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Doctor Brillat-Dessaigne’s Valiant Riding Caterpillars
This… is an example of what happens when you have to balance what the client wants with what the vendor can produce. What the client (in this case, an extremely well-connected general high up in the French military hierarchy) wanted was two-man giant caterpillar cavalry, for admittedly mostly ceremonial use. What the vendor could produce was a giant caterpillar permanently ‘frozen’ at its immature state that could barely carry one man, provided that he had a small amount of gear. When the general in question saw this, of course, he immediately… opened his mouth, contemplated the matter, closed his mouth, then told an aide to go fetch him a certain minor official in a certain obscure department who certainly wasn’t a representative of the Third Republic’s most secretive black ops organization.
Why? Because not every high-ranking general in the French army is, in fact, an idiot. These Riding Caterpillars were useless (and ridiculous) on parade, true. But Dr. Brillat-Dessaigne had also somewhat desperately included a demonstration on how one of these Riding Caterpillars could climb a stone cliff with a human clinging to its back; and, every so often, a long shot pays off. The French general happily handed the project over to France’s spy organization, in exchange for being owed a favor (and getting his deposit with Brillat-Dessaigne back); and, of course, Dr. Brillat-Dessaigne got his nice government contract anyway. So: win-win all around. Really, they should teach this deal in Government Supply Skulduggery classes.
As for the field troops? Riding Caterpillars are… useful, under the right circumstances. Dumb, but both trainable and usefully predictable. You have to largely keep them in hibernation until you need them, because they eat a lot of plant matter. Brillat-Dessaigne also provides French black ops with suitable sophoric unguents and concentrated food bundles; nobody knows yet what will happen if a Riding Caterpillar gets too hungry, and frankly nobody wants to find out. In the meantime, these things are biddable enough to climb any number of ‘inaccessible’ rocky crags and ‘sheer’ fortress walls to deliver small teams of spy-assassins with glints in their eyes and cheerful mayhem in their hearts. Getting down is possibly still a problem — Riding Caterpillars are typically taught to go back to their handlers, once they’ve delivered their cargo — but is that not always the case, mon ami?