lumns of whom they lured into the
depths of the Bocage and cut down to the last man. As Victor Hugo has
finely said: "It was a war of the town against the forest." At first the
forest-dwellers threatened to overrun the towns. On 11th June they took
Saumur, a town on the Loire, after a desperate fight, and sought to open
communication with the coast and the British fleet by seizing Nantes.
This attempt, however, failed; and it is generally admitted that they
erred in not marching on Paris after their first successes. After
gaining a sure base of operations, they should have strained every nerve
in order to strike at the heart. And if distance and lack of supplies
and equipment shortened their reach, they might at least have carried
the war into the rich central provinces, on which the capital subsisted.

But the mistake of these poor peasants was venial when compared with
those of the Allies. On the capture of Mainz, Conde, and Valenciennes,
the Prussian, Austrian, and British commanders did not enforce an
unconditional surrender, but offered to allow the garrisons to march out
with the honours of war on condition of not serving against them for a
year. A better example of shirking present problems at the cost of
enhanced difficulties in the future cannot be imagined. By this
improvident lenity the Allies enabled the regicides to hurl fully 25,000
trained troops against the royalists of the West and deal them terrible
blows. In September and October the Republicans gained considerable
successes, especially at Cholet. Soon the Vendean War became little more
than a guerilla strife, which Pitt fed by means of arms and stores, but
not in the energetic manner desired by Burke and Windham.

These ardent royalists constantly pressed him to help the men of Poitou
and Brittany, but had to deplore the wearisome delays which then clogged
all military and naval operations. Most bitterly did Burke write to
Windham, early in November 1793, that Ministers were so eager in seeking
to win indemnities from France that they had hardened the national
resistance of that nation, and meanwhile had not sent a single shipload
of stores to the brave men of Poitou. Of course it was less easy than
Burke imagined to get stores across a sea not yet fully commanded by the
British fleet, and through inlets and harbours closely watched by the
enemy. But the inaction of a force entrusted to the Earl of Moira for
the support of the French royalists is cer