With the new accessions to his army, the prince commanded a force very considerably larger than any he had led in the previous wars. Among the conflicting statements, we may find it difficult to fix its numbers. Agrippa d'Aubigne says that, after the losses consequent upon the defeat of Messignac and those resulting from camp diseases, Conde's army consisted of only seventeen thousand foot soldiers, and two thousand five hundred horsemen.[612] A Huguenot bulletin, sent from La Rochelle for the information of Queen Elizabeth and the Protestants of England, may have given somewhat too favorable a view of the prince's prospects, but was certainly nearer the truth, in assigning him twenty-five thousand arquebusiers and a cavalry force of five or six thousand men.[613] On the other hand, Henry of Anjou, who had been placed in nominal command of the Roman Catholic army, had not yet been able to assemble a much superior, probably not an equal, number of soldiers. The large forces which, according to his ambassador at the English court, Charles the Ninth could call out,[614] existed only on paper. The younger Tavannes, whose father was the true head of the royal army, gives it but about twenty thousand men.[615] It was already nearly winter when the armies were collected, and their operations during the remainder of the campaign were indecisive. In the numerous skirmishes that occurred the Huguenots usually had the advantage, and sometimes inflicted considerable damage upon the enemy. But the Duke of Anjou, or the more experienced leaders commanding in his name, studiously avoided a general engagement. The instructions from the court were to wear out the courage and enthusiasm of Conde's adherents by protracting a tame and monotonous warfare.[616] The prince's true policy, on the contrary, lay in decided action. His soldiers were inferior to none in France. The flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled. But, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.[617] The nobles and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more pitiable class than even the burgesses. The latter, whom devotion to their religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction, had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in great pecuniary distress. It was not, however, possible for Conde and Coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline, and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time, their design of wresting from his hands the city of Saumur, a convenient point of communication with northern France. Early in December the vines