The ravings of the French Convention would soon have ended, had not a great organizer now appeared. On 17th August 1793 Carnot entered the Committee of Public Safety, and thenceforth wielded its limitless powers for purposes of national defence. He was an officer of engineers, and had eagerly studied the principles of strategy. Throwing himself with ardour into the Revolution, he became a member of the National Assembly, and now was charged with the supervision of the War Department. At the War Committee he had the help of officers scarcely less able. Among them Mallet du Pan, in an interesting survey of French administrators, names D'Arcon as largely contributing to the French triumphs at Dunkirk and Maubeuge. He calls him a soul on fire and full of resource.[227] But the brain and will of this Committee was Carnot. His application to work for some twelve or fourteen hours a day, his hold on masses of details, and his burning patriotism, enabled him to inflame, control, and energize Frenchmen until they became a nation in arms. Moreover, Carnot had the invaluable gift of selecting the best commanders. True, the Frenchman was not hampered by a monarch who regarded the army as his own, nor by clogging claims of seniority. The "organizer of victory" had before him a clear field and no favour. The most urgent danger for the Republic soon proved to be not in Flanders, but in Brittany and la Vendee. There _la petite noblesse_ and the peasantry still lived on friendly terms. They were alike shocked by the expulsion of the orthodox priests and the murder of the King. Summoned by the Republic to arms in the spring of 1793, they rushed to arms against her. In la Vendee, the densely wooded district south of the lower Loire, everything favoured the defence. The hardy peasants were ably led by that born leader of men, the chivalrous Marquis de Larochejaquelein, who had inspired the men of his neighbourhood with the words: "If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, slay me; if I fall, avenge me." With him was his cousin, Lescure, not less brave, but of a cooler and more calculating temper. The ardently Catholic peasantry of the west furnished as leaders a carter, Cathelineau, of rare ability and generosity of character, and Stofflet, a gamekeeper, of stern and vindictive stamp. Nerved by fanatical hatred against the atheists and regicides of Paris, these levies of the west proved more than a match for all the National Guards, whole columns of whom they lured into the depths of the Bocage and cut down to the last man. As Victor Hugo has finely said: "It was a war of the town against the forest." At first the forest-dwellers threatened to overrun the towns. On 11th June they took Saumur, a town on the Loire, after a desperate fight, and sought to open communication with the coast and the British fleet by seizing Nantes. This attempt, however, failed; and it is generally admitted that they erred in not marching on Paris after their first successes. After