spirit and personal motives by which I see that every member
appears to be actuated to the risk of the Company in general."

In the midst of this distress, and in spite of this ebullition, M. de
Lally led his troops up in front of Madras; he made himself master of the
Black Town. "The immense plunder taken by the troops," says the journal
of an officer who held a command under Count Lally, "had introduced
abundance amongst them. Huge stores of strong liquors led to drunkenness
and all the evils it generates. The situation must have been seen to be
believed. The works, the guards in the trenches were all performed by
drunken men. The regiment of Lorraine alone was exempt from this plague,
but the other corps surpassed one another. Hence scenes of the most
shameful kind and most destructive of subordination and discipline, the
details of which confined within the limits of the most scrupulous
truthfulness would appear a monstrous exaggeration." Lally in despair
wrote to his friends in France, "Hell vomited me into this land of
iniquities, and I am waiting, like Jonah, for the whale that shall
receive me in its belly."

The attack on the White Town and on Fort St. George was repulsed; and on
the 18th of February, 1759, Lally was obliged to raise the siege of
Madras. The discord which reigned in the army as well as amongst the
civil functionaries was nowhere more flagrant than between Lally and
Bussy. The latter could not console himself for having been forced to
leave the Deccan in the feeble bands of the Marquis of Conflans. An
expedition attempted against the fortress of Wandiwash, of which the
English had obtained possession, was followed by a serious defeat;
Colonel Coote was master of Karikal. Little by little the French army
and French power in India found themselves cooped within the immediate
territory of Pondicherry. The English marched against this town. Lally
shut himself up there in the month of March, 1760. Bussy had been made
prisoner, and Coote had sent him to Europe. "At the head of the French
army Bussy would be in a position by himself alone to prolong the war for
ten years," said the Hindoos. On the 27th of November, the siege of
Pondicherry was transformed into an investment. Lally had taken all the
precautions of a good general, but he had taken them with his usual
harshness; he had driven from the city all the useless mouths; fourteen
hundred Hindoos, old men, women, and children, wan