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 very loosely based on the chapter of the same name in C.S. Forester's novel, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and on the actual ill-fated Quiberon expedition of 1795. The main title is based on the often derogatory description of the French by the British (as well as other English speakers) and on the red coats of the British soldiers. The secondary title deals with Horatio's own duty to the Crown and the alliance with the French and his struggle with his own sympathy towards the French revolutionaries.
François de Charette (John Shrapnel), 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.
The main departure from the original story is the introduction of French peasant girl Mariette (Estelle Skornik), now a schoolteacher with fluent English. She and Hornblower fall in love, but she is killed by French revolutionary troops en route back to his ship as she tries to escape with him.