It is, however, possible that the Governor made these declarations in good faith, for he had hardly been a year in the country, and was obliged to rely for advice on the Residents and Vice-Residents; and these civilians, hating the military element, were only too eager to throw doubts on the exactitude of the information contained in the reports coming in from the military territories, and they openly declared that the officers of the colonial army were intentionally exaggerating the gravity of the situation in the hope of provoking operations likely to bring them promotion and decorations. The contradictory advice of his civilian staff was possibly one of the causes which led the Governor to pooh-pooh the importance of this new upheaval, declaring that the Generals were alarmists, and that the well-armed and organised bands of Luu-Ky were "_que des voleurs de vaches pour venir au bout desquels il suffirait de quelques gendarmes_" ("only cattle-stealers with whom a few policemen could deal"). These declarations provoked the anger and disgust of every officer and man in the colony, and very soon a veritable hatred reigned between the civil and military elements. The different newspapers sided with the parties appealing most to their sentiments or their pockets; for it was an open secret that some of these journals were subventioned by the Government, and a wordy warfare wherein neither insults nor invective were spared, was the order of the day. Doubtless there were faults on both sides; and it is certain that the Commander-in-Chief committed an unpardonable error by issuing general orders to the troops, to be read at parades and posted up in the barracks, in which the civilian authorities were belittled and reproached with having insulted the army. This necessarily added fuel to the fire; and the situation became so strained that officers and civilians came to fisticuffs in the streets of the capital, and several serious duels took place. Things were, however, brought to a climax towards the end of August by the abduction of three Frenchmen on the railway-line, one of whom, M. Vezin, was the principal engineer representing the big contracting firm, Fives-Lille & Co. The consternation in high quarters when this news was received was considerable, for there existed no possible chance of keeping such thrilling information out of the newspapers in Paris.