Last summer, I read an article that made a big impact on me. Written by Anton Howes, Does History Have a Replication Crisis brought to mind a number of the mistakes that I made in the books and articles that I wrote over the course of my career. Better yet, it convinced me to use Substack as a vehicle to both acknowledge these errors and correct them.
In my very first book, I referred to a song that my father used to sing while doing chores around the house.1 Called Adieu, My Little Guard Officer [Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier], it told, in the voice of a mother, the bittersweet story of the day she bid farewell to her son, who, despite his tender years, had just received a commission in the socially prestigious Prussian Guard.
As is often the case with ancillary singing, I registered the refrain (“and forget me not, forget me not”) without learning the verses. Thus, in keeping with the grand tendencies of the popular music of the mid-twentieth century, I presumed that the relationship in question belonged to the realm of romance. And so, in a passage about the officers of the Prussian Guard, I made reference to the “love-lorn Berlin ladies” who, I presumed, pined for them.
I did not realize my mistake until, in the course of a YouTube search for other songs of the Edwardian era, I ran into a full recording. (I soon discovered that such recordings, some of which were made quite recently, abound. A few of the people who made these videos, moreover, have been kind enough to provide the lyrics.)
The younger version of myself, who enjoyed, at the time, easy access to splendid libraries, should have looked up the sheet music for this song. Indeed, as he did this for other songs encountered in the course of his research, this was something he was already in the habit of doing. To put things another way, this story serves both as a reminder of the dangers of letting a personal memory, however pleasant, take the place of due diligence.
Storm Troop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918 (New York: Praeger, 1989)