The Year of the French (42 page)

The day, as we continued eastwards, was splendid, and the evening long in coming. Far off on our left, towards the Atlantic, lay the Ox Mountains, blue-purple against the pale sky. We felt ourselves distant not merely from Dublin but from Castlebar. Here and there, on rises of ground or half hidden by plantations, lay the big houses of the gentry. But for the most part we had before us open rolling plains and the cabins of the peasants. We stopped at a cabin for bowls of milk, and nothing could have been farther from the minds of these than battles and insurrection. It gave my conscience a sore twinge to know that they would soon become a part of our turmoil. For what had they to do with kingdoms or republics, with equality and the rights of man? They had but their lives to live and their crops to harvest.

FROM “YOUTHFUL SERVICE:
WITH CORNWALLIS IN IRELAND,”
CHAPTER THREE OF MY CAMPAIGNS,
BY MAJOR GENERAL
SIR HAROLD WYNDHAM (LONDON, 1848)

The city of Dublin received its northern and southern boundaries from the arcs of two canals, the Grand and the Royal, which thence stretched out across the midlands to join the capital to the Shannon and the ocean. They were, and they remain, marvels of the arts of engineering and inland navigation, bearing to the city the rich crops and herds of the luxuriant Irish meadows and fields, for shipment to England. During the years of the French and the Napoleonic wars they were lifelines indeed, binding England to Ireland, which served as her granary.

It was by the Grand Canal that Cornwallis proceeded towards Connaught. I would myself have been fuming and fretting, but he sat quietly on the deck of the barge, puffing on his long pipe and sipping innumerable small cups of chocolate. It was from Cornwallis that I received in my youth the invaluable lesson that haste and swiftness are not the same. The unfortunate General Lake reinforced the lesson by his sorry example of the consequences of haste. To be sure, as Cornwallis set out, he had not yet learned of the disaster of Castlebar.

“By the time we arrive,” Cornwallis said, “Lake may have smashed the Frenchman. If not, we shall take a look around and decide what to do. This is a most peaceful countryside, is it not, Wyndham, along this stretch of the canal? It might be France or the Low Countries or even England. This is how the people of this land would live, if only they were given the chance. They are a people with a great love of justice, some old chronicler has observed. Some Englishman.” As it happens, he was looking towards the great Bog of Allen, where no one at all lives, peaceful or otherwise, and yet his observation was a most sage one. The Irish people have been much maligned. They seek the blessings of a government which deals with them justly yet mercifully, save when their passions have been stirred up by demagogues. As for their belligerence and hot temper, of which so much is made by their detractors, when it is harnessed to the discipline of the British army, as it has been for the past forty years, they make the finest soldiers in the world.

It speaks well for the breadth of Cornwallis’s vision, and for his humanity, that these should be his thoughts even as he moved into battle against the misguided multitude in Connaught. He had been sent to Ireland by Pitt with two missions, one avowed and the other, as yet, concealed. First to pacify the island, and then to tumble down into ruin the so-called Kingdom of Ireland, thus bringing the country at last within the full governance of the English Parliament. And yet both of these plans he discussed with me in an open and candid manner, and no lieutenant of twenty has ever received a finer education in the combined arts of war and statecraft. To pacify while at the same time laying down the foundations of a lasting social settlement is the ambition of every soldier-statesman, and Lord Cornwallis possessed the necessary largeness of vision and instinct for the wishes of humanity. At the time, however, I lacked the wisdom to profit to the full from this unparalleled opportunity.

The old man (younger, I must confess, than I am now) spoke quietly as the afternoon darkened with the wonderful gentleness of Irish summers.

To either side of us stretched the red brown bogland, marked here and there by the labours of turf cutters, dark, shallow trenches crossing and recrossing the wide, level expanses. Many centuries of the past lay as yet untouched by their spades, indeed all the layered melancholy of the land’s unhappy history converted by time’s slow chemistry to dark, odorous fibres. I carried in a portfolio of red Russia leather Cornwallis’s maps and the notes which he had dictated to me on the movements of our troops, but he found no occasion to ask for them. All these details were fixed in his mind, which looked beyond battle and sudden victory to the imposition of permanent law, of a just and fecund tranquillity.

A net was being cast over Connaught, with four sturdy knots strung along its border—Sligo, Boyle, Castlebar, Galway. The rebels would be held within this net while the main body of our troops assembled to the south. Then the net would be pulled tight. Having settled this in his mind, and having issued his orders, Cornwallis could now settle at ease in his chair, his gouty leg resting upon a small cushioned stool.

We disembarked at Tullamore, a prosperous canal town, and proceeded by coach to Athlone, which lies twenty-five miles to the northwest, on the banks of the Shannon. It guards the principal bridge across that river into Connaught. Control of Athlone, and thus of the Shannon, was bitterly contested in both the Cromwellian and the Williamite wars. In June of 1691, it was attacked by an army of twenty-one thousand Williamites, who subjected it to the most fearful bombardment in all Irish history, fifty cannon hurling ton upon ton of bombs and stones over the walls of the city. Cornwallis, whose imagination responded to history, was inspecting the battered castle and the remaining fragments of the city wall when word reached us of the disaster at Castlebar.

It was carried in the most humiliating manner possible, by light dragoons who had fled from the battlefield, scarcely pausing until they reached Athlone. They were taken before Cornwallis to make their report, but not even his stern manner and august bearing could bring them to coherence. As they would have it, overwhelming masses of the peasantry, howling like demons and spurred on by their priests, surged up and down the roads of Connaught. The principal towns between Castlebar and Athlone, including Tuam, had fallen. Cornwallis listened to them in silence, doubtless trying to strike a balance between their frenzied exaggerations and the bare fact of a defeat to the north.

Turning away from them, he resumed his inspection of the town, moved now not by historical piety but by his need to know whether Athlone could be defended against an attack in strength. He also sent a rider westwards to Tuam, to discover if that crucial road junction remained in British hands. After nightfall a messenger galloped in from General Lake, bearing a despatch couched in terms more disgraceful than any which had ever before been sent by a British officer in the field to his commander, a mixture of bluster, pity for himself, and indiscriminate condemnation of his own officers and men. British troops, he reported, had given way to abject panic, fleeing like the cowards they were from a battleground which he had prepared with care and which he had sought to defend with bravery. But the next paragraph contradicted him, placing upon General Hutchinson responsibility for the order of battle. The despatch spoke not a word as to why panic spread so disastrously among soldiers who outnumbered the enemy and who held the high ground. Neither was there a word of generous praise for a daring and resourceful foe, whose victory had been made possible by a night march which a lesser commander would never have attempted.

I remember, with a vividness which years and age have not dimmed, Cornwallis standing on the bridge, one hand resting on the parapet to take the weight from his bad leg. The dark waters of the Shannon moved beneath it, and we faced the darker Shannon shore. In the town behind us, alarm had begun to spread, one rumour feeding upon another. He crumpled Lake’s despatch and held it over the water, but then, regaining his composure, smoothed it out and handed it to me.

“See there,” he said. “If General Lake had heeded my advice and given himself a night’s sleep, he would have been spared all this.” Then, summoning Colonel Crauford to his side, he said: “If we still hold Tuam, I propose to move there tomorrow with two regiments. Our forces, as they arrive, are to be sent forward to join me there. When I possess the strength necessary for the purpose, and not later than two days from now, I shall advance into Mayo. Draught despatches that the road eastwards must be held at Sligo and at Boyle. An urgent message must be sent to the War Office that additional forces may be required to guard the approaches to Dublin. Young Wyndham here will help you with the spelling. You dragoons can’t spell worth a damn.”

“Is it that grave, sir?” Crauford asked.

“We shall win, of course,” Cornwallis said. “We shall win. We have been fighting wars here for several centuries, and winning has become habit with us. But we shall not win as quickly as I had hoped. And Crauford, the two regiments that I take into Tuam are to be English regiments.”

“In a pinch, my lord,” Crauford asked, his Scotch burr giving an angry rasp to his words, “will you accept Scottish soldiers?”

Cornwallis laughed genially and rested a hand briefly on Crauford’s shoulder. “By preference, sir. By preference. Your lads are the best of all. But by God, if I had the men to spare, I would have this native yeomanry and militia sent to garrison and kept out of my way and out of my sight.”

Thereafter he never referred directly to the battle of Castlebar.

It is a most extraordinary and dramatic coincidence that his request for reinforcements reached London simultaneously with the first information that a battle was under way at the mouth of the Nile, at Aboukir Bay, between the British fleet under Admiral Nelson and the French fleet which guarded Buonaparte’s expeditionary army. I have often speculated, in idle moments, as to whether some occult chain bound together these two events, half a world away from each other. And yet I know that such speculation is idle indeed, for what connexion could obtain between skirmishes fought beneath the leaden sky of a bogland and one of the world’s decisive battles, with the fate of Europe and India hanging in the balance?

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT JOURNAL
OF JUDITH ELLIOTT, ENTITLED,
ALL DRESSED IN GREEN:
MEMORIES OF AN IRISH PATRIOT

August 29
. Today my brave Malcolm is somewhere eastwards of Mayo, rousing the people from their slumber, as Ossian would say. Our town of Ballina lies securely within the patriot camp, although the manner in which the people are comporting themselves is not all that one might wish. Castlebar, the capital of our splendid young Republic of Connaught, is governed by a provisional executive, and all there is orderly and seemly, or so I am informed, for I have not ventured far upon the roads. But the patriots of Ballina, although spirited, conduct themselves as though liberty meant but a licence for brigandage and rudeness. They are kept in order, after a fashion, by their captain, Michael Geraghty, a strong-farmer who was some time ago sworn into the Society of United Irishmen by my dear husband, but his hold upon them is that of a rude chieftain who dare not assert too firm a discipline. In consequence there has been much looting of the houses of the gentry, although mercifully there has been no bloodshed. As I watch these patriots upon the road, bent under their weight of stolen furnishings, they seem far indeed from the heroes of whom Ossian wrote, those ideal creatures of flaming courage and cloudy grandeur. And yet these, as history teaches us, are the true descendants of Ossian and Oscar and Finn, though broken and crushed into the mud by the tyrannical heel which has for centuries pressed upon them. Remembering this, it is possible to forgive much, and to trust that their coming sacrifices will exalt and purify them.

I had this day a visit, kind in intention, from Mr. George Moore, of Moore Hall, elder brother of the President of our Connaught Republic. Mr. Moore had ridden to Castlebar to visit John, and returning to Ballintubber stopped at The Moat, by Malcolm’s request, to make certain of my safety. It was a needless errand, for Malcolm’s reputation among the country people spreads itself over me like a protecting mantle. Without his spectacles, Mr. Moore is a most handsome man, in his manner courtly yet sardonic, and with, at times, an attractive air of melancholy. I must confess to having experienced a pique upon learning that the French had chosen young John Moore, rather than my own Malcolm, to serve as our President, and must own, even now, to a suspicion, perhaps unworthy, that they were prompted by considerations of social rank and pedigree, though this would be most unseemly among the apostles of human equality. But in my heart I know that Malcolm is better placed as now he is, at the head of his troops, the sword of liberty in his hand. And yet few indeed of the gentry have rallied to the banner of freedom, John Moore and Malcolm being the notable exceptions, although there is a thick scattering of squireens and near-gentlemen, such as the boisterous and rough-mannered Randall MacDonnell. Of these latter, all are Papists. A staunch Protestant myself, and right proud of this, my soul quivers with anger and indignation that none of our kind in Mayo, save Malcolm alone, has rallied to our sacred cause, which being the cause of liberty should be also the cause of Protestantism. Twisted and snarled indeed are the roots of this unhappy though once-heroic island.

More shame then to George Moore, at once Papist and gentleman, that he holds himself aloof, heedless of the splendid example set by his brother. “Alas, ma’am,” he said, “I am not as good an Irishman as yourself.” “I am not Irish at all,” I cried, “but English born and English bred, and yet my heart can be stirred—” “Why, so you are,” he interrupted me; “and I am reproved by your love for your adopted land. I have lived too long abroad.” “I know that you are making sport of me, sir,” I replied with spirit, “but I believe that no cause is more sacred than that of restoring the liberty of an ancient nation.” “Ancient we are, indeed,” said he; “that at least is not in doubt. But do you know, I sometimes think that all sacred causes are pernicious, and a source of human sufferings.” “Never think it, sir. No people can be happy if they are not free.” “And is that what we are, then? A people? Myself and Captain Cooper and Malachi Duggan and Dennis Browne and Randall MacDonnell?” And yet this strange being, if all accounts are true, is not the coward he seems, but was in earlier years a notorious duellist and a courter of married women, which latter at least I am disposed to believe, for although his eye is pale and chill, his lips are full and sensual, and indeed he sat closer to me than need required and seemed conscious of my dress of soft muslin. But his wit is an icy blast swirling within him, which has chilled and blighted his spirit, and he is too proud of his mind, which is sharp rather than lofty. Would he dare lay claim to an intellect more capacious than that of our Rousseau, that true and brave genius whose key has found and unlocked the heart of Europe? “And how fares our President?” I asked him. “My brother? He fares well. As Perkin Warbeck did in his day, and Lambert Simnel and Jane Grey.” His tone was one in which indifference and bitterness were strangely mingled. A difficult, remote man, but one whom many a romantic little fool might find attractive.