Or, again, take that prime question, why the Prussians did not charge at
Valmy. On their failure to do so all the success of the Revolution
turned. A man may read Dumouriez, Kellermann, Pully, Botidoux,
Massenback, Goethe--there are fifty eye-witnesses at least whose
evidence we can collect, and I defy anyone to decide. (Brunswick himself
never knew.) But go to that roll of land between Valmy and the high
road; go after three days' rain as the allies did, and you will
immediately learn. That field between the heights of "The Moon" and the
site of old Valmy mill, which is as hard as a brick in summer (when the
experts visit it), is a marsh of the worst under an autumn drizzle; no
one could have charged.
As for human testimony, three things appear: first, that the witness is
not, as in a law court, circumscribed. His relation may vary infinitely
in degree of proximity of time or space to the action, from that of an
eye-witness writing within the hour to that of a partisan writing at
tenth hand a lifetime after. That question of proximity comes first,
from the known action of the human mind whereby it transforms colours
and changes remembered things. Next there is the character of the
witness _for the purposes of his testimony_. Historians write, too
often, as though virtue--or wealth (with which they often confound
it)--were the test. It is not, short of a known motive for lying; a
murderer or a thief casually witnessing to a thing with which he is
familiar is worth more than the best man witnessing in a matter which he
understands ill.
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