Page:History of the French in India.djvu/537

 THE COMPONENT PARTS OF LALLY'S FORCE. 511 seized. D'Ache was even worse. It is probable chap. • XII that if the French armament which accompanied Lally had been commanded by a Suffren, it wonld 1753. have achieved at least a temporary success. Suffren himself, some five and twenty years later, did maintain on the seas the superiority which in 1758 would have enabled Lally to carry out his designs on shore. But d'Ache was the feeblest, the weakest, the most nerveless of men ; the very last officer to whom the command of a fleet should have been intrusted, the most unfit man in the world to be the colleague of Lally. The Chevalier de Soupire, sailing with nearly a thousand men of the regiment of Lorraine, 50 artillerymen, and two millions of livres (about 80,000/.) on December 30, 1756, anchored off Pondichery on September 9 of the following year. He arrived at a moment, which, had he been a man of action, might have been made decisive. It was at the time when the English had retired from all their conquests in Southern India — TrichinapalH, Arkat, Chengalpa, tand Kanchipuram alone excepted ; when Madras was stillbut slightly fortified ; whenFort St. David, almost in ruins, was garrisoned by but 60 invalids ; when Saubinet was retaking the places which his predecessors had lost, unopposed by the English in the field, and caring little for the undisciplined levies of Muhammad Ali. It was just such a moment which Dupleix, or La Bourdonnais, or Bussy, or Lally himself would have used to the complete expulsion of the British from the Kar- natik. For the French were not only masters on land ; they were, up to the end of the month of April of the following year, masters also at sea. It is obvious that in this crisis the Government of Pondichery should have directed the combined forces of Saubinet and de Soupire to proceed against the cardinal points of the English possessions — Fort St. David and Fort St. George. The first would most cer- tainly have fallen without a blow, and its fall would