Devicotah, after scarcely the ghost of a siege, opened its gates.

Lally had been hardly a month in India, and he had already driven the English from the southern coast of the Coromandel.

"All my policy is in these five words, but they are binding as an oath--No English in the peninsula," wrote the general.

He had sent Bussy orders to come and join him in order to attack Madras.
The brilliant courage and heroic ardor of M.de Lally had triumphed over the first obstacles; his recklessness, his severity, his passionateness were about to lose him the fruits of his victories.

"The commission I hold," he wrote to the directors of the Company at Paris, "imports that I shall be held in horror by all the people of the country." By his personal defaults he aggravated his already critical position.