From propaganda to scholarship: a new book tracks the development of Canadian military history.(Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars)(Book review)

Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook University of British Columbia Press 326 pages, hardcover ISBN 0774812567

The novelist E.M. Forster understood the challenge pretty well. "The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave," he wrote of Edward Gibbon in Abinger Harvest. "Otherwise," he warned, "he will move in a world of the dead." Forster was playfully cautioning against the flat and vapid style of academic historians, who in his view too often wrote only for other specialists, but don't most historians, by definition, have to live in that "world of the dead" (judiciously avoiding a frightful world composed solely of dead historians)?

Of course, it cannot be done. Historians can only indirectly write of "the dead." Inevitably, their work reflects their present, the world in which they live, and their connection with the dead is how their contemporary world, through its peculiar social, intellectual and emotional postures, views the past. That does not mean that the historian does not strive to recreate the past, to place himself or herself in that past, and to try and think and act not as an historian but as one who lived in that past. But at core the effort is fated to be imperfect, and for the historian and the reader alike, the writing of history remains inescapably an act of faith.

But faith is not without its disciplinary aspects. Its pursuit has rules and regulations and methodologies. The true picture of the past may always remain beyond reach, but one does not give up reaching. Moreover, although historians should not write for other historians exclusively, neither should they exclude historians from their field of study. Historians are as much actors in the past as anyone else, and there is much merit in considering the manner in which they do or did behave--how and why. That study is historiography, the history of historical writing, and historiography has its history and historians as well.

Canada's historians recently have been much portrayed and analyzed--and in both official languages. Studies such as Alexander John Watson's biography of Harold Innis, Marginal Man (2006), or Donald Wright's The Professionalization of History in English Canada (2005) have joined older efforts such as Carl Berger's The Writing of Canadian History (1976), Serge Gagnon's Quebec and Its Historians (1982, 1985) or Ronald Rudin's Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec (1997).

One particular slice of Canadian historiography, however, has never adequately been examined: our official military historians, those writers and researchers who have been mandated by the state to create an authorized account of our military …