The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  She sat quietly, hands joined.

  He took one of the matched pistols from the case. “It could become dangerous here, Judith. This is the closest garrisoned town to the French. The yeoman corps of other towns may move here and try to hold it.”

  “I know nothing of such matters,” she said. “Garrisons, movements of men. I have never understood them.”

  “No more have I. Do you know Michael Geraghty, who has the big farm on the other side of the river? Geraghty is a United Man. If there is trouble here, get word to him at once. If you have trouble with either side, do you understand me?”

  She felt that her mind was moving too slowly to grasp his meaning.

  “I must try to reach Killala now,” he said. “Very soon the fencibles will have the road closed.”

  “I am sorry, Malcolm,” she said, shaking her head. “The French have landed, and the insurrection has begun. All over Ireland. Is that it?”

  “I cannot speak for all of Ireland,” he said. “It has certainly begun in Mayo.” He put the pistol back in its case and closed the lid. “The hours my father spent teaching me the use of these! In his day every Mayo gentleman was a duellist. A national disease. He had a limp from a pistol ball in his thigh. Badge of honour. It was a brutish place in those days, and it is little better now.”

  Judith grasped the arms of her chair. “We are merchants,” she said, “my father and his brother. I doubt if either of them has ever held a pistol in his hand.”

  Elliot smiled at her. “I will be back soon,” he said. “There will be a battle for Ballina.” The word echoed in his ears: battle, large and melodramatic.

  “We must pray for its success,” she said. Then she cried, in a different, shriller voice, “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “No,” Elliott said. “Few of us will understand it, now that it is here. We all talked about it.” He put the pistol case under his arm, and walked to her. He shared her sense of unreality. Judith herself, the room in which he stood, the field in which the word had been brought to him, belonged to the order of actuality. He was setting out towards phantasy, a world of pistols, Frenchmen, and words like battle.

  “What will happen, Malcolm?” she asked. “You must have some sense of what will happen?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and bent down to kiss her.

  Two miles outside of Ballina, he encountered a carriage crowded with women. Beside them rode George Falkiner, an elderly man who sat his horse with a stiff, erect back. One of the women recognised him, an old friend of his parents.

  “Mr. Elliott,” she called out. “You must not go near Killala. It is in the hands of the Frenchmen and the Papists. They have murdered our yeomen.”

  He reined in, and touched his hand to the brim of his hat. “I must, Mrs. Saurin. I have business there.”

  “There are mobs in the streets, and more Papists pouring in by the hour.”

  “My business there is pressing.”

  “They will murder you,” she said. “You don’t understand, Mr. Elliott. They will murder you, as the innocent Christians were butchered in Wexford.” She had a round, anxious face, and speaking had brought her to tears.

  Falkiner called him away from the carriage, and they went together a short distance down the road.

  “If I correctly understand the purpose of your journey, Mr. Elliott, I should pistol you as you sit there.”

  “I understand my obligations, sir, as you do yours.”

  “You are riding to join foreign invaders, who have come here to bring bloodshed and death. They have already slaughtered men. You intend a treason for which the only remedy is a shameful death on the gallows.”

  “I am not acting thoughtlessly, Mr. Falkiner. I trust and believe that I am serving our country.”

  “I observe that you are carrying your father’s pistols. Would your father have called this service to your country?”

  “He would not, sir. But I am not my father. You must excuse me. Ballina is still safe for your party, and the door of The Moat is open for you, if you wish it.”

  “The Moat!” Falkiner cried. “No longer, sir. No longer. I would sooner sleep in the ditch, and these poor women with me. But I have no fear of that. The houses of Ballina are loyal, all but one of them.”

  In the phantasy towards which he moved off, he might at such a moment expect a pistol ball between his shoulders. But he knew that Falkiner sat motionless, the reins held loosely in his white, fragile hands. Between fields of corn and barley, golden in the sun of late afternoon, Elliott rode towards Killala.

  Kilcummin, August 22

  On a field sloping down from Knockmany, Michael MacMahon and his son Fergus watched the French unload supplies from their boats.

  “Queer small men they are,” MacMahon said. “For all the talk about them.”

  “Ferdy O’Donnell will be bringing into Killala the men who have sworn the big oath, and I will be going with them.”

  “For what purpose? To make yourselves drunk in the streets of Killala?”

  “Well do you know for what purpose.”

  “Look around you, boy, and tell me who is to give me help in those fields. Let the Frenchmen make up their army out of spalpeens and homeless men and idle, wandering fellows.”

  “It is often enough that I have seen you beating time with your heels when they sang about the great rising there would be when the French came, or Owen MacCarthy bawling out his poems. The French are here now.”

  “Is Owen MacCarthy with the French?”

  “How would I know where Owen MacCarthy is. He is below in Killala.”

  “Owen MacCarthy is a scholar and a man of deep learning. You will not find him wasting his life to the rope or the cannon.”

  “There is no waste when an entire countryside of people rises up.”

  “Would you be back for the harvest?”

  “Before then, sure. How long can it take? Last week the yeomen were swaggering across the countryside, burning whatever man’s house they chose. Today they are dead in the streets of Killala.”

  “ ’Tis here that the year’s harvest is,” MacMahon said, “and not with the dead yeomen of Killala.” He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “It would be a wonderful thing to see the Protestant landlords driven off, and the English soldiers.”

  “It would.”

  MacMahon turned suddenly, flung his arms around his son, and began to weep. Fergus, taken by surprise, patted his back awkwardly.

  “I don’t want you killed,” MacMahon said, sobbing. “It isn’t the harvest at all. I don’t want you to go off to the fighting and get killed.”

  He is an old man now, Fergus thought with surprise, holding his father close. Over the father’s beefy, heavy-muscled shoulder, he saw Ferdy O’Donnell and forty men coming towards them along the road, pikes sloped.

  Killala, August 22

  A man wearing a helmet of the Tyrawley Yeomanry crashed into MacCarthy, who moved back a pace and held him upright. Randall MacDonnell was riding down the crowded street towards the Palace, followed by a long, straggling column of men. When he saw MacCarthy he waved, sketchy parody of a salute.

  The man whom MacCarthy was holding said, “Tomorrow we will be given uniforms and firelocks, master.”

  “Get yourself home now and go to bed,” MacCarthy said, “or tomorrow you will do yourself an injury with your firelock.” He clapped the man on the back, pushing him forward.

  In the Wolf Dog he found Ferdy O’Donnell, who had his uniform already, a blue coat with yellow facings, and a sword.

  “Have you become a Frenchman on me, Ferdy?”

  “Indeed I have not, Owen, but a captain in the Irish army, in command of the Kilcummin men.”

  “Will Randall MacDonnell be the general then of the Irish, or will Malcolm Elliott?”

  “Not Malcolm Elliott,” O’Donnell said. “He is to be on the staff of the French when he arrives, and so is John Moore. It will be Randall, or Corny O’Dowd, or George Blake
of Barraclough, and the others are to be colonels. You couldn’t want a better man than George Blake.”

  “It is true,” MacCarthy said. “He is a good man. Gentleman, I should say. I observe that the rebellion is paying proper attention to social grades.”

  “Sure who would follow after cowherds and potboys? Owen, it has been wonderful the way men have been coming in. There are men marching in from beyond Nephin who met a party of yeomen and scattered them.”

  “It is wonderful indeed,” MacCarthy said. “It is as if a great sackful of people had been shaken out upon Killala. The town is crowded to bursting with them.”

  “We will have a few jars, and then I will take you over to Bartholemew Teeling, the Irish Frenchman who made me a captain.”

  “I will settle for the jar, Ferdy. How many of the Frenchmen are there?”

  “A thousand, and they have brought firelocks for five thousand of us. And swords and sashes for officers.”

  “One thousand is not many.”

  “In this fleet only. More are on the way, thousands more. Teeling stood on the steps of the Protestant minister’s house and made a speech with the French general standing beside him.”

  “A speech in Irish?”

  O’Donnell shrugged. “Ulster Irish, but we could make out what he was saying.”

  “And what is it that they intend to do?”

  “I do not know for certain, except that we will first attack Ballina. In two days’ time, with the help of God, my brother Gerry will be a free man.”

  “With God’s help he will,” MacCarthy said. He crossed himself and then picked up his whiskey. “I am ashamed to confess it, but my mind is all confusion. Frenchmen in their gay uniforms, Cooper’s yeomen smashed to pieces, men coming in from all directions with their pikes. What in God’s name do the likes of us know about armies?”

  “We know as much as Cooper, and he was part of an army.”

  “That is not at all a comforting example. Cooper and his yeomen were make-believe soldiers, and the real soldiers smashed them like eggs. The English too have their real soldiers in this island. Thousands upon thousands of them.”

  O’Donnell slapped his arm. “Will you break loose out of your gloom? Your damned poems have come to life all around you.”

  “My poems.” MacCarthy drained off his glass, and signalled for another round. “You are right there, Ferdy. Figures from my poetry are rising up all around me in the streets of Mayo, captains and colonels and generals and ships from France. And yet who is to be the leader if not Randall MacDonnell the horse dealer, with a crowd of ploughboys at his back?”

  “And who for a captain but only Ferdy O’Donnell from a mountainy farm near Kilcummin, why do you not add that? Well, Owen, we are what is left. There are no chieftains or proud Sarsfields, and have not been for a century. Ireland is only horse dealers and farmers.”

  “And peasants,” MacCarthy said. “Like me. You have grown eloquent in your handsome uniform.”

  The innkeeper brought them their whiskeys.

  “By God,” O’Donnell said, “it is only a few nights ago that the Protestant yeomen were in here, putting fire in their bellies to warm themselves for their cruel tasks.”

  “The wheel of fortune,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis oiled by whiskey.”

  “You have said many the time to me, Owen, that we were slaves. Will we ever see a better chance to fight?”

  MacCarthy moved his glass forward and back on the rough table. “No,” he said at last.

  “Then come with me to the minister’s house and meet Teeling. They will have need of men with learning.”

  “Faith, they will,” MacCarthy said, “if Randall MacDonnell is to be the measure.” He drank off his whiskey. “No, Ferdy,” he said. “I will not go. But I wish you luck with your sword of steel.” On impulse, he reached out his arm, and squeezed the heavy shoulder in its unfamiliar cloth.

  “Don’t wait too long,” O’Donnell said.

  Killala, August 22

  Humbert sat alone in a small room off the drawing room. A map was spread before him on an oval table, held flat by bound volumes of theological tracts. Until Hardy arrived, he was in complete command. Not even in the Vendée had he had such freedom of choice. He looked at the whole of the island, deliberately ignoring its details. By tomorrow, Lord Cornwallis, in Dublin, would be sitting before such a map. A most competent old man, it was said. An aristo, doubtless gouty and querulous, as elderly British officers always were. What will he have heard? That a small French force has landed on the Connaught coast and is recruiting allies. How will he move? To seal us off as close to the coast as possible.

  He bent closer to the map. There would be a strong English garrison in Galway, and one to the east, perhaps less strong, at Sligo or at Enniskillen. If these commanders had sense, they would move at once. They would move towards this town here—he placed his finger on it—Castlebar, which controlled all the Mayo roads, and was doubtless already garrisoned. He could move to Castlebar himself, and perhaps knock them off balance, but to do so he must first take Ballina, Foxford, Swinford, towns strung like beads along the only road south to Castlebar. If he defeated that garrison, and captured Castlebar, what then? Cornwallis would be moving slowly towards him from the south, his armies spread wide. By then, Humbert would have his thousand men and perhaps five thousand raw allies. Local uprisings would be ignited as he moved, and would pin down the local militia. The trick then would be to slip past the English armies, cross the Shannon, join with the United Irish in the midlands, and make straight for Dublin.

  He had already sent off a fishing boat from Westport with word that he had landed and had taken Killala, and he would send a second after he had met and defeated his first force of English. That would bring out Kilmaine. The Directory could not allow a victorious army to perish for want of support. And then Buonaparte, that power-hungry little bourgeois, would have some of the gilt rubbed off his uniform. It was a good plan, but with one defect: it was difficult to the point of impossibility. The odds were heavy against even reaching Castlebar.

  He stood up and walked to the window. There was still music in the courtyard, a tall fiddler leaning against the wall, and it was still crowded with peasants, laughing and singing. They were a curious people, not at all what Tone and Teeling had led him to expect. He had imagined sober, implacable men, grim, perhaps a bit bloodthirsty. The ideals of the Revolution, Tone had assured him, formed their Bible. But these men were primitive, with something wild and terrifying in their appearance, like huge children. The Chouans had been lacking in manners, God knew, but they would have fled in terror from these fellows. All for the best, perhaps; terror had its uses. Many of them were holding pikes, a most effective weapon against cavalry, and formidable against unseasoned infantry. What kind of life did they have in this strange land of moorland wastes? Did they seek liberty, a pikehead thrust into a tyrant’s throat? Liberty, they would discover, is elusive and problematical.

  Ballintubber, August 22

  Standing on the entrance porch, facing the cool dark waters of Lough Carra, John Moore bade farewell to his brother.

  “At twenty-two, I am too old to be given orders.”

  “Nor do I presume to give you any. But you will shortly be taking a great many. How many of our people are leaving with you?”

  “None. I am riding ahead to Killala. But two hundred men from Ballin-robe will follow. About sixty of them are ours.”

  “It is my intention to speak to our tenants and warn them against this enterprise. None of them will follow you, if I can prevent it.”

  “You must do what seems proper to you,” John said, shrugging. “The estate is yours.”

  “How many have the French landed?”

  “The first messenger wasn’t certain. The second said about a thousand men, under a general called Humbert.”

  “Humbert!” George said, startled. “A general called Humbert. You have caught yourself a Tartar.”

  “W
hy? Is he well known?”

  “He was the general of the Vendée. A Jacobin. Clever, coarse, unprincipled.”

  “A good general?”

  “It was a special kind of war in the Vendée. Peasants and ambushes.” Like Mayo, Moore thought. “I cannot imagine why so shrewd a man would allow himself to be trapped in Mayo with a thousand men.”

  “He has brought one part of an expedition.”

  “That will depend upon the winds, the British fleet, and especially the Directory, as famous a collection of rogues as has ever been collected in one city. It is useless to preach to you, but I will make one effort. Your General Humbert will never get past Castlebar. Cornwallis will scoop him up like a weasel. And the rebels who take his arms will be traitors. When you ride down that avenue, you ride straight to a gallows.”

  “I may. But I believe that most of the people are prepared to make a stand.”

  “Make a stand. Your very language comes out of penny pamphlets.”

  “I have never claimed to be a scholar.”

  “You are wise in your modesty.”

  They stood facing each other, motionless.

  “Tell me this, George. You believe that we will not succeed. Do you hope that we will?”

  “I do indeed. In that event, you will not be hanged.”

  “No other reason?”

  George looked out towards the lake. Wind-rippled. The melancholy wind of late afternoons. “This insurrection is destined for so certain a ruin that I feel only despair. Many men will be killed or destroyed and among them my own brother. I could not be more certain.”

  “We are an odd pair of brothers, George. The world is full of luck and chance. Perhaps you will see me ride through the streets of Castlebar in all my glory.”

  George laughed. “It would become you well, John. You are a fine handsome young man, and you would look splendid in uniform.”

  “That would depend upon the colour. Red wouldn’t suit me at all, for example. Wish me luck, George.”

  “I wish with all my heart to see you here again. Our father managed to get back from Spain. May you have his luck.” Awkwardly, he embraced his brother.