Gabriel Dumont’s Account of the North West Rebellion, 1885
Good generalship requires imagination in the sense of foreseeing what the probable moves of the enemy may be; good military historiography requires not only imagination but the actual study of the documentary sources on each side. It is well known that military, like diplomatic history, is too often presented only from one point of view. A certain bias is unavoidable when the author is familiar with the movements of an army on one side of the hill but can only guess at those of the enemy on the other; an accurate picture of any war, campaign, or battle cannot be presented by a writer who is limited to the records, official and unofficial, available at one G.H.Q., but has nothing more than the conjectures of Intelligence as to what went on at the other.