CHAPTER V.
THEIR LIFE IN TIME OF WAR.
Many of them had no arms but pikes. They had plenty of good fowling-pieces. Their were no more skilful marksmen than the poachers of the Bocage and the smugglers of Loroux.
They were strange, frightful, fearless warriors. The decree to raise three hundred thousand men caused the tocsin to sound in six hundred villages. The crackling of fire burst from every point at once. Le Poitou and Anjou exploded the same day. We may say that the first peal of thunder was heard before 1792, the eighth of July, a month before the tenth of August, on the moor of Kerbader. Alain Redeler, to-day forgotten, was the forerunner of La Rochejaquelein and Jean Chouan. The royalists compelled all able-bodied men to march, under pain of death. They requisitioned horses, wagons, and provisions. Immediately, Sapinaud had three thousand soldiers; Cathelineau, ten thousand; Stofflet, twenty thousand, and Charette was master of Noirmontier. The Viscount de Scépeaux roused Haut Anjou; the Chevalier de Dieuzie, l'Entre-Vilaine-et-Loire; Tristan-l'Hermite, the Bas-Maine; the barber Gaston, the town of Guéménée; and the Abbé Bornier, all the rest. A little thing was enough to raise these multitudes.
In the tabernacle of a priest who had taken the oaths, a préte jureur as he was called, they placed a large black cat which jumped out suddenly during the mass. "It is the devil!" cried the peasants, and the whole canton rose in revolt. A breath of fire came from the confessionals.
For attacking the Blues and for leaping ravines, they had a long stick, fifteen feet in length, the ferte, a weapon and an aid to flight. In the thickest of the conflict, when the peasants were attacking the Republican squares, if they met a cross or a chapel on the battlefield, all would
