The Year of the French (52 page)

Humbert, unbuttoned, bleary-eyed from an hour’s sleep, came from a cabin to welcome them. Sarrizen and Teeling, standing behind him, at a distance, made a quick count. Three or four hundred men, most of them armed with pikes, a few with muskets. Some of them seemed unarmed, standing confused and useless. Geraghty bobbed his head, embarrassed and uncomprehending, before Humbert’s rapid French.

Later he talked with MacCarthy. “It was an endless fucking journey, as though we were all headed for some hiring fair in China, first the rain and then a night as dirty as the back of your arse. And terrified every minute of the time that we couldn’t find you, or that you would be long gone, or eaten up by the English. But we dropped down the last slope and there you were, as the man said in the note that you would be.”

“Who said?”

“Teeling is his name, is it not? The Irishman in the French uniform. He said that we would find you where the path drops to meet the Sligo road, near a village. He said that that was the order of the French general. And here you are, by God. By Christ, he must be a wonderful man, the French general.”

“He must indeed,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis a village called Bellaghy. The people are all gone out from it. I marvel you did not find them in the mountains.”

“There is nothing alive in those Ox Mountains but wild goats and owls. They are a sad excuse for land. Nothing to be seen to the left or right or up and down but the brown, dreary hills stretching away and lonely mountain lakes. I wonder that there was even the path, unless the goats beat it down. No one has ever gone that way before.”

“Long ages ago,” MacCarthy said. Diarmuid and Grania with Finn following after. Hugh O’Donnell from Ulster, the great prince. No path or rock or tree that lacks its legend. “We are going into O’Donnell’s country, ’tis said. Into Donegal.”

“God help us,” Geraghty said. “The poor Donegals. Why would the French general take us into such a savage place?”

“I don’t know,” MacCarthy said. “But that is what is said by O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell and some of them.”

“Do they say where the English soldiers are?”

MacCarthy shook his head. “I declare to Jesus, Michael, they might be all around us. There were a hundred men we left behind us in Castlebar, and they must all of them be dead this minute by the sword or the rope or the cruel lance.”

“Did you know any of them yourself, Owen?”

“I don’t even know who they were. It was only an hour or so before we left that they were told to stay, and so they did. Some Frenchmen stayed with them, to work the guns. And John Moore stayed.”

“May the Lord spare him,” Geraghty said, making the sign of the cross.

“The Lord may,” MacCarthy said, “but Cornwallis will have other ideas.”

“I was talking with him in Ballina, and the two of us having a drink in Brennan’s, down near the river.”

“I know Brennan’s,” MacCarthy said. “Mr. Moore is less comfortable tonight, and so are you.”

“There was a look of death in his eyes that day.”

“Ach,” MacCarthy said. “There is never a man gets into bad trouble but that someone will rise up to say that there was the look of death in his eyes.”

“They were empty eyes,” Geraghty said. “As empty as the sea at Downpatrick Head.”

A good phrase. “We may all be in bad trouble before this is over.”

“By God, we may, so. ’Twas but a short while ago that we had no thought but of the harvest and the fine weather, and see where we are now and what has been happening.”

“You were a United Man yourself, were you not?” MacCarthy asked.

“I was. I took the oath from Elliott and Randall MacDonnell. But sure, what am I at all but a farmer who was a great one eight or ten years ago at the faction fighting and the hurling, before I began to lug this around with me.” He slapped his heavy, sagging belly.

MacCarthy shook his head. “It is a strange business, farmers and ploughboys tramping about like rapparees. I was talking about it tonight with some of the Ballycastle men.”

“Ballycastle men!” Geraghty broke into unexpected laughter, and put his hand on MacCarthy’s shoulder. “Sure, those poor devils would do anything to get out of Ballycastle, and who could blame them?”

“ ’Tis a sorry, Godforsaken bit of land, right enough,” MacCarthy said.

He left Geraghty and walked past seven or eight French soldiers huddled in a loose circle, their uniforms invisible in the night, and barely visible their dark, foreign faces. When they saw him staring at them, they fell silent, and looked up at him, impassive and uninterested. A horse whinnied. Beyond the village there was only the blackness of the night, cloud-shrouded moon. He shivered and went in search of O’Dowd, who carried a bottle in either pocket.

O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell were together, against a cabin wall. One of the bottles was empty, but O’Dowd opened the other one and passed it to him. Officer and gentleman. Gentleman’s whiskey, it poured smoothly down his throat. Small, golden explosions of warmth, promise of sun. He wiped his palm across the mouth of the bottle and held it towards O’Dowd, who shook his head.

“Keep it for a bit. ’Tis running out of me. Teeling says that we will be leaving this miserable place now.”

“To the north?” MacCarthy asked.

“In Sligo town, where I was born,” O’Dowd sang.

“One of the French patrols up ahead caught three British soldiers and killed them,” MacDonnell said. “There are British behind us, and British ahead of us in Sligo.”

“Jesus,” MacCarthy said, and took another long swallow. He had not been drunk in days, and it would be pleasant now. Let the army march off and leave him to crawl into one of the cabins with his bottle. Settle down in the deserted village of Bellaghy as its sole proprietor. Sweet Bellaghy, loveliest village of the plain. Greet the farmer when he slipped down from the mountain and offer him a drink. It was a miracle, the way whiskey could give you fresh ambition.

Humbert emerged from one of the cabins, rubbing his hands briskly, then passing one of them across his eyes, like a man roused from sleep. Cool, strange Frenchman, his head packed tight as an egg with plans. He shouted out orders to Sarrizen and Fontaine, called Teeling to him. We follow. Hounds behind his horse.

FROM
THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS
,
WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOTT
 IN OCTOBER, 1798

I am assured by British officers who have spoken to me in this place of imprisonment that the celebrated battle of Castlebar was a less impressive military accomplishment than the skill with which Humbert slipped us past the armies which were gathering against us. That may well be so, but I lack the experience and the skill needed to judge such matters. For me, and for most of those on the forced march of one hundred and thirty miles from Castlebar to Ballinamuck, the enterprise scarce merited a name, so incoherent and bewildering did it appear to us. Now, studying a map, I can perceive that our march did indeed cut a wide, bold arc across the face of Ireland, and can readily accept that to have carried us from the first of its tips to the second was a demonstration of shrewd generalship, for all that it appeared to us but senseless blundering in the dark.

We were oppressed and frightened by the knowledge that Crown forces pressed us from the rear and were awaiting us beyond the mountains. Indeed, at two O’clock of the first morning, as we were at rest in a straggling village, a British scouting party encountered our pickets, and had they been allowed to report back to Sligo, matters might have ended then and there. The members of the party it was of course necessary to kill upon the spot, for our circumstances did not permit us to take prisoners. And they did inform us that they were indeed soldiers in General Taylor’s army but that he had sent forward their Coolavin Yeomanry to the town of Tobercurry, at no great distance from us. They were Irishmen, and although it was Frenchmen who put them to the sword, the responsibility must be shared by all of us.

The close presence of this British force occasioned the first of a number of increasingly bitter arguments among our officers, the true grounds of which held me for a time deceived. Colonel Teeling argued vehemently that the British, by reason of their numbers, should on no account be engaged, but rather that we should continue to evade them, if possible, and move either towards Ulster, whither we were now headed, or else the midlands. But Sarrizen and Fontaine pressed Humbert to make an immediate attack upon the British in Tobercurry, in the hope that those elements of Taylor’s army might be caught unprepared. In this manner, so they asserted, we might win a rout second only to that at Castlebar.

We were assembled in one of the cabins, a badly thatched and pestiferous hovel with an inadequate fireplace, so that the smoke from the turf fire stung our eyes.

Humbert heard us all out patiently, almost with indifference, nodding his approval of Sarrizen’s impetuous eloquence, and grinning with ill-bred delight at Teeling’s fluent but heavily accented French. But so far as I could judge, which was no great distance, this was not an issue which admitted of two solutions. We were, on paper as it were, a victorious army, the conquerors of Ballina and Castlebar, but in fact an ill-armed and motley force, on the run, with superior strength massing itself against us. Our one hope, so it seemed to a novice like myself, lay in moving towards safe ground, if not towards new allies. And this was the very case which Teeling argued, not with eloquence, but with a hard, flinty logic. Indeed he pressed also the case that we should march not towards his own Ulster, but rather towards the midlands, and with all haste and by whatever roads lay open, trusting that the rumours of an impending uprising there were well founded. But he was no oratorical match for the two Frenchmen, with their torrents of words that fell as thick as rain, and those accursed words
la gloire
and
la victoire
pattering like rhyming hailstones. And all this time, Humbert turned his head first to one man and then to the next, like a spectator in a playhouse following the speeches of the actors in a performance of Racine.

At last he waved his heavy, fish-white hand to silence all three of them. “I have no intention of ending this campaign in the shadow of savage mountains. What exactly we shall do I will allow circumstances to explain to us. But there will be no battle fought here if I can avoid one. Teeling’s view of the situation is most obviously the correct one, and I am astonished at you, Sarrizen, astonished at your frivolous arguments. And at you, Fontaine. Like a pair of schoolboys.”

To this Sarrizen said nothing, but rather turned off his eloquence as abruptly as though he had twisted a spigot in his tongue. He contented himself with folding his arms and contriving to look at once condescending and respectful, an attitude which I have found the French to be peculiarly skilful at expressing. Thus ended my first military conference, in what I supposed was a victory of the cause which I favoured. Later, however, when Teeling and I were walking up and down the road to stretch our legs, I found him far from jubilant.

“Why do you think that Sarrizen is so anxious to engage the British?” he burst out passionately. “Because he loves battle? Not at all. It is because he is convinced, he and Fontaine, that it is hopeless. They want to see it all ended and make their surrender after a little flurry of arms for the sake of their reputations. Humbert is the only one of them who thinks that we have a chance.” His tone, flat and sardonic, as northern speech often seems, was withering.

“And yourself?” I asked.

He hesitated, and seemed to be looking through the darkness towards the men. “We have done well enough so far,” he said. “If we are reinforced in time. Or if the midlands rise. And if we can fight our way through to them.”

“That is what Humbert believes?”

He shrugged. “Do you think I know what he intends any more than Sarrizen does? Perhaps he is telling us the truth, perhaps he is trusting to luck and opportunity. That would be unfortunate. I have a suspicion that this is not a lucky campaign.” He could be brisk one minute, and the next set into a cold-clay melancholy.

To lighten the mood, I said, “You have done a prodigious job of acquiring the style of these Frenchies. Did it take you long?”

“About two years,” he said, taking the question seriously. “In taverns in Paris and encampments on the Rhine. Two wretched years. Humbert is a law of his own, though. He is playing his own game, and we are the pieces on his board. It seems to be our national fate.” He gave me a nod then, and walked away.

It is most curious and disturbing to be moving with an army across one’s own countryside. Familiar names, Killala, Ballina, Castlebar, become targets to be shot at, walls to be knocked down. I found myself envying the French, for whom the names of our towns and mountains were barbarous, places to be taken to, to fight for, to stand guard over.

The morning came clear and pale, the sky a most wonderful soft, light blue, across which stretched broken clouds, and the mountains, which had seemed so formidable behind rain or under darkness, now stretched away in their comfortable greens and browns, with dark patches of purple heather. It proved difficult to assemble the men in marching formation, for a number of bottles of whiskey had been carried out of Castlebar, and they had comforted themselves with these in the cold night. It was my task to assist Fontaine with the artillery pieces, and it was necessary to bully some of the men to their task. Add to this that they were wretchedly hungry, for they had few ready provisions save the potatoes which they had stuffed into their pockets before setting out. Whiskey and potatoes, the staples of Irish diet as depicted in hostile caricature.

Humbert seemed everywhere at once. His anger when he heard of the drinking was inordinate, and he sent his sergeants on a sweep through the camp, seizing bottles and destroying them. Two men who were too far gone in drink to march were spread-eagled and whipped. I had never before seen men lashed, and it is a most dreadful spectacle, great gouts of blood leaping from their backs as though driven forth. They were then tied, bellies down, to one of the artillery horses and were taken off with us, and although their groans were most dreadful to hear, they had reason to be grateful, for had they been left behind to the mercy of Crauford’s dragoons, they would not have lasted out the day. Neither Crauford nor Lake was to show the least mercy towards any stragglers who fell into their hands, and I have heard it said that their line of march could be followed, a week later, by bodies hanging from trees or gables, which the villagers, whatever their sympathies, were too terrified to cut down. And yet we ourselves, as I have said, took no prisoners. I have become heartily cynical as to such phrases as
honourable warfare
and
the rules of war
. It is an ugly, cruel business.