Page:History of the French in India.djvu/339

 INTENSE DISAPPOINTMENT OF DUPLEIX. 315 capture of this convoy, on the destruction or. at least, chap. • * r ■< VII the repulse of this relieving party. To this end he had v devoted all his faculties. He had been to Law the eye 1752. to see, the ear to hear ; it was not, alas for him, in his power to be the mind to conceive or the arm to strike. He had given Law all the necessary information ; the rest, being soldier's work, he had left to him as a soldier to perform. The result showed that the mere donning of epaulets does not make a man a soldier : that if devoid of the intellect given by God to man, and not, as some would seem to think, implanted in the dress he wears, that very dress and the fancied knowledge attaching to it make the pedant more pedantic, the shallow-minded and narrow more vain, more obstinate, more contemptuous of the opinion of the many wiser men who wear it not. Law had come out to Dupleix recommended by letters from the directors and by his own vaun tings, — the latter probably the cause of the former. Had he, who boasted himself a soldier, acted even as a man of ordinary common-sense would have acted, it might have been pardoned him had he failed in fair fight before the genius of a Clive and the persistence of a Lawrence. But it is clear that he would have failed equally before men of far inferior capacity. It needed but for his oppo- nent to be capable of advancing, — a rarer quality, how- ever, than is generally supposed, — and Law would have succumbed. He did everything out of season ; and the reason was, that although he wore a soldier's coat, he was not a soldier. How keenly Dupleix felt the bitter disappointment can scarcely be described, nor will we attempt to describe it. We would rather dwell on the measures which, in spite of his disappointment, he adopted un- hesitatingly, to remedy, as far as possible, the disaster. His was indeed no easy position. Where was he to find a general Bussy, the only competent commander