The Yellow Poppy

by D. K. Broster

(1)

And now at last the West was really ablaze, and in a few days, as department after department lit up with the carefully prepared flame, the Republicans began to suffer more serious reverses than they had known since the days of the grande guerre, the Vendée proper, six years before. For the Chouannerie which the dying Directory had to face was very different from what it had been in the days of Hoche and the Convention; it was no longer a swarm of small peasant uprisings led, sometimes, by nameless chiefs as uneducated as the men who followed them. The leaders of this war were gentlemen, returned émigrés, with enrolled levies at their disposal; with a system of requisition, a network of espionage and intelligence throughout the country districts; with, here and there, white-plumed staff officers wearing the cross of St. Louis, with uniforms, now and then with fifes and drums, and even, in one or two cases, with a little cavalry.

And their tactics were new and more formidable. No longer did they content themselves with overrunning the country districts, avoiding the neighbourhood of towns; on the contrary, as M. de Kersaint had told the ladies of La Vergne, they were in such force that they threatened—and did more than threaten—those centres of Republicanism.

At the voice of Cadoudal the country between Vannes and Auray had risen as one man. Not vainly had he boasted in the spring of his careful organisation. And while he himself successively took Landévant between Auray and Hennebont, Port Navalo at the outlet of the inland sea of the Morbihan, and other places between that and the mouth of the Vilaine, his lieutenant Sol de Grisolles raised the districts between the mouth of the Vilaine and that of the Loire. To him fell La Roche-Bernard on the river itself, Pontchâteau and Guérande with its mediæval walls and towers, a formidable triangle of possessions above St. Nazaire and the Loire mouth. And these were only some of the Republican losses in Brittany.

Maine fought under the young Comte de Bourmont, seconded by the veteran Chevalier de Tercier, and Chappedelaine, and the Chevalier de Châteauneuf—who was “Achille le blond.” Another of Bourmont’s lieutenants, La Fregeolière, pushed as far as Le Lude and La Flèche on the borders of the Angoumois and Touraine. Anjou obeyed the old Comte de Châtillon, and, after the brilliant initial success of his chief of staff, d’Andigné, at Noyant in September, the Angevins made rapid incursions into the districts of Segré, Candé and Châteauneuf. Ingrandes, Varades on the Loire, garrisoned towns, were threatened. From the Loire right up to the Côtes-du-Nord the Republican cantonments and posts were submerged under a flood of insurgents.

But far more resounding than all these widespread successes were the audacious coups de main carried out on large towns. St. Brieuc on its bay in the Côtes-du-Nord was not, it is true, a large town, but it was garrisoned; yet Mercier, Cadoudal’s young alter ego, and Saint-Régent took and held it for a night while General Casabianca barricaded himself in his hotel. The Chouans set free three hundred Royalists imprisoned there, and took muskets. But, ten days before this, a much more daring capture had been made—nothing less than the city of Le Mans which, at three o’clock on the morning of October 15, Bourmont’s forces entered at five points simultaneously. He held it for three days before he withdrew. Even more than Le Mans, Nantes, that great city, proud of its resistance to the Vendean army, might have seemed secure. But while Grigny, commanding there, went out in the wrong direction to encounter the Angevins, Châtillon and d’Andigné, under cover of a thick fog, slipped in at four o’clock in the morning of October 20 with no more than two thousand followers, of whom only half were accustomed to arms.

The taking of Nantes, though the place had to be evacuated before daylight, and though it did not give the captors any material advantage in the way of arms and powder, as did the seizure of Le Mans, had, equally with that exploit, exactly the effect on public opinion that the Royalists had hoped, creating such a terror in the large towns that they could not be left without adequate garrisons, and thus immobilising a number of Republican troops, and leaving the country districts freer for the operations of the Royalists. Before either of these feats, however, the example had been set in Finistère—and was not Valentine proud of it?—when her husband, with a smaller force than any, seized and held for two days and nights the pleasant cathedral city of Quimper, the chef-lieu of the department. Yet she could hardly have been prouder than ‘les jeunes,’ who played a most conspicuous part in the enterprise. To the Republicans of Quimper the sudden inroad of a hitherto unknown phenomenon, Chouan cavalry—not very wonderfully mounted, it is true, nor smartly equipped, but making a terrific noise on the cobbled streets—was little short of apocalyptic. The Chevalier de la Vergne, the commander of this small body, observed to his two intimates that they had a right to give themselves airs, since the capture of Quimper was undoubtedly due in the main to “Charlemagne’s Horse,” as he had christened his corps; but Roland reminded him that, if such were the case, it was really Mirabel which had taken the town, for Mirabel had mounted and armed those cavaliers, as it had armed the greater part of M. de Kersaint’s gars.

And, after leaving Quimper, before the troops sent in haste from the Morbihan could fall upon him, the Marquis de Kersaint was up threatening Châteaulin, while M. du Ménars with “Charlemagne’s Horse” marched rapidly towards Carhaix. A force was then ordered out of Brest in the hopes of catching the Royalists between two fires, but, nobody knew how, M. de Kersaint and his men slipped through, and, effecting a junction with his subordinate, plunged into the wild, broken country round Huelgoat, where the Blues did not dare to follow them. Finally, in retiring unsatisfied to Brest, the Republicans were fallen upon in the rear by a perfectly unexpected body of Chouans from the north, which they had believed quiet. Their leader was one “Sincère.” And the authorities, completely misinformed as they had been about the supposed quiescence of Finistère, were at their wits’ end to know where the flame would next break out in the department.

But south of the Loire things did not go so well. There were no great generals left there; the majority even of the former officers were missing. Forestier, the most popular, was still recovering from his terrible wound of August, and his ill-success then made a new levy still more difficult. Yet d’Autichamp, Suzannet, and Grignon, who divided the three Vendean commands, did their best. The Republicans had few forces on the left bank of the Loire, and one brilliant success might have raised Vendée from ruins. The success did not come. Suzannet attacked Montaigu, was beaten off and severely wounded, a misfortune which led directly to the dispersal of his men. D’Autichamp, who had got together a rather larger force, fell in at Les Aubiers with two hundred and fifty Blues whose commander stationed some of them in the church tower, whence they killed and wounded some forty Royalists. It was proposed to burn them out, but this would have offended the religious scruples of the Vendeans, and they were besieged instead. After twenty-four hours without food or water they were still holding out. Meanwhile the Republican chef de brigade at Bressuire was on the march. D’Autichamp went to Nueil to defend the passage of the little river Argenton against him, left the command there to a peasant subordinate, and returned to Les Aubiers. He had better have stayed at Nueil. The Vendeans, according to their incorrigible habit, neglected to put sentries, the Blues from Bressuire surprised them, and they were put to flight.

The affair did not cost many men, but it had a most unfortunate moral effect. Five thousand Vendeans had allowed themselves to be surprised and routed by eight hundred Blues. “Where is Cathelineau?” was the universal cry. And in fact this miserable affray of Les Aubiers decided the fate of the whole campaign in Vendée, for after it d’Autichamp could only skirmish, and Grignon, in the centre, was never able to get together many men. Much, certainly, had hung on the valour of the Blues in the church tower and the religious scruples of their opponents.