Short as the war had been it was full of horrors. Wherever the two armies passed the country was laid waste. The towns-people were comparatively safe behind their walls, but the peasantry were between two millstones: there was no escaping except by flight to the woods and leaving the fields uncultivated, the consequence of which was famine and pestilence. In Schiller’s picturesque language, “men became savage like their countries.”[410] After the proclamation of peace a few governors did all they could to check the disorders of the royal troops in their provinces. Marshal Damville, commanding in Guienne, Poitou, and Dauphiny, issued many regulations to pacify the country and restrain the license of the soldiery, who had assumed the administrations of several towns by turning out the magistrates and substituting drum-head justice for the regular courts of law. They appropriated the contents of the city chests, and the only limits to their extortions were the means of the citizens to pay. Many large towns had been half deserted by their inhabitants, who in despair had formed into volunteer partisan corps, which roamed over the country, making the roads unsafe, and plundering friend and foe alike. They were under a rude kind of military discipline, resembling in this as in other respects the brigand bands of modern Greece and Southern Italy. To remedy this great evil, Damville ordered the officers and soldiers to permit the exiles to return on condition that they gave up their arms, gentlemen and others having the privilege of wearing swords being excepted. Charles himself frequently complained that the provincial governors did not attempt to carry out the treaty of Longjumeau. On the 31st March he wrote to Condé regretting that the edict of toleration had not been observed as fully as he had desired, and declared it to be his wish that all his subjects, without respect of religion, should be protected alike. He grieved that justice was not so purely administered as it ought to be--a state of things he would remedy as far as possible.