The Frogs And The Lobsters
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The Frogs and the Lobsters (a.k.a. The Wrong War) is an episode of the television program Hornblower. It is set during the French revolutionary wars and based on the actual ill-fated Quiberon expedition of 1795.
[edit] Plot summary
François de Charette, a royalist general in exile, decides to rally the surviving royalists and raise an army in France to restore the King to power. He calls upon the British Navy to ferry him across the English Channel with French troops (the frogs) and a company of British redcoats (the lobsters) to Quiberon, but one important thing has gone wrong. A lieutenant carrying a copy of the orders has been murdered and the orders stolen. Captain Pellew, who is in charge of the transports, believes this the work of French spies and begs his superiors to call off the invasion, but they ignore him and the army sets off for disaster. Horatio Hornblower, the central character, is assigned to a division of the invading army that is to hold the bridge at Muzillac, but the royalist officer in charge is a butchering madman whose obsession with revenge does nothing to help the doomed invasion.
[edit] Source
The episode is very loosely based on the corresponding chapter of C.S. Forester's novel, Mr Midshipman Hornblower. The main departure from the original story is the introduction of a formerly illiterate but beautiful French peasant girl, whom the French revolution has miraculously turned into a schoolteacher and who no less miraculously speaks fluent English. After a brief romance, she escapes with Hornblower but gets killed by French revolutionary troops, leaving Hornblower free to pursue a life of adventures more consonant with his creator's original intentions.
