The French wounded, with a few men rescued from the ships that were sunk, were sent on shore by cartel to the Duc D’Aiguillon, as soon as the weather had moderated sufficiently. With them were sent also a hundred and twenty French soldiers, the poor remnant of a half-battalion of the regiment of Saintonge, and a company of militiamen gunners from Brest, who had served on board the _Formidable_. Two of our own ships were wrecked in Quiberon Bay, one on the night of the battle. That was the _Resolution_, to which ship the _Formidable_ had hauled down her flag. The other was the _Essex_, which was cast away early next morning while trying to secure Conflans’ flagship. The storm continued to rage with unabated fury during the whole of the day after the battle. To Hawke, though, their fate was only part of the price for the risk incurred in bringing the French to battle. This was the victor’s summing up on the day’s work. “When I consider the season of the year,” wrote Hawke to the Admiralty, in his modestly worded dispatch, “the hard gales on the day of action, the shortness of the day, and the coast they were on, I can boldly affirm that all that could possibly be done has been done. As to the loss we have sustained, let it be placed to the account of the necessity I was under of running all risks to break this strong force of the enemy. Had we had but two hours more daylight the whole had been totally destroyed or taken, for we were almost up with their van when night overtook us.” In this plain way did the victor of Quiberon Bay render his account to the nation, this grand old fighting seaman and leader to whom England has not yet found room for a monument, either at the Abbey or in St. Paul’s. The battle of Quiberon Bay sealed the fate of France at sea for the Seven Years’ War. The building of “flat bottoms” stopped after that; there was no more mustering of armies along the French coast, no more discussion in the Pompadour’s boudoir of schemes for the invasion of England. The guns that should have conquered us they rusted on the shore, The men that would have mastered us they drummed and marched no more, For England was England, and a mighty brood she bore— When Hawke came swooping from the West! “It seems as though France is never to have a navy,” said King Louis morosely, while sitting at supper with the Pompadour on the night that the Quiberon dispatches reached Versailles. * * * * *