yalists, desolation and
ruin in scenes once peaceful and happy such horrors American patriotism
learned to associate with the Loyalists. These in their turn remembered
the slow martyrdom of their lives as social outcasts, the threats and
plunder which in the end forced them to fly, the hardships, starvation,
and death to their loved ones which were wont to follow. The conflict
is perhaps the most tragic and irreconcilable in the whole story of the
Revolution.

CHAPTER X. FRANCE TO THE RESCUE

During 1778 and 1779 French effort had failed. Now France resolved to do
something decisive. She never sent across the sea the eight thousand men
promised to La Fayette but by the spring of 1780 about this number were
gathered at Brest to find that transport was inadequate. The leader was
a French noble, the Comte de Rochambeau, an old campaigner, now in his
fifty-fifth year, who had fought against England before in the Seven
Years' War and had then been opposed by Clinton, Cornwallis, and Lord
George Germain. He was a sound and prudent soldier who shares with La
Fayette the chief glory of the French service in America. Rochambeau had
fought at the second battle of Minden, where the father of La Fayette
had fallen, and he had for the ardent young Frenchman the amiable regard
of a father and sometimes rebuked his impulsiveness in that spirit. He
studied the problem in America with the insight of a trained leader.
Before he left France he made the pregnant comment on the outlook:
"Nothing without naval supremacy." About the same time Washington was
writing to La Fayette that a decisive naval supremacy was a fundamental
need.

A gallant company it was which gathered at Brest. Probably no other land
than France could have sent forth on a crusade for democratic liberty a
band of aristocrats who had little thought of applying to their own land
the principles for which they were ready to fight in America. Over some
of them hung the shadow of the guillotine; others were to ride the storm
of the French Revolution and to attain fame which should surpass their
sanguine dreams. Rochambeau himself, though he narrowly escaped during
the Reign of Terror, lived to extreme old age and died a Marshal of
France. Berthier, one of his officers, became one of Napoleon's marshals
and died just when Napoleon, whom he had deserted, returned from Elba.
Dumas became another of Napoleon's generals. He nearly perished in the
retreat from Moscow but live