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actually won the Battle of Waterloo or that the battle took place before his invasions of Russia or Spain, although we can certainly disagree about why he lost at Waterloo and howmuch those earlier decisions of his contributed to his defeat. If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.
    Historians, especially in the past, have done their share of creating bad and tendentious histories. In the Middle Ages, Christian historians saw the past in terms of the triumph of the universal Catholic Church. When a Renaissance scholar showed that the document which purported to hand on the power of the Roman emperors to the pope was a fake, his work helped to stimulate a fresh look at that assumption. Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”
    The proper role for historians, Howard rightly says, is to challenge and even explode national myths: “Such disillusion is a necessary part of growing up in and belonging to an adult society; and a good definition of the difference between a Western liberal society and a totalitarian one—whether it is Communist, Fascist, or Catholic authoritarian—is that in the former the government treats its citizens as responsible adults and in the latter it cannot.” After World War II, most Western democracies made the difficult but wise decision to commission proper military histories of the conflict. In other words, they hired professional historians and gave them unrestricted access to the archives. The results were histories which did not gloss over Allied mistakes and failures but which strove to give as full a picture as possible of a great and complicated struggle.
    The British case is an interesting one. The government initiallygave Winston Churchill free run of the records (and a very advantageous tax deal) to allow him to write his great history of World War II. Part of its aim was to make sure that a British account of the war got into print before the inevitable rush of memoirs and histories from the United States and Russia. The result, as David Reynolds has so convincingly shown, was a sweeping and magisterial account which glossed over many awkward issues. Churchill said little, for example, of the debates within the British cabinet in those dark days of May 1940. France had fallen to the Nazis, and, according to Churchill’s account, there was no discussion of what Britain should do, only unanimity that it must fight on alone. “Future generations,” he wrote, “may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda. It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues.” In fact, as the record shows, the cabinet properly considered alternatives, most notably to see if Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, could broker a peace. When that was rightly rejected as unlikely to lead to anything useful and, moreover, ran the risk of dealing a serious blow to British morale, the cabinet made its momentous decision.
    From the start of the war, however, the British government had also intended that there would be an official history, and in 1946 it appointed Sir James Butler, a respected historian, to oversee what was expected to be a series of volumes on different aspects of the British war effort. Butler made it clear that for the sake of the reputation of