and inconsiderate French ones had made it. We knew it, and so well, too, that the appropriateness of having our troops winter in our colonies of the West Indies was at one time considered. Our minister, Gérard, was of that opinion: “The Americans are little accustomed to live with French people, for whom they cannot have as yet a very marked inclination.”
“It is difficult to imagine,” said Abbé Robin, “the idea Americans entertained about the French before the war. They considered them as groaning under the yoke of despotism, a prey to superstition and prejudices, almost idolatrous in their religion, and as a kind of light, brittle, queer-shapen mechanism, only busy frizzling their hair and painting their faces, without faith or morals.” How would thousands of such mechanisms be received?
Preparing to give the enemy “hot shot”
With his usual clear-headedness, Rochambeau did the necessary thing on each point. To begin with, in case of an English attack, which was at first expected every day, he lost no time in fortifying the position he occupied, “having,” wrote Mathieu-Dumas, “personally selected the chief points to be defended, and having batteries of heavy artillery and mortars erected along the channel, with furnaces to heat the balls.”
During “the first six days,” says Closen, “we were not quite at our ease, but, luckily, Messieurs les Anglais showed us great consideration, and we suffered from nothing worse than grave anxieties.” After the second week Rochambeau could write home that if Clinton appeared he would be well received. Shortly after he feels sorry the visit is delayed; later, when his own second division, so ardently desired, did not appear, he writes to the war minister: “In two words, Sir Henry Clinton and I are very punctilious, and the question is between us who will first call on the other. If we do not get up earlier in the morning than the English, and the reinforcements they expect from Europe reach them before our second division arrives, they will pay us a visit here that I should prefer to pay them in New York.”
Concerning the reputation of the French, Rochambeau and his officers were in perfect accord; it would change if exemplary discipline were maintained throughout the campaign. There is nothing the chief paid more attention to than this, nor with more complete success. Writing to Prince de Montbarey a month after the landing, Rochambeau says: “I can answer for the discipline of the army; not a man has left his camp; not a cabbage has been stolen; not a complaint has been heard.”
Not one complaint against the conduct of the French troops
To the President of Congress he had written a few days before: “I hope that account will have been rendered to Your Excellency of the discipline observed by the French troops; there has not been one complaint; not a man has missed a roll-call. We are your brothers and we shall act as such with you; we shall fight your enemies by your side as if we were one and the same nation.”
Mentioning in his memoirs the visit of those “savages” who had been formerly under French rule and persisted in remaining friendly to us, he adds: “The sight of guns, troops, and military exercises caused them no surprise; but they were greatly astonished to see apple trees with their apples upon them overhanging the soldiers' tents.” “This result,” he concludes, “was due not only to the zeal of officers, but more than anything else to the good disposition of the soldiers, which never failed.”
William Channing, father of the philanthropist, confides to the same Ezra Stiles, in a letter of August 6, 1780, his delighted surprise: “The French are a fine body of men and appear to be well officered. Neither the officers nor men are the effeminate beings we were heretofore taught to believe them. They are as large and likely men as can be produced by any nation.” So much for the brittle, queer-shaped mechanisms.
With the French officers in the West Indies, most of them former companions in arms and personal friends, Rochambeau,
