Historians are aware of, but remain prone to, one fallacy – because something happened, it had to happen.  It was inevitable.  Hindsight brings not just finality, but certainty – when in truth things could have all turned out quite differently.  They are big on this at Oxbridge.  People make history, and not the other way around.  And there is such a thing as chance.

A related problem is that history is written by the winners.  Some call this bragging rights. 

But when it comes to sporting contests, we tend to go clean off the rails.  The Grand Final we just had was as close you could get to a paradigm even money bet from beginning to end.  One mate who follows the Pies described it as ‘unrelenting agony.’  (That is why I do not watch my teams on live television.)  Until the siren went, all three possible endings were possible.  As it happens, Collingwood won by less than a goal.  That prize could well have gone to Brisbane.

But when I went to On the Couch, a show I like and respect, for analysis, I am treated to an hour of closely argued reasoning about why Collingwood won.  And I did so with the God given certainty, that had Brisbane won by a goal, I would have been treated to an hour of closely reasoned analysis of why that was the case.  When the whole history of the game turned on hundreds of instances where a deviation of centimetres would have produced a different outcome.

As a commentator, Stan Alves was incomparable on this issue.  A side might get up by a contentious point right on the bell, and after a while, you would wonder why the other side bothered to turn up.

And now we get analysis dressed up with layers of statistics that make it all sound scientific.  I am very suspicious of all this – as I am in expressing predictions for the future in percentages or odds.  I don’t believe there an adequate empirical basis for either exercise.

Well, it is harmless enough in sporting matters – unless you want to invest on the basis of such ruminations – but other considerations apply to matters of state.  Toward the conclusion of a five-volume history of the west, I find the following.

The turning point in the battle of Gettysburg came on its second day.  Lee was determined on staking the fortune of the South on a major battle – he thought that the North was too strong to lose the war, and he was probably right.  He was intent on taking the North by its flank on his right, near a hill called Little Round Top.  His men charged again and again – the Southern boys were not used to losing battles, and the North had usually fallen before their blood-curdling onslaught.  The casualties were appalling. 

The end of the Northern Line was commanded by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, who taught Rhetoric at Maine.  He knew that as the end of the line, his retreat would mean that the battle was lost.  He had been told that retreat was not open to him.  He saw that his men were nearly out of both ammunition and the will to resist.  He gave orders to them to perform a manoeuvre that is hard even on the parade ground.  They were in part to retire at an angle behind the end of the line, and then advance in a sweeping movement around the enemy.  In the film, Jeff Daniels plays Chamberlain, and when he gives the order for ‘Bayonets’, we can see the whites of his eye, and we know that he is staring straight into eternity.  He is, as they say, running on adrenalin.  The manoeuvre was perfectly and successfully executed.  The Northern line held.  The Southern advance had been repelled.  The next day Lee saw his army smashed in what is still remembered as Pickett’s charge.  It would never be the same threat again.

Lincoln was desperate for victory.  His generals were awful; the Union was shaky; and Lee seemed able to toy with them.  Negroes were being lynched in New York.  Had that battle been lost, Lincoln may have had to sue for peace.  If the Union had been lost, and if the Confederacy had gone on as a hostile slave-owning republic, the light of the West in the New World could have gone out.  Whom could Europe have looked to if Germany had still waged war on it, not just once but twice? 

All those consequences turned on the extraordinary valour and coolness of a lecturer in rhetoric from Maine during the evening of 2 July 1863 around a small wooded hill in Pennsylvania.  A deviation of one foot by one of the thousands of bullets fired that day could have led to a different result.  It is on such threads that the history of the whole world hangs.

People make history; history is just the story of what they did.  As we look at phases or periods or trends or movements or eras or epochs, it all comes down to what someone did or did not do.  We who look backwards must remember that it could all have been so different, that chance plays such a great part.  It is said that during the charge a Southern officer pointed his revolver at Chamberlain at point blank range.  When he pulled the trigger, he found that his revolver was empty.  There are some who doubt that part of the story, and other parts of the story, too, but does that matter? 

Chamberlain survived the war.  He was wounded on six occasions, and he had six horses shot from under him.  He was hit by two bullets at Little Round Top.  One shot was stopped by his sword scabbard.  It is said by some, and disputed by others, that he presided over the parade of the defeated Southern army before the Appomattox Court House.  Of his own initiative, he ordered his men to come to attention and to present their arms as a mark of respect.  The courtesy was reciprocated when the commanding general from the South wheeled on his horse, and dropped the point of his sword to his stirrup with that customary Southern grace, and the great Confederate ensign was dipped.  Not a word was said on either side.  Was this a fine start to the flawed process called reconstruction?

We do know with some certainty that Chamberlain died in 1914, the year that a more frightful conflagration started in another part of the world but that would draw in the United States.  He had been involved in organising a fiftieth-year reunion for those involved in the battle of Gettysburg, but ill heath stopped him from attending.  Some say that he was the last veteran of the Civil War to have died of wounds received during that war. 

For some reason, Chamberlain did not receive his Medal of Honour for his gallantry at Little Round Top until 1893.  The Medal of Honour is now held at the Joshua Chamberlain Museum in Maine.  In 2013, an anonymous donor presented the Medal to the historical society that runs the museum.  It had been found in the back of a book bought at a local church sale. 

The story of that Medal, like all history, was all down to chance.  It is like Hamlet’s musing in the graveyard on the noble dust of Alexander the Great ending up as a bung in a beer barrel.  We need to try to stay somehow earthed as we muse upon some of the themes that we might see in our stories of what men and women did before our time.