Popular mythology is a term used to refer to a glamourised, and often sanitised, version of history. In addition it can give undue prominence to what were in fact minor events or processes simply owing to their perceived romantic appeal, or the accidents of historical portrayal. Typical examples of this include 'the Wild West' and 'King Arthur'. Neither are historical events in themselves, but they enclose periods of history within the wings of school-boy adventure and adolescent romantic fantasy. Yet, to casual observers (and apart from professional historians, most people are casual observers) they are the only history of these eras that they know, and they thus take on the role of historical reality in the popular consciousness.

To rectify misconceptions caused by popular mythology, we have to know what the truth is first. Otherwise we could be replacing one mythical version of history with another (over-writing John Wayne-style Cowboys and Indians with 'Dances With Wolves' for example).

On the subject of truth, it is difficult to know in many respects. Apart from the obvious that people involved are usually dead, we immediately face the problem of memory and testament. If one was asked about one's life, one usually glosses over the bad parts and focuses on the good parts. Usually we can recall the bad parts if we need to, but otherwise it is swept under the carpet. However, sometimes we have 'rewritten' our own memories, as some kind of survival mechanism I often feel - we have removed our blame, or our own stupidity from the bad parts, and inserted instead a version of events in which we were either the victim of circumstance, or it was no-one's fault really. One assumes we do this in order to protect our own self-worth and make life going forward worth living. But the effect it has on the quest for historical truth is obvious - interviewees may unconsciously lie in that they recall only the good parts, or their rewritten versions of the bad; testaments, memoirs etc are this set in stone, the documents used to 'prove' a case usually carefully selected so that those which might appear to query it are not included.

Furthermore, it becomes a question of who knows the truth ? Even if people tell the story of their experiences without embellishment, omission or glossing over some of it, do they in fact KNOW the truth?

- Did they see but a fragment of it ?

- Did the confusion of events wash over their perceptions ?

The soldier in the trenches can tell you the truth about his experiences, the drudgery and squalor, the firefights and terror of bombardments. But he can only tell you his IMPRESSION of the orders from higher up, the tactical situation and what was going on elsewhere.

History is thus a patchwork of impressions. Even the most important person's memoirs, with supporting papers, only tells of history as that person knew it. Take Churchill's 'The World Crisis' - in order to understand properly the British political scene you would need to throw in Lloyd George's memoirs, Beaverbrook's, Asquith's letters. And even then do you have the full picture ? Now, how to turn this into a full picture of the war ? The poetry of Sassoon and Owen, the memoirs of Sir Roger Keyes... Even when you have filled in the gaps for aircraft, trade unions, Conservative-Unionists, Irish Nationalists and the army command...you still only have ONE COUNTRY.

Faced with the apparently shifting and unsettled face of historical truth, many people believe they find a better representation of what things were like if they read a novelised fictional account - it places THEM more clearly into the scene, brings the dry words to life and allows them they think to interpret things themselves.

But they fall prey to many other kinds of untruth - the dramatisation of mundane events, the role that coincidence and underhand plotting must play in novels, the idea that an event is more important than it was because the novel is focused around it, anachronisms of language, appearance and behaviour (how many rapes do you see in Sharpe ?), and the fact that often a novelist has a message to get across that may have little to do with objective study of history.

The problem with attempting to rectify matters, is that on the one hand we have colourful exciting dramatisations and on the other we have words, occasionally black-and-white pictures, and we also have as much difficulty separating truth from non-truth. All historians have their own world view, some acknowledge that theirs is not necessarily right, others are to some degree fanatical that history is a Marxist story, or the unbridled advance of liberal democracy. These beliefs colour how things are interpreted, how events sit within a greater whole and whether a small anomaly is ignored, or blown out of all proportion (the two extremes).

History is impressions and it is perceptions. It is often found in the little details - British troops in August 1914 not taking their boots off for three weeks because their swollen feet could not have fitted back in them, the draughtsman crying over the death of his mule, the poverty of a peasant's cottage seeming like luxury compared to sleeping in the open for nights on end.

But this itself asks the questions WHAT is history ? No matter what is TRUTH, but if we are looking for the truth of history, what is HISTORY ? One could say that the details coalesce into building blocks and these keep coming together to make bigger blocks until in the end we get a cohesive picture.

But do we ? How many histories of The Great War even mention the tensions in Stockholm in July and August 1914, or the Serbian appeal to Greece to honour their treaty of mutual defence, let alone the events in Albania where King William of Wied had recently fled his throne ? Yet these are important ASPECTS of the crisis of July and August 1914; surely they should not be ignored...

If history AS REPORTED is a select reporting of salient facts in order to fit to an over-arcing narrative, can we trust an individual's judgement as to which facts are important ? On the subject of 1914, a British historian would see things differently from a French historian, or a German or a Russian or an Italian or a Japanese or an American... All, though, are valid.

Does history then not exist ? If so-called objectivity is intrinsically linked to the nationality and political views of the historian, who can write an unbiased history of anything ?

But what is in question here ? It is not the events themselves. It is the INTERPRETATION of them. It is PUTTING THEM TOGETHER. History is the sum of events. It is this sum that people rarely agree on. There are so many events that they can be put together in innumerable ways in order to support diverse theories and arguments.

We are back FULL CIRCLE. History is a mess. It certainly seems so to 'the common man'. They do not WANT a learned discourse on the value of alternative presentations. They want simplicity. And it is this simplicity that popular mythology gives to them.

Grey Wolf