The Year of the French (74 page)

We rooted out bones from the shallow hillside graves to make fires for our cookpots. The fires were beacons for Crauford, but he knew well enough where we were, fox hunter riding to the kill. I crouched beside two of the Crossmolina men. One of them plunged his knife into the pot and then held it towards me and I took the hot potato with both hands. “It is a sorry business for a gentleman like yourself,” he said in English. A deep ravine divided us, spanned by his courtesy.

“Is it far that we have yet to go?” he asked.

“Not far,” I said. “We are less than a day’s march from Granard.”

“There is a great gathering of the Gaels at Granard,” he said.

“That is what we believe,” I said, but he caught the hesitation in my voice, and his eyes, wild as a mountain hare’s, turned away from me.

I thought again of Judith, whose mild eyes grew bright with passion. Landscape, music, poetry, moonlight upon a flowering hedge—they stirred her heart, and I was stirred by her. Mayo, which to me was but the hard, exacting business of the estate, flowered beneath her fancy. Often I would be at work in the room which I used for the business of the estate, heavy black-bound ledger books from my father’s time stacked upon the floor, and she would burst in, talking as she moved, her eyes luminous and soft. It would be a trifle, or what I then thought a trifle, although now I know that we were bound in love by such moments. Suddenly I knew that I would not see her again. My mind was upon her, though I watched the lad from Crossmolina cramming his mouth, and the knowledge came to me with the flat certainty of noon. In the event I was mistaken, for she was permitted to visit me before the trial and twice since then, for which I stand indebted to the humanity of the Attorney General.

Thus, my thoughts upon that final night were a jumble. I beheld my life as a bright, small room at the end of a dark corridor. The room was crowded—Judith, my parents, Tone and Emmet gesticulating like Punch and Judy, the auctioneer at Castlebar from whom I had bought a gelding, a London girl whom I had courted before meeting Judith. My memories were fragments of glass, sharp as razors. I held them tight, although they cut and brought the blood.

At some time in the night, one or two O’clock I would judge it, twenty men from Granard arrived, stumbling in the darkness up the steep hill, and we learned from them that the midlands rising had been crushed and the trap sprung. Although they had been searching for us, they came into Cloone by chance, and the sentries fired upon them, fortunately without result. We were as great a shock to them as they were to us, for the rumour had taken hold that we were a mighty army—thousands upon thousands of French and a like number of rebels, with cavalry and monstrous, terrifying cannon. Instead, they found another band of fugitives, sheltering in a graveyard.

They had a leader, a “captain” or “colonel” of some sort. He peered through the darkness at us, as though not believing that he had found us, and Teeling got answers to his questions only by taking his arms and shaking him. He spoke in long-winded braggadocio of how they had seized a building at Edgeworthstown and of how they had defeated companies of yeomen, and, over and over, he spoke of a battle near Granard. His words were those of pothouse ballads, empty and swaggering. It was as though he was rehearsing a song about himself which other men would sing. “We drove our pikes against the yeoman cavalry,” he said. “King George’s regiments we put to flight.” He was reshaping what had happened, peopling with heroes the landscape of a disaster.

For such it was, and at last we got the truth from him. The rebels had been slain or put to flight, and the British were drawn across the roads in a tight, heavy knot. The defeat had been utter. At least a thousand men, making full allowance for his hyperbole, lay dead in the fields outside Granard. “They fought like wild wolves,” he told Teeling, “and with bursting hearts.” “They have been smashed,” Teeling said in French to Humbert. “These are survivors.” Humbert, who must have understood as much, nodded but continued to stare at the Granard man.

“Holy Mother of God,” Randall MacDonnell said to me. “Did you hear him? We are as good as dead. Did you hear that man? There will be no way out of this place.”

But I could find nothing to say to him, and we stood silently together until Teeling joined us. By the faint starlight I could make out his long pale face, but his voice startled me, calm and harsh.

“It will end tomorrow,” he said. “We will move out in the morning, but they will be upon us before noon. General Humbert proposes to take us into Ballinamuck, a village that this local fellow knows of. There is a good hill there and a bog to protect our flank. It will not be much of a battle.”

“Fight, is it?” MacDonnell asked, indignation fighting with fear. “What good will that do?”

“If we remain in good order we can put up a fight for an hour or two. That will end matters.”

“Sure an hour’s fight will have us all killed,” MacDonnell said. “And what sense is there in that? ’Tis a few men with white flags that we should send out, and surrender now, before we are blown apart by their bloody cannon.”

“It will be more difficult to surrender than you believe. For us, that is. It will be a different matter for the French.”

“They wouldn’t murder us in cold blood,” MacDonnell said.

“Murder?” Teeling asked, as though weighing the word. “It is not called murder, Mr. MacDonnell. We are rebels in arms against the Crown. The British are not obliged to give us quarter. I doubt if they will wish to.”

There was a long pause before MacDonnell replied in a low, spiritless voice. “I call it murder.”

“And so do I. So does Mr. Elliott here. General Humbert would not. He gave no quarter to the peasants in the Vendée. We are not protected by the rules of war.”

“The rules of war permit the slaughter of unarmed men?” I asked. “Men who have surrendered? Yes, I would indeed call that murder.” I am astonished now that we should have spoken so calmly of our own deaths, and yet we did. The human disposition to argue against calamity is relentless.

“My God,” MacDonnell said. “Oh, my Jesus.” Whether as prayer or curse I could not tell.

But as we spoke together, all about us was commotion. The Irish, dragging themselves wearily awake, grasped but slowly, through ripples of rumour and talk, that no help awaited us to the south. Fear grappled them then, like iron chains, made more terrible by the darkness and confusion. I joined the Ballina men, to explain to them as best I could what had happened, but my words were wasted upon them. They had come so devoutly to believe that an army of the Gael awaited them that nothing would persuade them to the contrary. Yet at the same time they accepted that some catastrophe had occurred in the south. It was useless to reason with them, and after a time I walked away.

Humbert stood facing the south, his arms clasped behind his back. I could not read his face. Nothing had served his purpose. The country had not risen up, the fleet from France had not arrived, the Dublin road was blocked. Spread out all around him were the men whom he had led and dragged across Ireland, foreign and remote as Laplanders. He was thinking, perhaps, that at last he had been trapped.
He
was trapped. Not an army of two thousand men, but one commander, so great is the vanity of generals. In a village called Cloone, an ugly name on a map. As I stood watching him, he suddenly shrugged and straightened his shoulders.

He saw me watching him and stepped towards me. “Your Irish down here were useless,” he said, in a grating, angry voice. “Worse than useless. They have dragged me down into this dark bog. They will deserve what happens to them.”

“They trusted in us,” I said. “And already they have begun to pay. They were killed in their hundreds at Granard.”

“They will be killed in their hundreds out there,” he said, waving his arm towards the dark south. “I once wondered why the English had such contempt for the Irish. Now I understand.”

He jerked his head towards the men invisible on the slopes below us. “You wanted to make a revolution with those. You are a fool.” He turned then and walked away from me.

Towards morning, with the first streaky light, we were assembled to march, but only with difficulty. The French troops had no stomach for battle, and the sergeants were compelled to thwack them with sabres. As for the Irish, bewilderment had settled so deeply upon them that they moved as they were bid, but slowly, as though not fully awakened. We were no longer an army, so much was clear even to my unpractised eye, but we went through the motions of an army, squaring ourselves off into columns. MacDonnell had managed somehow to recover his spirits, or at least his style, for he behaved as though saddled for a morning’s hunt, bantering with the men and cajoling them with coarse pleasantries. Vanity and recklessness had brought him out with us, a roaring horseman with a foolish plume stuck in his hat, but he was now to prove his merits. I watched him with a mild envy. For myself, I had before this lost confidence in our enterprise, and awaited with dull heart its predestined end.

In the dawn hours before we set forth, other men from the Granard fighting joined us, men who had moved northwards because no other path lay open to them, or else men who had believed the rumours that we were advancing with a powerful host. More than half of them still carried pikes or weapons of some sort, and these Teeling formed up into a company. Their familiarity with the countryside seemed but to make more intense their bewilderment and fear. And also, about an hour before we left Cloone, we were joined by Owen MacCarthy, the Killala schoolmaster, who had deserted from us outside Manor Hamilton.

More even than the rest of us, he appeared exhausted, his eyes, beneath the mat of red hair, sunk into their sockets. He stood irresolute upon the path which led down the hill, and then walked towards my own Ballina men, with one of whom, Michael Geraghty, he had struck up a friendship.

Randall MacDonnell leaned down from his saddle and shouted to him. “Owen MacCarthy! You were lonely for our company.”

MacCarthy looked over towards him. “There is no way out of here. I have been within a mile of Mohill, and the road is thick with British soldiers.”

Teeling walked over to him and said, “Speak in English. Where else have you been?”

“I began in Drumlish. It has been burned and a man killed in his shop. Then I walked towards Mohill, but when I caught sight of the soldiers I turned off onto this road. I spent part of the night in a cave, hugging my knees with my clasped hands.”

“You would have been wise had you stayed in the cave.”

“Sure I am not a fox or badger. I had a bottle with me, and when it was done I set forth into the darkness. The English have covered the entire world. They burned Drumlish, the great brutes. Would you not think that men hurrying to a battle had no time to burn a village.”

“They are in no hurry,” Teeling said. “They have the day before them.”

At exactly six, by my father’s heavy gold watch, we began our march, two long, straggling columns. Humbert, mounted, lingered on the hill, holding a spyglass to his eye. Perhaps he could see the first of the English moving in their southerly direction from Mohill.

As we marched out, I turned round to look at the church. Prim and disdainful, it held itself aloof from our tumult. It was so like the Ballina church that they might have been built from the same set of plans. And again my memory stirred within me. Spare, undecorated, it stood guard over Thomas Ticknell, Cromwell’s slumbering trooper.

FROM “YOUTHFUL SERVICE: WITH
CORNWALLIS IN IRELAND,”  BY
MAJOR GENERAL SIR HAROLD WYNDHAM

I set out with my small escort, feeling myself a most important personage to be carrying the order for battle, and riding, if only for an hour, at the head of a body of horse. I was now making my own jingle and flash of scarlet, like the dragoons whom I had envied. Cornwallis must have derived amusement from the spectacle which I presented, for the colour of war had long since been bleached from his thoughts, and it remained for him only a duty to be scrupulously performed.

The countryside, after we had left behind us the pleasant river, was somewhat sombre in appearance, farmlands divided and redivided by rocky walls, yellowing fields, low hills. But the morning itself was splendid, and the air as fine a tonic as claret. Birds, starlings and rooks, were surprising in their numbers, breaking suddenly from trees like bursts of grapeshot. Far from the road, down narrow lanes, stood the cabins of the natives. I saw no one stirring near them, and it was most curious to see them washed clear of their usual swarms of shouting children. It was in truth a silent scene, save for the thud of our hooves, and bird cries, the abrupt whir of wings.

It was only when we drew near to Mohill, which stands midway between Carrick and Cloone, that we began to encounter the burned cabins. The village itself had been left untouched, so far as I could judge, but the outlying cabins had been fired, and the stench from those which stood near the road carried to us. It seemed a poor way to begin a battle, and I turned to observe its effect upon my escort, but their stolid faces told me nothing.