On the day after Clive's triumph in India, a bold and improvident soldier, of indomitable courage and will, passionately attached to France, which had received him and his cause--M. Lally-Tollendal, of Irish origin, and already known by his conduct, first in England and then in Scotland, during the expedition of Prince Charles Edward--proposed to the ministers of Louis XV. a new attempt to re-establish France's situation in the East. The directors of the India Company sustained his proposal. The king had promised troops. M. d'Argenson knew Lally's character, and hesitated. The representations of the company won him. When M. de Lally landed at Pondicherry in 1757, the treasury was empty, the arsenals unprovided with arms and munitions, and the English were pressing on the French possessions at all points. The ardor of the general sufficed to remove all obstacles. Lally marched on Gondalem, which he razed on the sixteenth day. Shortly afterward he invested Fort St. David, the most notable of the English fortresses in India. The first assault was repulsed. The count had neither cannons nor beasts of burden to bring them. He hastened to Pondicherry and attached the Hindoos to the trains of artillery, taking indiscriminately the men who came to hand, without troubling himself as to rank or caste, thus imprudently wounding the dearest prejudices of the country that he came to govern. Fort St. David was taken and razed. Devicotch, hardly besieged, opened its gates. Lally had been scarcely a month in India, and already he had chased the English from the south coast of Coromandel. "My whole policy is contained in these five words, but they are sacramental: 'No English in the peninsula,'" wrote the general. He had sent orders to Bussy to rejoin him at Madras.
The ardent heroism of M. de Lally had for a time troubled the English by restoring courage to the remnants of the French colony. The grave defects of his character soon seconded the efforts of his adversaries by surrounding him with enemies, secret or declared, among his compatriots themselves. Being badly backed by M. d'Aché, who was in command of the French fleet, and who was twice beaten by the English, he attacked Madras in the month of September, 1758, with an undisciplined army, addicted to the most frightful debauchery, and commanded by chiefs who were either angry or discontented. Bussy could not console himself for having been obliged to abandon the Dekhan to the feeble hands of the Marquis de Conflaus. The black town had been stormed; the white town resisted valiantly. On the 18th of February, 1759, Lally was obliged to raise the siege; Colonel Coote had just taken possession of the fortress of Wandewash. The general wished to regain it. The battle which was fought on the 22d of January, 1760, was fatal to the French; M. de Bussy was made prisoner and immediately sent to Europe. "To him alone did the capacity belong to have continued the war for ten years," said the Hindoos. Karikal was in the hands of the English. They were marching on Pondicherry.