Appropriately, no one can quite remember who first came up with the truism that the first casualty of war is truth. Many think it was the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus but predictably, given the phrasing is so modern, they have been unable to document it. Most think a Progressive Republican Senator for California named Hiram Johnson came up with the remark while bemoaning events during the First World War. It is more than possible, however, that he had been reading Samuel Johnson, who wrote something similar to the phrase in 1758. Certainly, Lord Augustus Posonby wrote something very similar indeed in 1928 in his book Falsehood in Wartime. Alas, we do not have sufficient collective memory to produce a general agreement as to who came up with the exact phrasing of a remark that is commonplace today. Yet it persists because it is true, and since it is true it remains of interest who first was clever enough to pinpoint its innate value. But the history of the remark shows that if truth is the first to die when diplomacy fails and war is declared, then memory, an even more malleable and contextual phenomenon, is surely the second.

Memory is perhaps never more malleable than when the stakes are at their highest, as in war. This is ironic, since if we are to prevent war in the future then nothing matters more than our ability to correctly recall its causes, successes, failures and resolution. Yet as the two books discussed here show, our collective and individual memories of war are mutable and porous. They are a product of the political and cultural weather in the same way, if not to the same extent, as are the songs we sing, the clothes we wear or, for that matter, our dreams for the future. For a number of reasons historians are now paying increasing attention to the role of memory in understanding war. Indeed, a “mnemonic turn” has occurred within analysis that has shifted focus away from what actually happened to the often less incendiary question of how what happened has come to be remembered. The approach has garnered particular plaudits when applied to wars where the causes, goals and practice of warfare remain deeply contested. Thus, for example, Jonathan Vance's 1997 study of how Canadians remembered the First World War, Death So Noble, was garlanded with prizes. Throughout, the book referred to the “myth of the war” but avoided the messy question of just what that myth entailed at the level of truth and falsehood. Instead, the focus was upon demonstrating that for Canada, the idea of war as noble and just was the preferred social memory. When judged by their written and public sources of commemoration and comment, it appears that Canadians relished the opportunity to die in the first global conflict.

What gets remembered is, of course, the sister to something often even more interesting – what gets forgotten. It is this that fascinates Colin G. Calloway in his latest book, The Victory with No Name. A thrilling read from an award-winning and prolific scholar of Native America who is deeply respected across the discipline's divides, it shows just how rewarding it can be to look at what has been deliberately obscured. Here he resurrects memories of an Indian victory so monumental that dominant forces since have made sure it has remained largely ignored and without a name. Unlike the more usual strategies used by Americans against Indians, such as attrition and forms of unlimited and total war, this was a pitched battle. The victory was permanently reversed just three years later but Calloway makes a good case for it having lasting significance today. At the time, it caused widespread sensation.

In 1791, one thousand four hundred members of the US army, under Major General Arthur St. Clair, were attacked by approximately one thousand Indians, who had formed a multi-tribal confederation variously known as the Northwest/Wabash or Miami Confederacy. Like the larger American confederation that Indians sometimes called the “thirteen fires,” this confederacy was recently formed and not without division, but it nonetheless utterly dominated the day and left a thousand Americans killed and wounded. As Calloway puts it, it was “the biggest victory Native Americans ever won and proportionately the biggest military disaster the United States ever suffered” (5). This first American settler military disaster changed forever how Americans understood their army, paid for their wars and conducted battle. It also prompted the first Congressional investigation and the birth of executive privilege because awkwardly, both Secretary of War Knox and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton were implicated in the contractor fraud that had starved St. Clair's troops and contributed to their abject failure.

Colin Calloway's study will do much to encourage further advances in understanding of Indian military strategy and conduct in war, a subject that despite excellent work by Wayne Lee and John Grenier has yet to be fully developed in transnational context. Certainly, St. Clair's defeat was an education at the time for Americans. Indians were not thought of as being capable, as Calloway puts it, of “fielding a multinational army, executing a carefully coordinated battle plan worked out by their chiefs, and winning a pitched battle” (5). With hindsight, of course, American defeat was not surprising. Military thinking of the time was convinced that Indian peoples would not stand and fight simply because, preferring more topographically appropriate guerrilla tactics, they had previously more often chosen not to. Led by the ill and lumbering St. Clair, the American army was tactically stupid: at one point, for example, they lit a large fire and stood around talking, unsure as to their exact position. They woefully underestimated their foes who, during the pre-battle harassment stage, stole two artillery horses and, with not atypical Indian irony, then left behind a pair of moccasins to replace them. Also ironic, given the western movie notion that when fighting, Indians killing the chief will cause the rest to flee, Indians in this instance thought the very same about their American opponents. Whilst they could act in disciplined unison, they fought as individuals, but they noticed that American soldiers were completely dependent on constant orders from their officers. Therefore they concentrated on dispatching the officers first. They fought spiritually strengthened, well provisioned and secure in the knowledge that their families had been safely evacuated elsewhere. Unencumbered by uniform or tack, they were, as one officer put it, “like a circle of fire, which, like an artificial horizon, follows … everywhere” (110).

The Confederacy drew on British support and had the support of Irish and Scottish traders and agents living with Indian communities, but its history is a timely reminder of an abiding truth: nothing threatens colonial forces more than when Indians set aside tribal and linguistic divisions and band together. This is worth remembering now when the intellectual focus is upon tribal-specific and indigenous nationalist histories. Such work needs to be balanced by other histories of intertribal unity and coordinated cross-tribal effort. The succeeding chapter in that narrative is already known in outline because the vision of united tribal defense of all Indian lands put into action by the Northwest Confederacy was later picked up by followers of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. As a youth he had scouted St. Clair's army and thus knew firsthand what coordinated political and military union could achieve. Colin Calloway's book begins the important and difficult work of reconstructing the history of Indian composite leadership in battle. It is hoped that future work will be able to broaden the source base so as to give a more granular texture to this history and develop, for example, deeper understanding of the role of Indian women in warfare, tactics and strategy.

In contrast, Boyd Cothran's study of how the Modoc War of 1872–73 was remembered via various markets tells a less remarkable story. Few will be surprised that a macabre trade in memorabilia developed after the public executions of the four men said to have dispatched the only US general to have died during the period's Indian Wars. They were Captain Jack, Schonchin John, Black Jim and Boston Charley. Fewer still will find it remarkable that Euro-Americans bought, sold and continued to buy, in a multitude of contexts, evidence of the rectitude of the Modoc conflict and of their rights as settlers to occupation of the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northern California. The author has detailed this history within the sensational press, in performance and through commemoration to show that markets influence how individuals articulate understandings of the past. This is unlikely to be contested, but the reader may well be less convinced by some of author's wider claims that are linked to aspects of the thinking of Karl Marx. These include the claim that history “helps to create the winners by serving as a tool of colonial oppression” (18) and that various marketplaces for remembering the Modoc War have “transformed an episode of ethnic cleansing into a redemptive narrative of American innocence” (23).

The author goes on to directly connect the violence of the nineteenth century to successive examples of US foreign policy and conflict. Specifically, he explores how judicial precedent established at the time of the Modoc War was used during the War on Terror by the Bush administration. The idea of innate American innocence, embedded and exacerbated by the marketplace, has provided Americans, he suggests, “with an enduring script for understanding their role in global histories of empire and colonialism” (23). Aspects of this argument will be familiar to those who read Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence in 1973 and Gunfighter Nation in 1993, but Slotkin, although a literary scholar and sometimes factually inaccurate, was not prone to the sweeping ahistorical generalization shown here. Large, deeply contested terms are used without either definition or periodization (empire, justice, conquest, ethnic cleansing), while the book's key theme, innocence, is defined cursorily in a paragraph. Overall, the book advances an already well-rehearsed argument about the material underpinnings of historical knowledge production and surrounds this with assertions about the United States that could never be evidenced within any single monograph. This book ends, however, with an intriguing and strong suggestion. This is that commemoration sites “obscure the continuing power imbalances inherent in American settler colonialism while enforcing the obligation to forget ongoing inequalities as the price of inclusion in reconciliatory national narratives” (26). Cochran develops this idea by building upon Marcel Mauss's 1950s description of the gift as embodying reciprocal exchange. However, this idea is asserted rather than proven via detailed research into formation of the Lava Beds National Monument or into analogous sites elsewhere.

Both these books refer us to something important, that the legacy of war is as much about what is selected to be forgotten as it is about what is chosen to be recorded and remembered. Each generation isolates aspects of the past to reconstruct and emphasize, but there is the further factor that the art of history itself has a history. Its role today within society is not what it once was. It is one thing to remember settler wars, and quite another thing entirely for those who continue to rise and sleep under the blanket of what those wars have provided to set about making recompense for the land and resources taken.