German Life, and Scenes from the War of Liberation inGermany, trans. A. Duff Gordon (London, 1847).

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paled in comparison with western European memoirs, and though theywere mostly written by officers of higher ranks. One particularly notabletext was that of Nadezhda Andreevna Durova. She served as a junior lightcavalry officer, and her memoirs give a rare account of the daily lives ofjunior officers and common soldiers in regular Russian cavalry regimentsboth on campaign and in peace.53 In South America and Greece partici-pants of the wars of liberation wrote a significant number of militarymemoirs, including a few by relatively junior-ranking combatants.54

In the second half of the nineteenth century the trends that becameapparent during the previous decades gathered momentum. TheCrimean War and the Franco-Prussian War produced numerous junior-rank memoirs, as did colonial wars throughout the world. Just as theCrusades and later the conquest of America inspired texts which werepartly military memoirs, partly travel accounts, so colonial wars, particu-larly the British campaigns in India, produced a rich corpus of travel/mil-itary memoirs.55 The American Civil War, fought by more literate menthan any previous war, produced thousands of military memoirs, only asmall minority of which has ever been published. Even today every yearseveral new civil war memoirs are published by inquisitive descendants andlocal history devotees after being discovered in attics and local archives.56

While the civil war was raging in America, the most important ex-ample of the common soldier’s iconoclastic worm’s-eye view of war waswritten thousands of miles away, by a wealthy Russian count. Leo Tolstoy,who served as a junior officer in the dismal siege of Sebastopol(1854/55), began his literary career with a few outstanding sketches oflife in the besieged city,57 but subsequently translated his military expe-riences back to the heroic days of the Napoleonic Wars. In War and Peace



53 N.A. Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, trans.M. Fleming Zirin (Bloomington, IN, 1988).

54 See, for example, N.K. Kasomoúlis, Enthimímata stratiotiká, 3 vols (Athens, 1940); T. Kolokotrónis, Apomnimonévmata (Athens, 1852); T. Kolokotrónis, Kolokotrones, theKlepht and the Warrior, trans. E.M. Edmonds (London, 1892); Spiromílios, Chronikó touMesolongíou, 1825–1826 (Athens, 1969); M. Belgrano, Autobiografía y memorias sobre laexpedición al Paraguay y batalla de Tucumán (Buenos Aires, 1942); J.M. Paz, Memoriaspóstumas, 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 2000); J.A. Páez, Autobiografía del general José Antonio Páez,2 vols. (New York, 1878).

55 See the bibliography to E. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester, 1999);and R. Palmer, ed., The Rambling Soldier (Gloucester, 1985). For a rare example of a militarymemoir composed by a nineteenth-century Hindu sepoy, or perhaps of a fictional militarymemoir attributed to a Hindu sepoy, see S. Ram, From Sepoy to Subedar, ed. J. Lunt (London,1970). It is interesting to note that by the early twentieth century every British officercommanding Indian troops was required to read this book, which was allegedly composedby a Hindu common soldier (Ram, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. xvi–xvii).

56 For American Civil War memoirs, see G.F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experienceof Combat in the American Civil War (London, 1987); J.M. McPherson, For Cause andComrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997); G.L. Cole, Civil WarEyewitnesses: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, 1955–1986 (Columbia, SC,1986); G.L. Cole, Civil War Eyewitnesses: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles,1986–1996 (Columbia, SC, 2000).

57 L. Tolstoy, Sebastopol, trans. F.D. Millet (Ann Arbor, 1961).

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he set out to teach civilian audiences what war really looks like to a com-batant, and it is telling that Count Pierre’s search for wisdom eventuallyleads him to Platon Karataev – an archetypical old common soldier whoepitomizes the wisdom of both war and peace better than any of theprinces and philosophers that litter the narrative. Tolstoy’s argumentsagainst the kings-and-generals history and for the worm’s-eye view of warhave been endlessly repeated since, but never surpassed.

The story of military memoirs in the twentieth century has often beenstudied and told, and need not concern us too much here.58 Each suc-ceeding war – and in particular the two world wars and Vietnam – pro-duced an enormous number of junior-rank military memoirs. Thoughsenior commanders, too, still wrote their memoirs, by now the public visi-bility and influence of these texts had decreased, and by the end of thecentury senior commanders began imitating the narratives of their sub-ordinates in order to regain some measure of credibility. In contrast, thepublic visibility and influence of junior-rank memoirs has soared.Previously, even the avalanche of American Civil War memoirs lackedany noticeable impact on the public view of war. In contrast, by the 1930sFirst World War memoirs were able successfully to challenge the officialnarratives of the war, and by the 1960s the mud-and-blood narrative ofmemoirists such as Erich Maria Remarque and Robert Graves becamethe mainstream public narrative of the war.59 Vietnam memoirs took farless time to become the mainstream public narrative of their war.60

The film industry, which adopted military memoirs as its standardapproach to modern war, contributed hugely to the success of thegenre. Whereas there is today no clear public narrative of the strategicor operational course of the First World War or Vietnam, films and TVprogrammes have combined to disseminate a very distinct idea of ‘lifein the trenches’ or ‘a platoon in Vietnam’, of which few western con-sumers are ignorant.61 From my experience with British and Israeli BAstudents, most of them do not know on which side Italy, Japan, orRomania fought in the First World War, but they can all give a colourful



58 For an overview, see Harari, ‘Martial Illusions’, pp. 43–48; J. Black, Rethinking MilitaryHistory (London, 2004), pp. 42–49. See also P. Ziegler, Soldiers: Fighting Men’s Lives,1901–2001 (London, 2001).

59 Even though many First World War memoirs in fact tell a very different story: see H. Strachan, ‘The Soldier’s Experience in Two World Wars: Some HistoriographicalComparisons’, in P. Addison and A. Calder, eds, Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of Warin the West, 1939–1945 (London, 1997); Harari, ‘Martial Illusions’, pp. 45–47.

60 See J. Neilson, Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative(Jackson, MS, 1998); M.J. Bates,The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling(Berkeley, 1996); A. Martin,Receptions of War: Vietnam in American Culture (Norman, OK,1993); T.C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London, 1992). For a list ofthousands of Vietnam memoirs, see http://recollectionbooks.com/vietnamlist.html. Seealso M. Clifton, ed., Those Who Were There: Eyewitness Accounts of the War in Southeast Asia,1956–1975 & Aftermath (Paradise, CA, 1984).

61 A. Kelly, Filming All Quiet on the Western Front: ‘Brutal Cutting, Stupid Censors, BigotedPoliticos’ (London, 1998); A. Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London, 1997); Martin,Receptions of War; J.-J. Malo and T. Williams, eds, Vietnam War Films (Jefferson, NC, 1994);J. Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York, 1986); J. Daniel,Guerre et cinema: grandes illusions et petits soldats, 1895–1971 (Paris, 1972).

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description of what it was like to live and fight in the trenches of north-ern France. News coverage of current wars also tends to follow the con-ventions of junior-rank military memoirs. For every bird’s-eye analysisof the strategic situation in Iraq, the media presents at least oneworm’s-eye narrative of common soldiers’ experiences.62

Thus at least in the media, iconoclastic junior-rank military memoirshave become the orthodoxy. And like their medieval and Renaissancepredecessors, these texts, too, increasingly blur the division betweenprivate and public and between autobiography and history. Just asBernal Díaz del Castillo could present his memoirs as a general historyof the conquest of Mexico, so today for western audiences the personalmemoirs of Vietnam veterans increasingly double as the ‘real history’of the Vietnam war. However, whereas in Díaz’s case the blurring of theline meant that history pushed aside most of his inner experiences ofthe war, in recent decades the opposite has happened, and the historyof war has been recreated as autobiography.

Having gained a general understanding of the history of the genre, wecan now examine what unique contributions it can make to the studyof military history. Traditionally, military memoirs were consulted pri-marily for knowledge of the events they narrate. In this respect, thereis little to differentiate memoirs from other types of eyewitnessaccounts, save for their comparative untrustworthiness. Since they areconscious retrospective attempts to shape the narrative of war, andsince they suffer not only from the pitfalls of memory but also from thebenefits of hindsight, they tend to be factually less reliable thandiaries, letters, and administrative documents created in the midst ofwar. Today military historians rely on memoirs for the events of warprimarily when they have no other choice. The memoirs of Joinvilleand Villehardouin are still among the chief sources for the events ofthe Crusades, thanks only to the lack of more reliable contemporarysources. When military historians have at their disposal a mass ofadministrative records, memoirs are reduced to playing second orthird fiddle, as happens in the study of late modern operations.

When the ‘war and society’ approach relegated events to a secondaryplace in military history, and focused instead on studying the social andadministrative history of war, it tended to ignore memoirs altogether. Forthis new trend, the epitome of all that was bad about traditional militaryhistory was the kind of argument retired generals conducted in theirmemoirs about the responsibility for this or that blunder. This prejudiceagainst memoirs, however, is unfortunate. The fact that traditional mili-tary historians sifted memoirs primarily in search of events does not meanthat this is the sole use of these texts. For the social and administrative



62 See S.L. Carruthers, The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century(New York, 2000); B. Katovsky and T. Carlson, Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq(Guilford, CT, 2003); H. Tumber and J. Palmer,Media at War: The Iraq Crisis (London,2004); A. Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq (London, 2004).

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study of war, though memoirs can never compete with the administrativerecords, they can certainly complement them.63

At least one particular sub-field of the ‘war and society’ approachwould gain immensely from a closer study of military memoirs, namelythe study of command. What has usually been regarded as a majordrawback of commanders’ memoirs – their obsessive interest in thepetty intrigues and personal relations of commanders – makes theman excellent source for studying the sociology of command. They offerhistorians of command a unique chance to put some flesh on theadministrative records, and examine how command networks func-tioned in the real emotional world of people rather than in the imagin-ary world of paper.64

Whereas the social and administrative study of war has usually tendedto minimize the importance of military memoirs, other recent develop-ments in military historiography are bringing them back into the lime-light. For the blooming study of both military experience and militaryculture, military memoirs are among the most important sources.

Studies of military experience and/or military culture that rely onmilitary memoirs, or that are themselves military memoirs, have beenpublished at least since the Napoleonic Wars – for example, CaptainElzéar Blaze’s La Vie militaire sous le premier empire (1837), PrivateCarlton McCarthy’s Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army ofNorthern Virginia, 1861–1865 (1882), LeGrand James Wilson’s TheConfederate Soldier (1902), Robert Blatchford’s My Life in the Army(1915?),65 Jean Norton Cru’s Du témoignage (1930), and Bell IrvinWiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb, the Common Soldier of the Confederacy(1943). Tolstoy’s War and Peace can also be considered a classic study ofmilitary experience and culture, as also the massive corpus of mem-oiristic writings produced by Pierre de Bourdeille de Brantôme in thelate sixteenth century,66 and the memoirs of the twelfth-centuryMuslim prince Usama Ibn-Munqidh.67

However, such studies have gained a respectable and central place inacademic military history only since the mid-1970s, which witnessed thepublication of two seminal works: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and ModernMemory (1975) and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976). Fussell’s studywas based mainly on reading the canon of First World War militarymemoirs. Fussell, who was himself a veteran of the Second World War,



63 For the war and society approach, see Black, Rethinking Military History, pp. 49–55, andWar and Society: A Journal of the History of Warfare and Its Impact on Society, published by theUniversity of New South Wales.

64 For an outstanding study of early modern command, which makes, however, relativelylittle use of memoirs, see E.A. Lund, War for the Every Day: Generals, Knowledge, andWarfare in Early Modern Europe, 1680–1740 (Westport, 1999).

65 This is actually a personal study of military experience and culture, more than personalmemoirs.

66 P. de Bourdeille de Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes de Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme,ed. L. Lalanne, 10 vols (Paris, 1864–82).

67 U. Ibn-Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: TheMemoirs of Usama Ibn-Munqidh, ed. and trans. P. J. Hitti (New York, 2000).

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echoed the memoirists’ attacks on official military history and academicmilitary history, and imported them into academic discourse. He arguedthat both the administrative records of war and the traditional studies ofwar – which focused on its operative, strategic, and political levels – areinherently false. Only an account of the experience of war can uncoverits true reality and do justice to its horrors. In effect, Fussell accused trad-itional military history of being heartless and immoral, helping to per-petuate war both through its heroic depiction of combat and through itsanaesthetized analysis of strategy. Keegan took a more nuanced and lessradical stance, and relied to a lesser extent on memoirs, yet he tooequated the true ‘face of battle’ with the experience of the combatants.

In the subsequent three decades, ‘experience’ became one of thehottest terms of military history. The experience of war in the twentiethcentury has been studied and restudied in immense depth, and a num-ber of books have attempted to outline the experience of war in previouscenturies too.68 General books on warfare in various eras have also begunto dedicate separate sections to outlining the contemporary experienceof war.69

Following Fussell’s lead, these studies have singled out memoirs –whenever they are available – as crucial sources for studying militaryexperience. In this field of research memoirs are a far better sourcethan administrative records, because they present a personal view ofwar and often dwell on the inner events that seldom if ever interestmilitary bureaucracies. That they are factually unreliable makes littledifference here, because one of the main arguments of the experien-tial approach to war is that subjective experiences are far more import-ant than objective facts. Factual accounts can never do justice to theexperiential horrors (and delights) of war. Certifying that in a particu-lar battle exactly 4512 soldiers were killed teaches us far less than anexperiential account of the death of one soldier, even if that experien-tial account gets wrong the date of the battle, the number of the forcesinvolved, and other factual details. Moreover, combatants on cam-paign almost never know the true facts of war, hence a factually trueaccount of war is ipso facto experientially wrong.70



68 Such as V.D. Hanson, Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (London, 1991); G. Daly,Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second Punic War (London, 2002); A. Goodman, TheWars of the Roses: The Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud, 2005); Carlton, Going to the Wars; Holmes,Redcoat; R. Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven, 1998);Forrest, Napoleon’s Men; R.B. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: American Military Experience in theMexican War (College Station, 2001); Linderman, Embattled Courage; McPherson, For Causeand Comrades; and Spiers, Late Victorian Army. For a discussion of the history of militaryexperience, see also J.A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Boulder, 2003), pp. xvi–xvii; S. Morillo, ed., Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations (New York, 1996), p. xviii; V.D. Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York,1989), pp. xii–xx, 7–8, 21–26; Black, Rethinking Military History, pp. 35–37, 47–48.

69 See, for example, M. Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The EnglishExperience (New Haven, 1996); Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle; and A. Starkey, War in theAge of Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, 2003).

70 Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, pp. 14–15.

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Some scholars – such as Alan Forrest and Jay Winter – have arguedthat memoirs depict the remembered rather than the lived experienceof war, and that they are heavily distorted by cultural factors.71 Hence,they argue, studies of military experience should focus more ondiaries, letters, and material artifacts. However, diaries, letters, andartifacts have their own shortcomings – such as censorship – and thedensity and depth of memoirs compared with these more laconicsources compensate for their lesser reliability. Moreover, lived experi-ence is as culturally constructed as remembered experience. Cultureshapes the lived experience even of pain, illness, and death.72 In par-ticular, the cultural memory of past wars and the cultural expectationsof future wars often shape present war experience to a remarkabledegree.73 Consequently, the study of lived military experience cannotbe divorced from that of remembered experience.

Memoirs are such a vital source for studies of military experiencethat many such studies have not just relied on existing memoirs, buthave actively solicited the production of new ones. Such oral historyprojects have been particularly valuable for retrieving the war experi-ences of groups that have previously written few if any memoirs.74

Despite the attention given to military memoirs by scholars of militaryexperience, much ground has so far been left unexplored, particularlyregarding earlier periods. Thus it would be very interesting to comparemodern oral histories with the works of medieval chroniclers such asFroissart who actively solicited war accounts from veterans, and thenrecorded them verbatim. Similarly, anyone who took the trouble tomatch the unpublished cache of early modern religious military mem-oirs with the even more massive hoard of unpublished early modernaccounts of services rendered would probably have the best chance ofwriting an illuminating history of the military experience of early mod-ern common soldiers.

The main drawback of this experiential military history, though, isthat it seems to be culturally biased. Reading military memoirs insearch of military experiences often presupposes that ‘experience’ wasof central importance to combatants in all times and places, and thatthe life-stories of sixteenth-century combatants, for example, werecomposed of experiences just like the life-stories of Vietnam veterans.



71 Winter, Sites of Memory; Forrest, Napoleon’s Men.72 For an excellent discussion of the way culture shapes the lived experience even of such

physically grounded phenomena as pain and illness, see A. Kleinman, The IllnessNarratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York, 1988). For a classicstudy of the cultural construction of dying, see P. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (New York, 1981). For the cultural construction of trauma, see P.J. Bracken,‘Hidden Agendas: Deconstructing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’, in P.J. Bracken andC. Petty, eds, Rethinking the Trauma of War (London, 1998), pp. 38–59.

73 Harari, ‘Martial Illusions’, pp. 67–72. 74 See, for example, J. Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First

World War (Portsmouth, NH, 1999); and W. Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the VietnamWar by Black Veterans (New York, 1984). On oral war histories in general, see Black,Rethinking Military History, pp. 42–49.

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In fact, looking at life as a string of experiences is far from a universalapproach. In the west this approach gained importance first thanks tothe Reformation, and became the dominant view of life only becauseof the influence of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility andnineteenth-century romanticism.

Consequently, approaching texts from previous eras and other cul-tures with an expectation of learning about the experience of war is asomewhat anachronistic and often a very frustrating experience. Most ofthese texts would seem to be interested in all the wrong issues, while say-ing precious little about ‘how it felt’. Paradoxically, the most importantconclusion we can draw from sixteenth-century military memoirs aboutthe sixteenth-century experience of war is that contemporary combat-ants apparently did not think of war in terms of what we call ‘experi-ences’. Though these memoirs occasionally shed light on the experienceof war, and though it is possible by dint of much hard work to piecetogether ‘the sixteenth-century experience of war’ from texts such asBernal Díaz’s, it would be a mistake to think that their authors – likeVietnam veterans – intended to teach their audience ‘how war feels’.75

The cultural approach to military history is more open-minded. Thisapproach too owes much to Keegan, especially to his A History of Warfare(1993), and has been championed in recent years by Victor DavisHanson and John Lynn.76 Cultural military history argues that culture isamong the most important variables in the study of warfare. The waysdifferent cultures understand war have exercised an immense influenceon the actual conduct and outcome of wars.

In contrast to experiential military history, which tends to empha-size the primacy of experience vis-à-vis culture, cultural military historyemphasizes that even the lived experience of war is culturally con-structed, and it may well be constructed as insignificant. Thus in mili-tary cultures that understand war primarily as a matter of honour, theinner experiences of combatants are given little or no importance,and instead all importance is given to one’s external actions (for hon-our depends on behaviour, not on inner feelings). This may well re-construct the lived experience itself, causing combatants to pay moreattention to their external behaviour than to their inner feelings – acentral mechanism of military socialization that has been utilized for



75 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, pp. 67–104, 184–86. See also P.-Y. Wu, The Confucian’sProgress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, 1990), pp. 6–12. For acritique of experience as a historiographical category, see also P. M. Cooey, ‘Experience,Body, and Authority’, Harvard Theological Review LXXXII (1989), pp. 325–42. For a critiquefrom the viewpoint of military history, see Black, Rethinking Military History, pp. 46–47.

76 Hanson, Western Way of War; V.D. Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in theRise of Western Power (New York, 2001); Lynn, Battle. For cultural military history, see alsoBlack, Rethinking Military History, pp. 13–22, 55–57; J. Shy, ‘The Cultural Approach tothe History of War’, Journal of Military History LVII (1993), pp. 13–26; A. Starkey, ‘Warand Culture, a Case Study: The Enlightenment and the Conduct of the British Army inAmerica, 1755–1781’, War and Society VIII (1990), pp. 1–28.

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better or worse by numerous military cultures to this day. Whereasexperiential military history still tries to wrench the fear or the shamefrom underneath this pile of cultural obstructions, cultural militaryhistory points out that the pile was probably of far greater significancenot only to the conduct of war, but also to the life-story and self-identityof the combatants themselves.77

Cultural military history has so far paid considerably less attentionto military memoirs than experiential military history. Keegan inHistory of Warfare, Hanson, and Lynn make little use of these sources.Yet military memoirs, wherever they are available, are an even betterand more vital source for the study of military culture than for thestudy of military experience. For as Winter and Forrest noted disap-provingly, in the delicate dialogue between cultural expectations andlived experiences, memoirs manifest the former more than the latter.They thereby preserve exactly the type of information cultural histor-ians of war are most interested in: how combatants understood theirmilitary life and the wars in which they participated.

For a historian of military administration, the notoriously inaccuratecasualty reports contained in medieval and early modern memoirs areoften no more than a dangerous temptation.78 For a historian of mili-tary experience, they are a great disappointment, because memoiristsnormally confine themselves to names and numbers, and very seldomspeak about the inner experience of injury and death. For a historian ofmilitary culture, however, such reports contain priceless insights. Forinstance, one can learn a lot about military culture from the fact that amemoirist details the exact number of wounds he received but not hisemotional reaction to them, or that he gives far more attention to thedeaths of his superiors than to the deaths of his comrades.79

Similarly, whereas it would be dangerous to rely too heavily on themilitary memoirs of generals to write the definitive history of theircampaigns, they are an excellent source for uncovering the mindset of military command. A comparison of Norman Schwarzkopf’s memoirswith those of Ramon Muntaner could for example uncover the differ-ent cultures of command that medieval European commanders andtwentieth-century American commanders brought to war.80 Otherfruitful comparisons can be made, for example, between the memoirsof British soldiers who participated in the conquest of India, Spanishconquistador memoirs, and Crusader memoirs, who describe in verydifferent terms what seem at first sight similar experiences of overseasconquest and colonization.



77 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, pp. 77–80; Harari, ‘Martial Illusions’, pp. 70–71.78 Though see B.H. Bachrach, ‘The Siege of Antioch: A Study in Military Demography’,

War in History VI (1999), pp. 127–46. See also G. Raudzens, ‘In Search of BetterQuantification for War History: Numerical Superiority and Casualty Rates in EarlyModern Europe’, War and Society XV (1997), pp. 1–30.

79 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, pp. 136–41.80 See H.N. Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (London, 1992).

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I hope this article has given readers both a general idea of the historyof military memoirs in the western world, and some ideas about thepotential historiographical uses of this genre as a whole. At present, Ibelieve the most urgent task for furthering the usefulness of this genreis to map in a more systematic way the large number of unpublishedwestern military memoirs, particularly from the early modern period,and to conduct a thorough survey of military memoirs outside thewest.81 This would be particularly helpful for cultural military history,since it would indicate which kinds of cross-cultural comparisonscould best be fostered by this genre.

A further need is to conduct a similar survey of civilian war memoirs.The present article has dealt exclusively with memoirs written by combatants, but there is an equally rich and widespread tradition ofwar memoirs written by civilian witnesses and victims of war. A culturalhistory of war, rather than of the military, would have to give at least asmuch attention to the perceptions of civilians as to those of combat-ants, and would therefore find the war memoirs of civilians as useful asthose of combatants.



81 Prior to 1800, a significant number of military memoirs were composed in Japan (see inparticular the sources mentioned in S. Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History,Richmond, Surrey, 1996, and S. Turnbull, Battles of the Samurai, London, 1987). See alsoD. Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed through 1,000 Years of Diaries(New York, 1999), pp. 257–59, 263–64, 276; and K. Kokichi, Musui’s Story: TheAutobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai (Tucson, 1988). On Korea, see: Yi Sun-sin, NanjungIlgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, trans. Ha Tae-hung, ed. Sohn Pow-key (Seoul, 1977);JaHyun Kim Haboush, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 6–8. On China, see: Wu, Confucian’s Progress, pp. 9–11, 25–27, 32–33, 41, 164. On the Muslim Mediterranean world, see: The Tibyan: Memoirs of ‘Abd Allah b. Buluggin,Last Zirid Amir of Granada, ed. and trans. A.T. Tibi (Leiden, 1986); Ibn-Munqidh, Arab-Syrian Gentleman; Ismail ibn Ali Abu al-Fida, The Memoirs of a Syrian Prince: Abu’l-Fida’, Sultan of Hamah (672–732/1273–1331), ed. and trans. P.M. Holt (Wiesbaden,1983); R. Irwin, ‘Usamah ibn Munqidh: An Arab-Syrian Gentleman at the Time of theCrusades Reconsidered’, in J. France and W.G. Zajac, eds, The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 71–88. On MuslimIndia see, for example, Abu’l Fazl al-Baihakí, Ta’ri’khu-s Subuktigin, in H.M. Elliot and J. Dowson, eds, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, 8 vols (London, 1867–77), II, pp. 53–154; M. Brion, Tamerlan (Paris, 1963), pp. 140–50;Zahiru’d-din Muhammed Babur Padshah Ghazi, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur), trans. A.S. Beveridge (London, 1969); Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, or Memoirs of Jahangir, ed. H. Beveridge, trans. A. Rogers, 2 vols (Delhi, 1999); R. Sharma, A Bibliography of Mughal India (1526–1707 A.D.) (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. 32–35, 78–81.

After 1800, military memoirs began to be composed throughout the world, but mostof these texts reflect western influences and models, and perhaps only east Asia hasretained a vibrant indigenous tradition of military memoirs – see, for example, K. Tamayama and J. Nunneley, Tales by Japanese Soldiers of the Burma Campaign,1942–1945 (London, 2001).

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