[In the following excerpt, Lewis offers a positive assessment of Dead Certainties.]

Simon Schama, a distinguished historian, assumes in Dead Certainties—correctly I think—that history is the product of human imagination. Interested not only in how the history of war is shaped, Schama is also fascinated by how these historical accounts become underwritten by a nation's values. (His subtitle, Unwarranted Speculations, indicates that he understands his view as a counterstatement to the process of entangling national identity with accounts of war.)

Schama takes up British General Wolfe's famous death in battle at Quebec on September 13, 1759. Writing from various points of view, including Wolfe's Schama renders with fact and imagination the complexity of both that battle and Wolfe's character—e.g., his family difficulties, his quirks including hypochondria, and his probable recitation to his troops on the eve of battle of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Skipping then to 1770, Schama gives us Benjamin West, the American painter then in London, as he completes and first shows his great painting, The Death of General Wolfe. The painting renders the events we have witnessed in Schama's accounts. In the painting “mere fact is overwhelmed by inspired, symbolically loaded invention.” It is a “grandiloquent lie” that stirs George III and, after huge numbers are engraved, becomes an “icon of the British Empire.” Indeed, when children of future generations were “drilled in the pieties of imperial history, it was West's scene they imagined rather than a more literal recall.” The complex events of war, which we witnessed, are now charged with strong national values.

But this palimpsest extends further. In the mid-1860s Francis Parkman, an eminent and eccentric Bostonian already well-known for his Oregon Trial, undertook his epic account, France and England in North America. At the climax is the Quebec battle and Wolfe's death. When Parkman writes of Wolfe, “Past and present dissolved at this moment,” according to Schama, and Parkman “became Wolfe and Wolfe lived again through him.” There is “metaphysical mystery” in this identification that allows mortals to cross the gaps between one era and another; without these crossings, history, memoir, biography and other accounts of the past would be inert. Justifications of Wolfe's death become, through “metaphysical mystery,” what justify Parkman in his labors. And just as Parkman and West find themselves in Wolfe, so does Schama find himself in their activity of representing Wolfe. And he completes his conception of war writing by demonstrating how such historical accounts entail—and therefore celebrate—a nation's sense of identity.

In 1849 Francis Parkman's brother, George, equally eminent and eccentric, was apparently murdered by John W. Webster, the Erving professor of chemistry at Harvard. (Schama is also a Harvard professor.) The trial had scandalous irregularities, including the judge “becoming a third prosecuting attorney.” As a result, the “verdict (not to mention the sentence) was an outrage. … What was truly at stake here … was the self-esteem of an entire community and the urgency with which they wanted a disgusting embarrassment put out of the way.” Webster was executed. War writing is inclusive of those who live that history (Wolfe), those who render it (West, Parkman), and—once historical accounts of war embody a nation's values—those who epitomize (the Parkmans) and those who are crosswise of that nation's “certainties” (Webster).

This perspective illuminates the reports considered here; it also completes Robert Penn Warren's description of war writing. Each author, looking back at war through memory and the labyrinths of public representations, confronts the “teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration.” Schama draws on Henry James to clarify these relationships. James, using a military metaphor, describes the “habitually insoluble quandary of the historian”—“how to live in two worlds at once; how to take the broken, mutilated remains of something or someone from the ‘enemy lines’ of the documented past and restore it to life or give it a decent interment.” Allowing for the memoirist as the historian of the self (and thus for Begley and Hathaway), all the authors struggle within James's terms—to restore life and decently to inter. In addition those who write the history of war (Klinkenborg, Ross, and Schama) of necessity must wrest their accounts from prior accounts entangled in national values. To write of war is to write of human loss and to call forth the most profound (and therefore absolute, “certain”) of a nation's justifications. If successful, these will transform losses—that “nothing”—into national sacrifices. War's wasting the substance of life drives the endeavor, as it drove Lincoln's meditation and Warren's.