Refusing orders

[Crispvs]

On the front of soldiers refusing orders, it might by worth asking the currently unanswerable question of where much of the information on particular campaigns and generals actually originated from.
Caesar's commentaries, for instance, give us a first hand account of the Gallic and Civil wars of the mid first century BC. However, comparison with information contained in letters sent by Cicero to various friends shows that Caesar failed to mention some things which it presumably did not suit him to mention and is quite liberal with his use of facts in places. If Caesar's commentaries are either his annual reports back to the senate or his campaign dairies (or both at once) then it is reasonable to assume that other generals and governors would have written similar accounts of their campaigns, and might have deleted or falsified embarrassing information to preserve or build up their reputations. It would not do a general's reputation much good to let it be known that his soldiers had come close to mutiny or had successfully refused his direct orders. If these campaign dairies, cover-ups and all, were used as source material by Rome's own historians, how many mutinies which might actually have happened slipped past the historians' gaze and never found their way into the history books?
The mutinies we know about and the orders known to have been refused may be simply the tip of a now invisible iceberg, thanks to general's censoring of sensitive information. It may be worth remembering that Caesar mentions a lot of centuriones (who would not be in a position to blacken his name much back in Rome) but as far as I remember does not mention any of his tribunes and only a few of the legati, such as Labienus and Marcus Cicero's brother Quintus, the latter probably because Cicero could have been a useful ally. How likely is it that Caesar (and therefore any other general) was able to exert a good deal of control over the outwards post of his officers, which might contradict things he was saying himself?
How likely is it therefore that we can ever build up a reliable picture of what really happened during many campaigns, particularly when they were often being written about when there was no longer any living memory of actual events, such as much of the material Livy cites, and long dead generals' own accounts may have been the best source material available?

Crispvs