tainly discreditable to him
and to Ministers. Among them the Duke of Richmond, Master of Ordnance,
distinguished himself by his incapacity and his ridiculous orders.
Another obvious misfit was Lord Chatham at the Admiralty. But how can we
explain the inactivity of four regiments in the Channel Islands all the
summer? Surely they could have seized St. Malo or the Quiberon
Peninsula.[228] Such a diversion would have been highly effective. For
the Bretons and Vendeans, when supplied with arms, could have marched
eastwards and roused the royalists of Normandy, Maine, and Touraine.
With so potent a foe near to Paris, must not the regicides have been
overborne by Coburg in Flanders? Everything tends to show that the
Republicans feared the royalists of the West more than the Austrians in
the North. But, as will appear in a later chapter, Pitt and Dundas
decided to throw their strength into the West Indies. On 26th November
1793, Sir John Jervis sailed for that deadly bourne with 7,000 troops.

Events were soon to reveal the seriousness of this mistake. It was far
more important to strike at Paris through Brittany than to occupy even
the richest of the French West Indies. For a triumphant advance of the
Bretons and Vendeans must not only have lessened the material resources
of the Republic but also have deprived its defenders of one of their
chief advantages. Hitherto the Republicans had been better massed
together, while their assailants were spread over wide spaces. It is a
well-known principle in war that an army operating on an inner arc, or
what are termed interior lines, has a great advantage over forces spread
over the outer circumference. The Allies then held the Pyrenees, the
Maritime Alps, the Rhine, and most of Flanders, Brittany, and parts of
the South. The defenders, possessing the central provinces, could mass
their units far more quickly and choose the point on that outer curve
against which they would aim their blow.

This principle was thoroughly understood by Carnot. Near the centre of
the circle he massed the levies that were to save the Republic, and,
confiding them to zealots who were resolved to conquer or die, he soon
had on foot armies which, however contemptible as units, were formidable
from their weight and their enthusiasm. As in mechanics the mass
multiplied by the speed gives the effective force, so in the campaign of
1793 the _levee en masse_ multiplied by enthusiasm and impelled by the
brain pow