The Year of the French (51 page)

FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA

September, 1798
. One of the armies left Castlebar by night, and the next morning the other one entered. I stood by the window in the front room over the shop and watched the English ride in, large reckless men they were on their heavy horses. They rode down the street at the full gallop, with their long sabres held level with their heads, ready to swing downwards. And on our street there was still enough to claim their blades. Most of the killing had been done at the bridge and in the streets leading to the green. But I saw them smashing down doors and dragging men out, and why they did not smash down this door I cannot imagine, nor why I was not hauled away to be thrashed or made a show of, as others were, though guiltless of wrongdoing.

It was but a fulfillment of what I had known would happen as I watched the Frenchmen and our own fellows move out the night before. The poor fellows had a stricken look, many of them, and who is to blame them, carried off at night, with rain beginning to fall, and no word given as to their destination. There are some of those fellows who don’t know that the world is round, and for all they knew, they were being marched off to the edge of it. The degree of ignorance in which the men of Nephin live their sunless lives is not to be believed.

And yet they were off for a morning saunter when measured against the distance which the Frenchmen had travelled. We never knew them, for none could speak English. When I saw them mustered and ready to march out of Castlebar, they might have been creatures carried here from the moon. They had not our look at all, with their sallow faces and dark, liquid eyes. But they joked together, as our fellows did, and scuffled, and they had the same look of fear behind the joking. No doubt they too had come from farms, and once were more at home with spades than with bayonets. What France is like I cannot imagine, although I have read a few of the French tales and romances that have been put into English. But it cannot be like Ireland. All of the countries of the world are different from each other. It would be interesting to know what they think of Ireland. They can have formed no high opinion of it, poor creatures—dragged from bog to bog to grey wet town, with the country people staring at them as though they were freaks on exhibition.

But they are soldiers now, whatever they were once. They have been trained to bellow and gore like bulls, and to walk docile as cows to their own slaughter. A most curious way to live, and it is frightening to reflect how easily men can be schooled to accept it. But the songs all have it that such a life is easy and free. Foolish indeed are those who believe the words of poetry and song, as was proclaimed long before me by the lofty-minded sages of Greece. And what of our own poor fellows, lined up behind the Frenchmen, but with a few files of Frenchmen placed behind them, to prod at them with bayonets should they think of slipping off? And all this in the name of liberty and equality and this nonsense of
the rights of man
, which I must put down in English because there is no Irish for it. You could tramp the slopes of Nephin for months and before you encountered
the rights of man
you would encounter a unicorn. Of what use to them are the ideas of that misfortunate John Moore, a well-intentioned creature but fanciful and moonstruck?

My neighbour Jeremiah Dunphy saw Mr. Moore run to earth outside the courthouse, three troopers crowded around him, their pointed blades pressed against his chest. But there was something worse than fear in his eyes, Jeremiah says: they were lifeless and despairing. And indeed he is as good as lifeless, unless good birth be a sufficient safe-conduct through all the vicissitudes of existence. He cannot be altogether right in his head, but he always seemed healthy enough to me, the times I have seen him in happier months, handsomely dressed and always laughing, a most comely youth.

I can understand the deviltry that dances in men like Randall MacDonnell and Corny O’Dowd, who are the giddy scapegraces of which this country has always had an abundant supply, and I can well see them in earlier days as bold rapparees or as men riding with Sarsfield to Ballyneety. It is that sort which stakes a horse or an estate or perhaps even a woman on the turn of a card, and is forever out upon what they call their field of honour, blazing away at each other with pistols. Small loss to the world is my uncharitable opinion. The brains of children they have, rattling around in their huge skulls. And what care they how many they drag off with them to sink within the bog’s brown water? There they were the other night, prancing about on their horses—chargers, perhaps I should call them—some in fine uniforms the French had brought and some in fine suits made in Galway, with silly plumes bedraggled and limp, like a man’s member who has spent the night with a randy slut.

One of the last things done before they all set off was the taking down from the courthouse of the flag of green silk with the gilt harp on it. And nothing would do but that it must be carried off by one of the Wexford men who had been in all the fighting and misfortune there. It is by such seductive colours and banners that men’s eyes are bedazzled and they are led off the paths of good sense and into the black bog. But are not the others worse still, with their uniforms the colour of bloody death itself?

They left in silence, but an army makes a fearful noise even when it moves in silence—the sound of feet upon the road, the creaking of harness leather, the rumbling of cartwheels. I looked through the darkness for Owen, but I could not make out faces, and there were many of the fellows had his shape, clumsy, heavy-shouldered cowherds, tall and ungainly. I ask again what business my Owen has with such men?

After they had gone, I stood by the window, as I am certain many others did in that street, for we were all thinking, When will the English come and what will they do? There remained but the few Frenchmen and rebels who had been left to hold the bridge for a bit, and to prevent the loyalists from leaving the town to warn the English. They patrolled until it was light. Two of them I saw across the road from my shop in the flat, damp dawn, country lads with faces like platters. One had a firelock and the other a pike, and they were standing against the poor shelter of a gable end. After a bit they left, and walked down the road. More likely than not, their bodies lay later in the morning on the footpath near the bridge.

Some there are who may take civic pride in our having housed two armies within a fortnight, not to mention our brief eminence as the capital of no less a thing than a republic. Castlebar cannot change. Low houses, mean people, as the jingle has it. We will again be drowned in our obscurity, and the windy rains will sweep away all traces of their presence—the discolouring in Castlebar High Street where the brave English gunner held his ground, the rivulets of blood on the near side of the small humpbacked bridge. And I will remember best a sight which I did not see save in the imagination—John Moore backed against the wall by the menacing riders, his eyes able to see at last beyond hope or desperation.

Later
. A ploughboy, who knows of my interest in such matters, tells me that some days ago he heard the clack of woodcocks in the woods beyond Sion Hill. That would have been soon after the great battle there. One would have thought that the sound of the cannon had driven away birds forever. What can they make of me, fellows like that ploughboy—a man who studies the habits of birds and notes them down in a book? But it is a pleasant and an instructive pastime for me, and also, I am pleased to say, for young Timothy. Now that the two boastful armies have moved away we may perhaps be able to resume our Sunday walks.

Bellaghy, September 4

The Ox Mountains. The rain had ended hours before, and a pale moon hung from the black, endless sky. MacCarthy knew the road. He had taken it with Elliott. Now circumstance had changed it beyond recognition. It was not a road now, but part of the boundaryless country through which an army moved, darkened by ignorance. They were camped upon a slope, and the mountains towered beyond them. A cluster of cabins had given a name to the slope. Bellaghy.

MacCarthy, squatting on his heels above the wet grasses, looked first at the dim mountains and then at the deserted cabins below. Three of the Ballycastle men, Lawrence’s tenants, crouched near him.

“It is to wild Ulster that they are taking us,” one of them said, a man named Lavelle. “And well you know it.”

“To Sligo,” MacCarthy said. “The road runs through Tobercurry and Collooney into the town of Sligo.”

“And from Sligo northwards into Ulster. More men than yourself have walked that road. If it was to the midlands they were taking us, we would not have passed Swinford.”

“It is a terrible thing,” Lavelle’s friend Staunton said, an older man, with a small, toothless head round as an apple. “To carry us far off in the black night, with no word of our destination.”

“It is no business of commanders to be telling their minds to the likes of you,” MacCarthy said. And never had been. Kernes and gallowglasses, trailing their pikes down bog roads, stumbling into bloody death upon unrecognised meadows. “If you had stayed in Castlebar, you would be dead now. They got us safe out of that.”

MacEvilly, the third man, said, “So that we could be killed somewhere else.”

“You know no more than we do,” Lavelle said, peering up at MacCarthy. “We are only a pack of poor fellows following like hounds after Frenchmen who are ignorant of any civilised language, whether Irish or English.”

“And how many words of English have you?” MacCarthy said. “You have not even the English for
loy
or
spade
, which are the only words needed in your station in life.”

“The word
pike
is needed in my station in life,” Lavelle said, and spat between his feet. “And my two hands are needed to carry it.”

“What you could do, Pat, is to get away out of all this, yourself and your two friends. Let you climb down the slope and head back towards Swinford, and into the hands of the redcoat soldiers. Let you discuss the civilised English language with them before they string you up.”

“Ach, sure, Owen. What talk have we had of running away? We are better off where we are.”

“You are so,” MacCarthy said, walking away from them.

It was a most extraordinary sight, what there was of it beneath the pale, clouded moon. A small army stretched along either side of the narrow, twisting road, voices low and exhausted. Those were fools surely who were sitting or lying on the wet earth. It might be the death of them. He walked down the road to the village, where men had crowded into the abandoned cabins. He heard from one, suddenly, a woman’s high-pitched scream, and stepped to the door. There were a half-dozen men inside, and, half lying on the floor, her back pressed against the wall, a very old woman, black-dressed, her white hair scanty and thin. One of the men, bulky and near middle age, was holding her hand in his. The turf fire cast a russet glow.

“She is terrified, poor creature,” the man said. “When the people ran off they left her here. What a dreadful thing to do!”

MacCarthy knelt down beside him. The woman stared, mad, fierce eyes. A web of saliva hung from her loose mouth.

“God help her,” the man said. “She doesn’t know who we are or why we are here. Suddenly all the neighbours were gone and the village was filled with more people than she had ever seen together in her life.”

MacCarthy took her other hand. A bird’s claw. Fleshless, yellow. “You are safe, mother. The lot of us will be gone soon, and your people will be back.”

She did not turn her head towards him. Small, shapeless sack of cloth, with scarecrow head above it. When she was young, Aughrim and the Boyne were recent history. All through the dark century, she grew, weathered, shrank. Our history is here, an old woman huddled with fear in a cabin beneath mountains.

“Let her be,” he said, rising and putting his hand on the man’s shoulder. “She doesn’t see us.”

“She is not blind. She moves her eyes.”

“She does not see us.” But the man did not move. He rubbed the bird’s claw between his heavy hands. MacCarthy backed out of the cabin, bending his head beneath the low, rough doorway.

Ireland’s image in the dark poetry of penal days. A crone, withered, she revealed beauty, youth, to the poet’s attentive eye. Silk of the kine.
Roisin dubh
. Had any of them ever looked at an old woman, skeleton-thin, milk of sickness a film across the eye? History, unbidden, unrecognised, had entered her cabin. Kinsmen vanished. In terror, she retreated to foolishness. Spit dribbled from her slack lips. A symbol shattered on her brittle bones. Moons are far safer for poets. Remote, austere, they sustain our words, protect our images. High above now, dim and cloud-obscured. Mountains stretched away beneath it.

“There is little enough that we can do for her,” someone said.

“Nothing,” MacCarthy said. “Nothing at all.”

At one
A.M
. that morning, Michael Geraghty brought in the men from the lands between Ballina and Killala, after a march of twenty-five miles over the Ox Mountains. Humbert and Teeling had given up on them. The sentries saw them first, a moving forest on the crest of a hill, and ran shouting to the camped men, who roused themselves up and stared in wonder. A forest in winter, thin leafless branches wind-ripped, their pikes against the moonlit line of sky and hill. In silence they moved down the steep path until they reached the encampment.