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176 Savannah in 1779, won the cross of St. Louis, and was a member of the Order of Cincinnatus. Brigadier-General under Dumouriez in Flanders, he was ordered to make a feigned attack on Tournay, to prevent it from assisting Mons, which was to be simultaneously attacked by Biron. According to Lord Gower's information, Dillon ventured too near the enemy, and was attacked while his horses were grazing. He ordered a retreat as prearranged, but the retreat became a headlong flight, and the soldiers, thinking Dillon had betrayed them, cut him to pieces in a barn where he had taken refuge, threw the body on a fire in Lille marketplace, and danced savagely round it. The Convention conferred a pension on Josephine Viefville, with whom Dillon had cohabited for nine years, but, as he said in a will made the previous day, had not had time to marry, as also on their three children.

Brigadier-General Thomas Ward, born at Dublin in 1748, had a similar fate to Arthur Dillon. He lodged at the same hotel as Paine, and related to Paine a conversation he had had with Marat. The latter said, Frenchmen were mad to allow foreigners to live among them. They should cut off their ears, let them bleed a few days, and then cut off their heads. "But you yourself are a foreigner," remarked Ward. Paine, in May 1793, informed the Convention committee of this episode, and suggested that they should question Ward upon it. Though