Ok, that's a mouthful of a title, so to be more specific:
I've been reading a ton on World War I, and just finished I Was a Spy, the story of the life of Marthe Cnockaert, a Belgian spy during WWI. Wikipedia claims it was ghost-written by her husband. I kind of mentally split passages from the book into three categories:
Much of the book is very in line with what I've read about areas under German occupation - the gradual reduction in supplies followed by Ersatz replacements, the shifts in tone in German propaganda throughout the war, a thriving black market, field hospital work, fear of and violent response to perceived civilian snipers, etc.
Other parts of the book play out like a thriller - dynamite, bombings, numerous close calls with sexual assault, boozing up soldiers to extract secrets, conniving German chemists mixing up chlorine gas, trap doors, people being knocked out with chloroform, forgotten tunnels, coded messages, seeing the Kaiser in person, timely arrival of costumed allies, and the like. All of these things and more definitely did happen to various persons throughout the war, but (I would assume) rarely all to the same person.
Even more confusingly, some parts play out almost exactly like British and French propaganda pieces. A baby is impaled on a bayonette; the conscripted but pure Alsatian soldier just wants to become a priest; all "Tommies" are inevitably rough around the edges but good-humored, good-natured, and feisty; most Germans are "cadaverous," scheming, vain, and/or violent; etc.
Category 1 I'm fine with - it's another individual's personal view on experiences that affected millions that are absolutely verifiable.
Categories 2 and 3 I'm conflicted about. Some of it seems spiced up for the reading audience: It's certainly a fun read, but possibly experiences from other spies were included or portions were fabricated entirely. On the other hand, some of it seems sanitized for print - again, it seems unlikely that a young woman in her 20s in an occupied country would repeatedly evade sexual assault despite frequently being locked in rooms with licentious German soldiers in varying states of intoxication.
What's a good historian (or just someone who wants to think critically about historical topics) to do with a source like this? A good bit of me just wants to say her husband wanted to write a spy novel and used his wife's name to make a buck. On the other hand, Marthe Cnockaert lived through an extraordinary period in human history, so some extraordinary events are bound to have happened. I don't just want to pass it off with a "the text was just appealing to prejudices and expectations of the time," either.
I feel like there are more nuanced ways of reading a text like this. Any historians care to help? Thanks for reading this!
This really is a troublesome topic amongst historians that has to be always appreciated, because we humans tend to both exaggerate or even underplay many events we have witnessed or been told about when retelling the tale - not always done deliberately, as the human mind can play tricks on us, but sometimes, it is done purposefully to make one seem "larger than life", or make an individual seem more evil than they were, or make them seem better and nicer and braver than the reality would actually show.
Firstly, studies conducted - primarily related to the criminal court system - have taught us that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. That doesn't mean eyewitness testimony or hearsay is always wrong, or that the person retelling the tale is always deliberately lying or exaggerating for dramatic effect or ego, but could simply highlight the fact that the human mind is not like a video camera that records and replays to us the incident from our memory as accurately as it really happened. Imagination and flawed recollection gets in the way many times, so when we replay events in our mind that we actually witnessed or were even told about by others, many times we retell or remember the story with slight to even extreme introduced differences from the reality of what actually occurred or what we were actually told.
Deliberate lying or exaggeration (sometimes gross lies and exaggeration) by the storyteller is also a serious concern that needs to be considered when looking for the veracity of historical fact, particularly when the primary source is a singular individual with no independent third party to verify the accuracy of the claims being made. Even small, unrelated lies a storyteller is caught in can and should open up the skeptic mindset, because like Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters." Credibility plays a big role in whether one should "take a person at their word" when they tell a story and present it as historical fact.
You mentioned Marthe Cnockaert - who was, as you said, a Belgian spy working for the UK and her allies during WWI. After the war, she became a novelist, writing many fictional works all related to the "spy game", so she apparently was capable post-war of weaving a tall tale pretty well. She was evidently a decent storyteller with a good imagination, but importantly in her case, we know from the war archives that much of the intel she provided to the allied forces during the war actually turned out to be accurate, which does add to the veracity of some of her claims at least. As for a lot of the "filler" material she wrote about - stuff like the evading sexual assault, knocking people out with chloroform, babies on bayonets - stuff like that is totally unconfirmable from the perspective that she actually witnessed or was involved in these acts, and when examining many of those claims, there is typically no third party verification that can confirm she was present to witness or be involved in some of the tales and anecdotes told in her memoirs. That doesn't mean they are definitely false and she was definitively lying, but it means that some of her stories need to be taken with a few grains of salt. She did receive multiple awards for her intelligence gathering efforts during WWI (Certificate of Gallantry, two Legions of Honour), and she was mentioned directly by her codename "Laura" in multiple intelligence reports during the war, signifying that she definitely was a "real deal" spy deep behind enemy lines who actually was providing actionable intel to the Brits and their allies during the WWI. Hell, post-war, Winston Churchill even wrote the foreword to her memoir "I Was A Spy!" (the book you are referencing), so there is little doubt she was definitely a powerful covert intel agent. That is confirmable stuff. There does seem to be evidence though that post-war, her husband played a very large role in her writing career - even to the point of ghost writing many of the works attributed to her.
Really, when tackling the supposed accuracy or veracity of an historical event or events, I feel one really has to try to focus on the supporting evidence, and examine the background of the storyteller - whether the story is told as a "first person" account or is a story relayed through a third party that had no direct connection to the event. We can look at a guy like Roman Emperor Nero for example, who is painted by many of the history books as an absolute tyrannical loon. Much of that "history" about him may be true, but much of it also may very well be gross exaggeration, written many years after his death by individuals who were never around when Nero was, and may very well have had an axe to grind against him and had no problem exaggerating his negative behaviours to paint him in a worse light than reality would have actually shown. Likewise on the other end of the spectrum, a guy like Yeshua of Nazareth - Jesus Christ - is a character from history whose story has been told and retold many times many years after his death, by individuals who had good reason to want to "prop him up" and paint him as doing positive (even supernatural) things that there is no contemporary third party confirmation available to begin to support the accuracy of at all. Again, back to that "grain of salt" skepticism that needs to be appreciated.
I guess the best critical thinking concepts from an historian's perspective who is hunting for the actual truth is to always try to keep an open mind and try not to get too wrapped up in the subject being studied to the point where common sense and fair and logical skepticism is discarded. Historians have to realize that the old adage "there are two or more sides to every story" tends to hold true, even though only one side of the story may be available to study, and thus may not be wholly accurate. This is particularly the case when there is no preferably independent third party forms of verification available to add veracity to the claims being made. History shows us that many people are indeed willing to deliberately or even subconsciously tell tall tales and "spin a yarn" when discussing personal or past historical events - particularly about subjects where they know or believe the true facts are going to be unconfirmable by the person they are telling the story to, and especially when money and fame are potentially on the table from people that are gullible and willing to believe the stories outright without fact-checking. Sometimes, people indeed tell the truth to the very best of their recollection, but sometimes, they also are prone to deliberately fibbing or exaggerating or outright lying through their teeth for personal gain of some kind. It seems to be part of human nature to lie for benefit, and in fact many behavioural scientists agree that the use of deception is a powerful trait that has shown itself to be an excellent measure of human intellectual advancement. You lie to get ahead in life, because in many cases, lying and deliberate exaggeration can be more beneficial to an individual than truth-telling is.
So, if a topic really interests you, research the heck out of it, and while you can still be enthralled by the story as you study it, also never fail to look for holes in that story - errors in the timeline, lies by omission, outright inaccuracies, lack of other eyewitness or third party verification, possible reasons the storyteller had to gain by falsifying or exaggerating the reality - things of that nature.
What does an individual stand to gain from lying or exaggerating? Is their story independently confirmable by outside contemporary sources? What evidence is presented to show the story to be true? Can you confirm the story is actually coming from the individual directly involved in the incident or incidents being retold? All those are entirely reasonable queries one should make when studying the accuracy of historical events or claims. Blind acceptance is not healthy or fair in the proper "historical studies" realm, but healthy, fair skepticism is always a good thing to have when studying history, and is never an investigative trait to be shunned.