Or, again, M. Thibaut, who writes under the name
of "Anatole France," gives footnotes by the score in his romance of Joan
of Arc, apparently not even caring to examine whether they so much as
refer to his text, let alone support it. They seem to have been done by
contract.
Another ailment in this department is the negative one, whereby an
historian will leave out some aspect which to him, cramped in a study,
seems unimportant, but which any plain man moving in the world would
have told him to be the essential aspect of the whole matter. For
instance, when Napoleon left Madrid on his forced march to intercept Sir
John Moore before that general should have reached Benevente, he thought
Moore was at Valladolid, when as a fact he was at Sahagun. In Mr. Oman's
history of the Peninsular War the error is put thus: "Napoleon had not
the comparatively easy task of cutting the road between Valladolid and
Astorga, but the much harder one of intercepting that between Sahagun
and Astorga."
Why is this egregious nonsense? The facts are right and so are the dates
and the names, yet it makes one blush for Oxford history. Why? Because
the all-important element of _distance_ is omitted. The very first
question a plain man would ask about the case would be, "What were the
distances involved?" The academic historian doesn't know, or, at least,
doesn't say; yet without an appreciation of the distances the statement
has no value.
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