To close up our ranks, when a comrade bites dust,
And march on, unbroken.”
“Monsieur d’Charette a dit à ceux d’Monfort,
Monsieur d’Charette a dit à ceux d’Monfort
‘Frappez fort ;
Le drapeau blanc défend contre la mort !’”
—Monsieur d’ Charette.
At half an hour after noon next day Louis-Henri-François de Marcé, with forty-eight years of service and two thousand five hundred men behind him, marched out of Chantonnay in the direction of Saint Fulgent, with the intention of completing his victory of the previous Sunday. At three o’clock he passed the river Lay on the pont du Gravereau, which had been cut by the peasants and subsequently repaired by his orders, after which he proceeded to repair a second bridge at the mill of La Rivière, a league further on.
While his troops were thus occupied there appeared over the high and wooded ground in front of him a large body of armed men. The Republican general would have taken them for insurgents, had not the commissary of the Convention who accompanied him distinctly heard borne towards him on the breeze the surge of the Marseillaise, that sound dear to every good patriot, as he remarked to the veteran. It stamped them, he asserted, as the National Guard from Nantes, and De Marcé went on with his bridge-mending. On all sides, except to his rear, the heights surrounded him: it was an ill position to defend, but at the moment he was not thinking of defence.
Yet it was not the true Marseillaise which was being sung on the heights; it was the Marseillaise Vendéenne, whose words, wedded indeed to the same famous air, expressed far other sentiments. With their rosaries round their necks the peasants were chanting lustily in their patois.