It is history these accounts offer, but history deprived of generalizations. The writers are strangers to omniscience. The varnish of interpretation has been removed so we can see people clearly, as they originally were – gazing incredulously at what was, for that moment, the newest thing that had ever happened to them.
Made up of nearly three hundred contemporaneous accounts, Eyewitness to History gives a truly fascinating insight into what people were thinking in the moment while experiencing those events from the past 2500 years that we still talk about today. Edited by Oxford professor and renowned literary critic John Carey, and initially released in 1987, my only complaint would be that these accounts are overwhelmingly written by white men – too often recounting battle scenes that failed to engage me – but I understand that this reflects the interests of the book's editor and the ethos of its time; I wouldn't want this book itself to be changed but I would be interested in reading other books of this type with more varied points-of-view. Thoroughly valuable romp through history, as recorded by the folks who were there to witness it.
These essays range in length from less than a page to ten pages, and feature everything from transcribed court proceedings to the reportage of well-known authors. I didn't know what to expect when I first picked this up, and while I didn't find anything particularly interesting about Julius Caesar's account of invading Britain, the ensuing piece about the burning of Rome in 64 AD was riveting (the perverse Nero may not have been fiddling, but it was rumoured that the Emperor took to the “stage, and comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy”). And although I intended to just dip in and out of this book, it became hard to put down when the pieces that immediately followed included an eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, a dinner with Attila the Hun, a Viking funeral (the poor girl sacrificed to accompany her dead master! The string of the master's friends who lay with her, saying they did this only for the love of their dead friend!), and then the Green Children of East Anglia. Every story short but fascinating; what matter one more, and then another? Read this as you will: seven hundred pages go by pretty quickly. Some of my favourite bits (which I am collecting here for myself; this is far too long for others to read):
Plato reporting on the death of Socrates in 399 BC: When he was implored by his friends to wait as long as possible before drinking the court-ordered hemlock, Socrates replied, “I think I should gain nothing by taking the poison a little later. I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and spared it, when there is no more profit in it.”
I could not help but be particularly moved by women's stories, even if by necessity recorded by men, so we have the cruelty of the Great Mogul (Jahangir) towards a wife in 1618, as witnessed by Edward Terry: “For his cruelties, he put one of his women to a miserable death; one of his women he had formerly touched and kept company with, but now she was superannuated; for neither himself nor nobles (as they say) come near their wives or women after they exceed the age of thirty.” (The death itself involved this woman being buried in the sand up to her neck and left in the hot sun to die.)
There is a description of the various regional methods that Hindu women employed for suttee, written in 1650 by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: “This miserable condition causes her to detest life, and prefer to ascend a funeral pile to be consumed with her deceased husband, rather than be regarded by all the world for the remainder of her days with opprobrium and infamy.”
There's a harrowing first-person account of a mastectomy performed without anesthetic, written by Fanny Burney in 1811: “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittently during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still!”
A suffragette (the Lady Constance Lytton, disguised as a lower-class woman) is force-fed during a hunger strike in Walton Gaol in 1910: Laying in her own vomit afterwards, exhausted and “quite helpless”, Lytton writes, “Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elaine Howey, I was sure. When the ghastly process was all over and all quiet, I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn't much just then, 'No surrender,' and there came the answer past any doubt in Elaine's voice, 'No surrender.'"
Henry G. Wales reports on the execution by firing squad of Mata Hari in 1917: “She seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backwards, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.”
A woman is stoned to death in Jeddah in 1958, as recorded by R. M. Macoll: After her male partner had been quickly and mercifully beheaded, the woman was given one hundred debilitating blows with a stick, and while lying sagged on her side, a crowd of men and boys began pelting her with stones. “It was difficult to determine how she was facing her last and awful ordeal, since she was veiled in Muslim fashion and her mouth was gagged to muffle her cries...It took just over an hour before the doctor in attendance, who halted the stoning periodically to feel the victim's pulse, announced her dead.”
And there were so many fascinating literary references, as with the open-air cremation of Percy Shelley, written by Edward John Trelawny in 1822: “The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.”
George Bernard Shaw, writing about his mother's funeral in 1914, begins with, “Why does a funeral always sharpen one's sense of humour and rouse one's spirits?” And after humourously describing his mother's cremation – making plain that she would have joined in on the laughter – GBS concludes with, “O grave, where is thy victory?”
George Orwell was shot during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the entire account is fascinating. “There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in the space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.”
I was intrigued by Walt Whitman's description of the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 and was thoroughly entertained by Mark Twain's breaking of a quarantine to visit the Acropolis in Athens in 1867. On the other hand, I wasn't much moved by Charles Dickens' account of a guillotining in Rome (1845) or Charlotte Bronte's visit to the Crystal Palace (1851). I don't know if the brief contributions by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Fielding, or Ernest Hemingway would have been included if they weren't well-known names. Further, I was a bit turned off by Gustave Flaubert's story of cavorting with Egyptian “dancing girls” in 1850 and totally disturbed by Paul Gauguin's story of how he (“nearly an old man”) came to “marry” a thirteen-year-old Tahitian girl in 1892.
There are many famines recounted (spoiler: famines always lead to cannibalism) and many accounts of cruel and inhumane behaviour (from the rapacious Spanish conquering the New World, to American slavery, bull-baiting, and factory conditions in Britain). There are enlightening eyewitness accounts of those people and places in history that we think we already understand: whirling Dervishes (1613); a survivor's story from a lethal night spent in the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756); Samuel Pepys describes the Fire of London in 1666 and Jack London describes the earthquake, and ensuing fires, that decimated San Francisco in 1906; H. M. Stanley recounts the entire day leading up to him famously inquiring, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” There are numerous executions (from the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II's family, to the Nazis sentenced to hanging after the Nuremberg Trials), scientific reports (Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon), and frequent slice of life essays (derbys and hunts, the Louis-Schmeling fight in 1938, a man loses a foot trying to hop a train to Winnipeg in 1899).
There was more about Trafalgar and Napoleon and the World Wars than suited my tastes, but there were often nuggets that piqued my interest even in the battle stories: Lord Nelson playfully putting a spyglass to his blind eye and reporting that he couldn't see his commander's semaphored orders to "close action" (and later, Nelson's drawn-out death – now one-armed, one-eyed, with a bullet in his spine – and his oft-repeated, “Thank God, I have done my duty”); the commander of a U-Boat in 1916 lamenting the imminent loss of the beautiful horses he could see on board the steamer he was about to torpedo; a sixteen-year-old apprentice pipe fitter witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor (and refused an officer's orders to go alone onto the burning Pennsylvania and attempt to put its fires out; the kid wasn't even in the army but later faced a military tribunal over this incident); flying in a plane accompanying the superfortress The Great Artiste on its way to bomb Nagasaki (“It is a thing of beauty to behold, this 'gadget'. Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history. Never before had so much brain power been focused on a single problem.”), written by William T. Lawrence, one of the architects of said “gadget”. I wasn't interested in much regarding the Korean or Vietnam Wars, but was interested in a Veterans' protest march on Washington D.C. in 1971 (“The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!”) The final entry is on the fall of President Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, and by this point, it was obvious that I was reading the work of a professional reporter, and I have to admit that I liked the more amateur (unpolished) accounts better.
Overall: This was a fascinating journey through history and I enjoyed pretty much the whole thing.
