Source A: Report of the Committee Led by Viscount Bryce, Assessing "Alleged German Outrages", 1915
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Background information
1 Describe two key features of Government Report in the FWW. The first key feature of government reports is that they contain statistics and detailed information on the topic they are about. They tend to provide an overview because they are based on the collation of a large amount of different evidence from various location. Quite often they also include statistical evidence. The second key feature of government reports is that through what they are focussed on, you can find out what the priorities and concern of the government were, at the point at which they commissioned them, as the reports were produced to inform government policy. |
2a How useful are government reports for an enquiry into the injuries, illness and treatment on the Western Front?
Government reports can be useful because they contain statistics and detailed information on the topic they are about. They tend to provide an overview because they are based on the collation of a large amount of different evidence from various location, which is then presented as statistical evidence. Government reports also reveal what the priorities and concern of the government were, at the point at which they commissioned them, as the reports were produced to inform government policy. Today, attitudes towards such official documents range from a belief that they carry the stamp of authenticity and approval, to the opposite belief that any government document had to be at least partly intended to deceive. In fact, like all historical evidence, these documents only start to reveal the truth when they are questioned and placed into context. Very often, they show us what governments believed at the time, or wished to be believed.
They can be limited by heavy political implications and influenced in their production and findings by the attitudes of the government. However, there would have been little point in publishing them at all if they were completely inaccurate. In many cases, official documents also contain a lot of what is called ‘unconscious evidence’: records and numbers that can be analysed to reveal patterns, such as the statistical tables in a post-war history of a wartime military hospital.