Retribution.
Had Kellerman failed to come up just in time to join forces with Dumouriez: had the Prussian advance been just an hour or two earlier: had the heavy mists lifted from the Valmy hill and Argonne wood revealing the relative positions of Kellerman and Dumouriez: had the forcing of the defile by Clairfayt and his Austrian corps proved fatally successful: had the Duke of Brunswick resolutely charged a second time up that hill of bristling bayonets: had the King of Prussia, urged on by a vision of the future, authoritatively commanded that the hill be taken and himself led the charge: ah! so we learnedly say from the calm eminence far away, but history is made in the low blind fury of the fray. Perhaps, too, there were potently at work upon that fated battlefield, forces that elude the gaze of the dreamer on the height far away:—a determining animus, moral and spiritual potencies formed by the slow centuries and long controlled, but now liberated and wildly free. Ghosts of ten thousand wrongs may have arisen between the gilded ranks of the French noblesse and the ragged rows of the Carmagnoles: and, as the spirits that arose over the tent of Richard the Third, the night before the battle of Bosworth Field, cursed Richard and blessed Richmond; threatened Richard with defeat and death on the morrow and cheered Richmond with hopes and promises of victory; fought intangibly, invisibly, yet potently present amid the awful carnage of Bosworth field even until death trampled down Richard: so, in like manner, may the ghosts of ten thousand wrongs have arisen between the men of the old regime and of the rebellious new—fighting for their fellow-wrongs still writhing in the flesh, fighting the old, old fight of retaliation, compensation, stern adjudication, infinite justice. As the sun’s rays that reach earth are but one-millionth of the rays emitted by the sun, so for every thing known, bright shining on the historic page, there are a million things unknown.