Note Left in Appendix Eleven

The note sat in the appendix. Appendix Eleven, of the Report on the Mortality of the Army in the East - a table of monthly death rates at Scutari, February to June 1855, with the figures for the general population of England printed beneath them in smaller type. Nobody at the War Office turned the page. The Commissioners quoted the main tables and passed over the appendix entire, and there the comparison lay for eleven months, face down against the binding, while men died of conditions the numbers had already diagnosed.

Yesterday I watched it happen again, in miniature. My niece was copying the coxcomb diagrams for the Royal Commission, and she pinned her working copy of Appendix Eleven to the board beside the large wedges. The candle guttered - the rain has come through the roof of this room again - and by its light I saw her pause at the appendix table, read the English figures, and say, “But this is the whole argument. Why is it not the first page?” Why indeed. The whole argument, filed after the signatures and the errata, where conscientious readers congratulate themselves for arriving and do not.

The pattern is now familiar enough to state plainly: the discovery that changes practice is rarely the discovery itself but its position in the document. The mortality figures buried in an appendix were true and useless. The same figures, rotated into the wedges and printed in blue and red and black where a minister’s eye must fall on them in four seconds, became an argument the Commission could not decline. The evidence did not change. The distance from the binding to the reader’s eye changed - a distance of some hundred pages, which is a greater distance, for practical purposes, than from London to Constantinople.

I had supposed the remedy was diligence: that readers of consequence would read fully. Correction. This morning I believe the opposite, and I will act on it henceforth - that the maker of the instrument must assume no reading beyond the first page, and place the decisive figure there, and accept the appendix as the place where truth goes to rest unread. The lesson belongs on the first page. Put it there.