In the first sentence (which bears the hall mark of the University)
every error that could possibly be made in so few lines has been made.
The numbers are wrong; the nature of the fighting is misstated; the
village in the centre is confused with that on the extreme right; the
critical second day is altogether omitted, and every portion of the
sentence, verb, adjective, and substantive, is either directly
inaccurate or indirectly conveys an inaccurate impression. The second
sentence, bald in style and uninteresting in presentation as the first,
has the merit of telling the truth. But--and here is the point--it would
be impossible to criticize the first sentence unless someone had read up
the battle, and to read up that battle one has to depend on five or six
documents, some unpublished (like much of Jourdan's Memoirs), some of
them involving a visit to Maubeuge itself, some, like Pierrat's book,
very difficult to obtain (for it is neither in the British Museum nor in
the Bodleian) some few the writings of contemporary eyewitnesses, and
yet themselves demonstrably inaccurate. All these must be read and
collated, and if possible the actual ground of the battle visited,
before the first simple inaccurate sentence can be properly criticized
or the second bald but accurate sentence framed. None of these
authorities can have been so much as heard of by the official historian
I have quoted.
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