"I cannot congratulate you, René, on your leaders! That man d'Hervilly is incompetent and ridiculous; Heaven send he do not make a mess of everything! And as for Puisaye, who fancies himself the man to stand in La Rouërie's shoes and to head the Chouannerie—I know something of him and of his intrigues in Jersey. Well, I must be getting back to my men over there, lest Grain d'Orge is letting them also acquire firearms too quickly. Au revoir, my friend; I trust not to be away more than a few days."
"You are going then—but where?"
"I am going to help Tinténiac and du Boisberthelot drive the Blues out of Auray and Landévant. When I return I hope to see the fleur-de-lys on Fort Penthièvre over there. Au revoir!"
He wrung the Marquis's hand and departed, and René watched his tall figure making its way through the scarlet-clad ranks of émigrés (whose uniforms seemed to many of them to smack too much of English patronage) ere he himself turned away.
CHAPTER XXIII
Displeasure of "Monsieur Augustin"
In a little wood to the south of Auray, and in an exceedingly bad temper, the Chevalier de la Vireville sat on a fallen tree and surveyed his small band of Chouans, who, lying, seated or crouched round him on their heels, looked at him with the expression of dogs who know that they deserve a beating—though wearing, indeed, the appearance of dogs who have already received one.
It was the evening of the third of July, six days after the landing at Carnac. During those days Auray and Landévant had already been taken by the Chouans and abandoned again for lack of support. Last night had come peremptory orders from Carnac that they were to be retaken; so the Comte du Boisberthelot and La Vireville had set out at eleven that morning, without a single piece of artillery, to recapture Auray, which was garrisoned by a thousand men under the Republican adjutant-general Mermet. At the same time Tinténiac, although he knew the task to be impossible, had attacked Landévant.
Mermet's sentries were not on the alert, and so the Comte du Boisberthelot, who was a sailor, came charging in at the head of his men by the route de l'Eglise, and drove out the Republicans. But outside the town was Hoche himself, who ordered them to retake it at any price. Mermet, in obeying this order, fell into the neat ambush which La Vireville had prepared for him in a copse by the Faubourg St. Goustan, and his column was on the point of breaking up in disorder when Hoche came quickly up with his grenadiers and two pieces of artillery. To stop his advance—a hopeless attempt it was—La Vireville transferred himself and his Bretons to the bridge into the town, cast up a barricade with carts and casks and beams, and could probably have held this obstacle for a long time against hand-to-hand fighting, or if he had possessed the smallest piece of artillery. It was the want of that which had caused him to grind his teeth as his men fired and reloaded and fired behind the rapidly vanishing barricade, their own numbers dwindling in proportion. For it was Hoche who had the cannon.
So he and his Chouans were driven from their position, and, penned into the square by the church, were mown down by grapeshot till he got them out of the town, when, in order to cover the wounded du Boisberthelot's retreat to Locmaria, they returned to the guerrilla fighting to which they were most accustomed, lying hidden in the broom and picking off their men with the skill of poachers. Unfortunately the Republican artillery discovered them there also. . . . Nothing that La Vireville could say or do would stop them this time; their abandonment of the position became a rout, whose track was strewn with discarded sabots and knapsacks and even with muskets. The émigré himself, swearing and furious, was swept away on the flood, and finally, at dusk, fugitives and leader found themselves in this little wood, not much more than a coppice, but safe enough from pursuit, where the former had time to draw breath and to reflect, and the latter to get rid of some of the bitter anger and disgust which had prompted him, at first, to leave them to their own devices and return alone to sell his life at Auray.
He took another look round his dejected followers, and propped his head between his fists, his elbows on his knees, to think. He knew that he could get these fierce and childlike natures in hand again—that, ashamed and penitent, they were, in fact, already in the desired condition. He had no right, after all, to be hard on them for the shortcomings of others. It was not their fault that they had no artillery, and that help had not been sent from the émigré regiments at Carnac. Moreover, his men had done no worse than the rest, for a rumour was already afoot that Tinténiac, the reckless and irresistible, had been beaten back from Landévant, and that Vauban with his supporting force of Chouans had fared no better.