There was present with those invading columns a man supremely gifted in the power both to observe and to express, a young man destined soon to bear one of the greatest of names. This was Goethe. For Goethe was with the German armies, and we have from him some account of what he saw. We can see through his eyes the bare, dull landscape, with low, misty clouds hurrying above [Illustration: GOETHE, WHO WAS WITH THE GERMAN ARMY AT VALMY _To face p. 177_ ] it, now hiding all things in rain, now in an interval of drier weather showing a steaming reek coming up from the drenched fields; and between those two flats of gray earth and gray sky the dark bodies of troops moving like ordered herds westward from the Argonne and the woods, on over the rolling of the open land. By this night of the nineteenth of September they had taken their full march and were drawn up with their backs to Paris, their faces to the Argonne, over against the French lines. The invaders could not leave those forces of Dumouriez’s behind them upon their communications. It was their task, now that the Argonne was forced, to clear away by capture or by dispersal the army that was still in existence, though doubtful, or, rather, only too certain of its fate. Now, this long way round by the northern gate in the hills, this lengthening of tortuous communications, and the persistent rain of those days, made it imperative that the decision should be taken promptly. Dysentery had been present in the Prussian and Austrian forces for some time. In the abominable weather it had lately increased. Bread, which was almost their only ration (until they should come out into more favourable lands a day’s march ahead upon the road to Paris), came up but tardily and clumsily by the long round of the muddy road. It was imperative that Dumouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volunteers, of foreign mercenaries, of old regulars, an army officered at random, and even some units only half-officered, should be swept from the communications if the invasion was to proceed; and therefore without repose, and with the invading force as it found itself after fighting through the Argonne and making the long march afterward, was to attack at once, with the first light of the next day, the twentieth. That day was to be decisive in the business of the modern world. For, by coincidences upon which men still debate, but which I think can be explained, and which I shall now present, the invaders failed in their easy task. Dumouriez’s troops were left intact after the attempted action, and the armed reduction of the Revolution was postponed so long that it became at last impossible.