History is empty of evidence here, and we have nothing to learn from it. Upon the French side the retirement seemed inexplicable, and upon the Prussian the shame and failure of it seemed to have tied every man’s tongue; yet I believe it to be due to nothing more romantic than mud. Certain of our contemporaries in modern history have said that Brunswick did not desire to press the action, because that his sympathy was with the Revolutionary forces. To talk like that is to misunderstand the whole psychology of soldiery; more--in such an action it is to misunderstand the whole psychology of men. Brunswick could not have recalled the charge without good cause on such a day and with such men about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant princes and the commanders; but the thing is, on the face of it, absurd. A wiser guess, but made erroneously, ascribes the retirement to the persistence and effect of the French artillery-fire as the Prussian charge approached. This must certainly be rejected, for we know that the advance was steady, and the retirement too, and what is more, we know how comparatively small were the losses. It was not due to an officer losing his head, for the whole line retired without breaking and in consonance. It certainly was not due to any doubt as to the moral ability of the men to continue the ordeal that had suffered so admirably over six hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quarter of an hour of time. Those who will do as I did, and visit Valmy in the autumn, and after the rains, and walk by no path or any picking of one’s way, but straight across the stubble, as the soldiers of those deployed companies had to do, will, I am sure, decide as I here decide. For they will come to a belt not upon the bottom level, but at the beginning of the opposing slope, where, under the deceitful similarity of the unchanged stubble, and with nothing to mark the drowned state of the soil, that soil becomes almost impassable, certainly impassable to men under fire. The French had before them, though they did not know it, a true obstacle, the unwitting attempt to cross which as though it were no obstacle lost the Prussians the battle, and with the battle lost the kings and the aristocracies of Europe their throw against the French democracy. Night fell, still misty, but unbroken by the sound of arms or of marching. With the next day, when the invaders counted their losses these, not [Illustration: UNDER THE MILL AT VALMY _To face p. 192_ ] over-heavy, they were appalled to find made far graver by a great increase of dysentery, which such a night in the open after such a day had produced. At the end of a week they fell back eastward again, followed and hampered by the French cavalry, and when they passed the boundaries of what was now the Republic, a blank-shot fired from the walls of Longwy closed this great episode in the story of the Gauls. PART SIX THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI [Illustration: GENERAL CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DUMOURIEZ