Page:History of the French in India.djvu/533

 507 CHAPTER XII. THE LAST STRUGGLE FOR EMPIRE. The new commander, Thomas Arthur, Count de Lally chap. and Baron de Tollendal, upon whom the hopes of t France in her struggle with England for supremacy in 1758. the East now rested, was regarded at the time of his appointment as the most eminent and promising of all the younger officers of the armies of Louis XV. The son of an Irish exile, Sir Gerard O'Lally, who had entered the service of France after the capture of Limerick in 1691, Lally, born nine years later, had, from his earliest days, been initiated in war. When a mere youth he had served under his father at Gerona and Barcelona, and he was not yet nineteen when he obtained the command of a company in the regiment of Dillon, one of the regiments of the Irish Brigade. During the French- Austrian war of 1734, he distin- guished himself greatly at Kehl and Philipsburg. Nor, when peace followed, did he show himself less capable of achieving diplomatic success. Sent into Russia to negotiate a secret alliance between France and that country, he acquitted himself so well as to gain the favour of the Czarina, though the timid policy of Cardinal Fleury rendered his mission resultless. On the breaking out of the war of the Succession, Lally served with distinction, but it was at Fontenoy that he gained his spurs. To him, it is said, was due the idea of that famous charge on the flank of the English column, terribly galled by the artillery in its front,