The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “That is not Tone’s understanding,” Teeling said. “The Directory—”

  “The Directory is in Paris,” Humbert said. “We shall be in the field. And you are yourself a French officer, I must remind you, Colonel Teeling. So is Tone. You will take my orders. And so will every man to whom I issue a weapon. Naturally, the Irish will have their own leaders. We have come to liberate them, after all.”

  “That was our understanding,” Teeling said.

  “There is no need for any misunderstanding,” Humbert said. “There is only need for common sense. We have the same purpose, to drive the English oppressors out of Ireland. And we shall choose the best way to do it.”

  “If you take the offensive before Hardy arrives,” Sarrizen said, “you will again be exceeding your orders, General.”

  “What? What is this, gentlemen?” Humbert said, spreading out his hands, palms up. “Objections from an Irishman on one side of me, and from Frenchmen on the other side. I must be a very wicked man indeed.”

  He smiled, and winked broadly. Marchand des peaux de lapin, Teeling thought. For a moment, he was able to imagine Humbert trading his skins, leaning across tavern table to strike his bargain.

  “Not objections, General,” Sarrizen said quickly. “But I would like to have matters clear in my mind. You have told us yourself that we are instructed to await General Hardy’s arrival.”

  “And so we shall, Colonel. So we shall. But we shall keep ourselves busy. We shall be ready to exploit opportunities. Orders must be interpreted in the light of circumstances. Except, of course, for such orders as I give to you.”

  “If you will forgive the impertinence, General Humbert,” Sarrizen began, but Fontaine interrupted him.

  “We are at your orders, General, of course. What may go on between yourself and the Directory is no business of ours.”

  “Nothing ‘goes on,’ ” Humbert said. “Nothing improper, that is. It is true that certain events have disturbed me greatly. A short while ago, there was a formidable army assembled on the coast for the invasion of England. Now it is a shell. The men and the munitions and the supplies have all been drained away to serve General Buonaparte’s Egyptian expedition. I have the greatest respect for General Buonaparte, as every soldier must. But he will make out of Egypt a catastrophe for France. The Revolution has but one enemy, England. And the place to strike England is close to her home. It was not simple slovenliness and ineptness which kept Hardy and myself without money or supplies. France has enemies within her own borders. The Revolution has always had such enemies. The guillotine could not fall fast enough to lop off all their heads.”

  “But surely you would not call General Buonaparte an enemy of the Revolution,” Sarrizen said softly.

  “Have I said that?” Humbert asked sharply. “He is a brilliant soldier of France. We have had our share of them. Hoche was as fine a soldier as we have had, and Hoche preached night and day that the British Isles must be attacked. I was with him two years ago in Bantry Bay, and so was Teeling’s friend Wolfe Tone. If Hoche had landed—”

  “If,” Sarrizen said, and smiled, to take the edge from the word.

  “These are deep waters for a colonel of infantry,” Fontaine said. “I keep my mouth shut and I leave politics to the politicians.”

  “That is a wise policy,” Humbert said. “And you will die a colonel. Unlike General Buonaparte.”

  “Fortune favours him,” Sarrizen said. “Fortune and the Directory.”

  “It all depends,” Humbert said. “The man who conquered Ireland could be a match for the man who did not conquer Egypt.”

  “That would be General Hardy, would it not?” Sarrizen asked.

  Humbert smiled.

  Teeling looked down at the neglected map. The ragged edge of Europe. Mists, bogs, rocky fields. What had it ever mattered, save as a pawn? An island whose natives were mutinous, and might muster to a flag and a drum roll. Of what concern to these Frenchmen was MacCracken in his Antrim glen, brigand chieftain with his cluster of pikemen? Humbert had a larger map, one which stretched from Paris to Vienna. And Buonaparte had the largest map of all, sweeping across the Mediterranean to Egypt, and then eastwards to the plains of India.

  He asked Humbert’s permission to retire, and went out on deck. The Atlantic air, with its savour of salt, carried him to Cushendall on the Antrim coast. A boy, he had stood there once with his father, looking out across the water to the Mull of Kintyre, so vivid in the pellucid air that they could make out the green of mountain meadows.

  Kilcummin, August 17

  West of Killala, near Kilcummin on the Rathlackan road, a shebeen. Not a proper tavern at all, but the long double cabin of a widow named Doolin. Herdsmen used it, and some of the poor cottiers who lived near Downpatrick Head. MacCarthy had been there once before, and that visit had taken the edge from his thirst. Scrawny hens running loose and the floor slippery with potato peelings. Worse now. Smell of rain-soaked frieze and tobacco. Music: a fiddler in one corner, fat, his eyes mild and sightless, milky pupils turned upwards.

  Unknown faces, grave and self-contained, but with a disturbing look, like Nephin men. They turned towards him as he stood in the doorway, and the sound of voices died.

  “Owen!” Ferdy O’Donnell shouted, and moved through the men to take him by the arm. “It is my friend Owen MacCarthy,” he said in a loud voice. “The Killala schoolmaster.” There was a pause, but then first one man and then another raised his hand to his shapeless hat.

  “God save all here,” MacCarthy said. He said in English, to O’Donnell, “They need saving, by the look of them.”

  “You are welcome, Owen,” O’Donnell said. “Come over to the fire and dry out a little.”

  “Maire said that I would find you here.”

  “What took you out on this dirty night?”

  “I took a notion to see how you were doing, yourself and Maire.”

  “Here,” O’Donnell said. “Sit down here where it is warm and get this inside you.”

  Acrid smoke from the fire of sweet-smelling turf. A lament. He knew the tune: a lament for some O’Connor or other. Smoke and music twisted themselves together in his mind. The men had begun to talk again, but quietly.

  “Did she tell you why I am here?” O’Donnell asked.

  MacCarthy shook his head.

  “The people in Kilcummin asked would I come here and speak with the Rathlackan people. I am the leader, like, in Kilcummin.”

  “The leader?”

  “I have joined, Owen, and so has many another in Kilcummin. We took the oath from Corny O’Dowd.”

  “The oath of the United Irishmen, is it?”

  “To be sure. Do you think that I would take the Whiteboy oath?”

  “Sure why need you?” MacCarthy said easily. “A man has told me that Malachi Duggan himself is in with the United Men now and all his fellows with him.”

  “It is a good oath,” O’Donnell said. “It is to free the people of Ireland from tyranny and give liberty to us.”

  “With the help of Corny O’Dowd? Sure that man knows as much about liberty as he does about unicorns.”

  They were speaking in low voices and in English.

  “True for you, Owen. And Malachi Duggan is a man for whom I have little use. But small indeed would be the army of the King of England were he to pick and choose, instead of sending out press-gangs to seize poor misfortunates on the roads or in alehouses. There are United Men spread all over Mayo now. All sorts and kinds of men.”

  “Ferdy, would you look around this room and tell me what these omadhauns know about liberty.”

  “There are two men here who know better than either of us. They were in the fighting in Wexford and they have been drifting here and there ever since. In many a village they have been given sup and shelter while they tell their story.”

  “Which ones are they?” MacCarthy asked, his interest quickening.

  “Over against the wall there, with the half-dozen men around them
. Poor fellows, they are hard-pressed for an audience in Rathlackan, for they have only the English.”

  One was a burly, short man with a mat of black hair, and the other a boy not more than sixteen, thin and narrow-waisted, with long hair the colour of corn.

  “You should talk to them, Owen, for it is a wonderful story they have to tell, and the dark lad tells it handsomely. There is stuff for a dozen poems in his story. He says that the United Men held not Wexford alone but Carlow as well, and parts of Wicklow, and they were in Kilkenny and Kildare, and there was fighting as far to the north as Meath. There was a battle on the Hill of Tara itself. Think of that if you will. Irishmen waging battle at Tara of the Kings. Tara is right there in Meath.”

  “So is the Boyne,” MacCarthy said. “Only a few miles away.”

  But it was a poem, right enough. Modern men waging battle with pikes and muskets, with their feet standing upon the ancient slumbering kings of Ireland. Not for me.

  The dark man had begun a song, quietly at first, but then lifting his harsh, heavy voice. The men fell silent in courtesy, even those who could not understand him.

  “O I looked behind me and I looked before,

  But the yeomanry cavalry was my downfall. . . .”

  They were terrible things, those songs in English, “ballads” they were called, ill-made things fitted up to old tunes or to no tunes at all, with ugly jinglejangle words in them, that a man would have to wash from his mind with clear water before he set to shaping a true line of poetry. But at least the man had no pretensions. He sang casually, to illustrate his story. The two of them had been on the move since the battle of New Ross, and once the older man had been taken up for questioning. He turned around and pulled up his jacket: his back was an ugly crisscross of new wounds.

  “They tied me up to a thing called a triangle,” the man said, “and set to work on me.”

  “Holy Mary,” one of the cottiers said in Irish. “His back has been ripped off him.”

  “It is just as it says in the song I learned. ‘The yeoman cavalry was my downfall.’ ”

  “Pagan beasts,” someone said.

  “O but we had our day first,” the man said. “At Oulart Hill and at Tuberneering, the British fencibles they ran like deer. We were over the country like a flood. We killed lords and merchants and the soldiers of the English King.”

  “Have you ever heard the like of that, Owen MacCarthy?” O’Donnell asked, in Irish now.

  “Some of the men who were duck hunters from Bargy and Shelmalier had their long-barrelled guns, but the rest of us had pikes or whatever we could find. We went to the houses of the gentry and took away their guns and swords.”

  “That has been known to happen here,” a man said, smiling to his friends. “Some men went to the castle of the Big Lord and took away all the guns.”

  “We met their regiments in open battle and we scattered them. The Ancient Britons, the North Cork Militia. The soldiers who had burned our homes and burned the chapel at Kilcormac.”

  “North Cork,” MacCarthy said. “Those lads are all Papists with no words in their mouth but Irish.”

  “God preserve us,” O’Donnell said. “Why were they fighting against the army of the Gael, and destroying homes and chapels?”

  “Landlords for officers,” MacCarthy said. “Protestants and lickspittle Catholic squireens. Sure what more agreeable task could you give an Irishman than to kill his own kind.” Ploughboys dressed up in their first good suit of clothes, white breeches and blue jacket.

  “By God, we scattered them,” the man said. “Those hoors from Cork.”

  “Yes,” MacCarthy said, walking forward, “but how was the end of the game played out? The massed soldiers were brought out against you, the King’s soldiers from England, and you were run to ground as a huntsman runs the red fox.”

  “It is true,” the man said. “After New Ross we did not know where to turn. But that is not a shame upon us. It is a shame upon the other men of Ireland. We strangled upon the nets cast around us, while the other men of Ireland watched their ripening crops.”

  There was an awkward silence in the room.

  “This is what happens,” MacCarthy said. “This is what happens when you run with pikes against cannons and big guns.”

  But militia and yeomen had been met and slaughtered. What might have happened if all the men of Ireland had swarmed from their cabins, like a muddy river spilling over its banks? Draw back from that thought. Death. Bodies festering in the summer sun. “You, boy,” MacCarthy said to the man’s friend. “Do you know a better song than the one we heard? A song with some music to it?” He handed the boy his glass of whiskey.

  “Yes,” the boy said. He smiled: a fox. His face was a sharp triangle, and his body seemed made of coils. He planted his feet firmly, looked down into the glass, and then began, in a clear effortless tenor. He had a voice.

  “ ’Twas early, early all in the spring The birds did whistle and sweetly sing Changing their notes from tree to tree And the song they sang was of Ireland free.”

  The words of the song moved upon a clear thread through the smoke and coarse smells of the cabin. Castlebar, talking easily with Sean MacKenna: liberty, a word. The boy sang, “My own dear father did me deny, and the name he gave me was the croppy boy.” The Irish-speakers listened in grave silence, uncomprehending. The thread hung a moment in the air, after it had been spun out. The singer turned shyly to his drink. Wexford, a place distant as Tara.

  “What is it about?” someone called.

  “About a boy who was hanged,” MacCarthy said. Worst of all deaths, the body writhing, breeches stained with shameful death, the face blackening.

  The songs never told you that. Macroom: Paddy Lynch dancing on air. And the song they sang was of Ireland free. “A croppy boy. For God’s sake, is there no one in this cabin has a song with some life in it?”

  Before he left, O’Donnell asked him to recite his lament for O’Sullivan Beare, but he refused. It was an intricate poem and it depended upon allusions, hints, the small gestures of remembered names. These poor cowherds, matted hair, breeches streaked with the dung of cattle, would be puzzled and embarrassed. As though a velvet-coated gentleman had flung himself into the room to call for punch.

  The rain had begun again and then had ended during his hour in the cabin, but the air was still heavy, and the tall grasses were drenched.

  Dublin, August 18

  Malcolm Elliott arrived in Dublin on the morning mail coach, took a room in a Dawson Street hotel, and breakfasted there in the company of squires, middlemen, and a few English officers.

  He had spent the night in Granard, to visit with Hans Dennistoun, a member of the provincial executive, and was encouraged by what he had heard. The United Irishmen were strong in the midlands; their organization had survived harassment and the arrest of several leaders. The county executives for Longford, Westmeath, and Cavan worked closely together. More remarkable than that, the strategy of the United Irishmen, an alliance of Protestant and Catholic, had been achieved. Dennistoun, the Longford commander, was a Protestant, an affable, large-bodied farmer with a quick, decisive intelligence. Michael Tuomy, his seconder, was a Catholic apothecary in Granard. At dinner, listening to their talk, Elliott could imagine himself back in Tom Emmet’s Rathfarnham villa. Why had such urban notions taken root here, in this rich pastureland? The bulky farmer and the spare, bespectacled apothecary sat perched on the edge of their chairs, amicably arguing tactics, politics, principles, as though there had never been a rebellion crushed in Wexford, as though Catholics had not been dragooned and hanged, or Protestants butchered at Wexford bridge and burned alive at Scullabogue. They lacked Elliott’s bitter, unspoken belief that they were committed to a cause hopeless and tainted. Perhaps they were right.

  But the road southwards to Dublin offered evidence at every mile that the island had witnessed one insurrection and was preparing for a second. Mullingar, the great cattle market of the midlands, was also a
garrison: The troops now stationed there had spilled from the barracks. Their neat encampments were spread beyond the edge of the town, in rolling meadows. Troops were on the move south of Kinnegad, slogging past the coach in double files, followed by bored young officers. Their accents, as they shouted cheerful obscenities at the coachman, were English. Perhaps they belonged to the supplementary regiments which Cornwallis had obtained from London. There was an empty gallows and a whipping post at Kilcock cross and a row of burned cabins in the village street. But Maynooth was quiet, its single street dominated by the massive estate walls of Carton, seat of the Duke of Leinster, Edward Fitzgerald’s brother. Sentries were posted along the Royal Canal, at the outskirts of Dublin.

  At breakfast, Elliott shared a table with an estate agent from Mallow, a witty, choleric man, who discoursed upon cattle, fox hunting, and politics between mouthfuls of mutton chops and slabs of thickly buttered bread. Cornwallis was being too bloody lenient towards the surrendered rebels of Antrim and Wexford, he said. What the country needed was a good stiff dose of Cromwell’s ghost.

  “No trouble with the people on my land,” he said. “Treat them fair and they’ll live as quiet as a parson. A pair of these United Irish vagabones arrived to stir them up, and one of my tenants tipped me the wink. I had my bailiff hang them up by the heels from a gable end. No need to hang them properly. Arrested, tried, convicted, and sentence executed in twenty minutes. My tenants pelted them off the land with rocks and clods.”

  A rough-and-ready view of matters: the national grain. Elliott found him, on the whole, a pleasant companion and they spent an agreeable hour together.

  After breakfast he strolled north, across the Liffey, to Dorset Street. It was a clear, brilliant morning, and the city of cool Portland stone and warm brick seduced his senses. At College Green he paused, where the curved masses of the Parliament House faced the austere, Palladian façade of Trinity College. What was that jingle about Parliament by Swift? Wolfe Tone was forever quoting it: “Half a bow shot from the College; all the world from wit and knowledge.” Tone’s mind was peppered and riddled by tags of poetry and song. “A soldier’s a man, and life’s but a span, Why then let a soldier drink.” Somewhere in Shakespeare.