Bussy was now in this serious dilemma, that if he should obey and quit Haidarabad, the field would be left open to his enemies there, whereas if he remained, not only must he take the consequences of insubordination, but Lally's failure on the coast would unquestionably entail ruin, sooner or later, upon the French party at Haidarabad. Very reluctantly, and after much remonstrance, he obeyed the order. It is probable, on the whole, that he was right in believing himself likely to serve Lally better by remaining to assist the French army with supplies drawn from the resources of the Deccan than by joining him on the coast with a small reinforcement; but this is by no means certain. For the fact remains that the one essential point was to drive the English out of the country, that Lally was quite right in declaring no peace or security to be possible for France in India until this had been done, and that when the struggle came Bussy might have not been able to co-operate decisively from so distant a base as Haidarabad. Clearly the first step was to beat the English by adroit and straightforward fighting, whereby the problems of expansion would have been mightily simplified and could have been solved afterwards at leisure.
Unluckily for the French, Lally, a soldier of great bravery and self-devotion, was yet a man totally unfit for the work. The French minister, D'Argenson, when the directors asked the Crown for Lally's services, warned them in words that almost exactly foretold what subsequently ensued that he was a hot-headed, stiff-
