The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Teeling, with partial success, sought to prevent the plundering from spreading beyond Glenthorne Castle, but it was Humbert who checked it entirely by sending out squads of his grenadiers. He did not object to looting on principle, but he knew that irregular troops, operating in their own countryside, had a way of drifting home with their booty. The sight of a rebel staggering bent-backed through the encampment, a grandfather clock lashed to his shoulders, convinced him that this was a lively possibility. But of course he allowed them to keep what they had taken, and silks trailed across the pasturelands of the encampment, and paintings in their massive frames of gilded wood stood propped against trees. He was annoyed when he learned of the unauthorised murder of Creighton, although he shared their detestation of aristocrats. “He was the land agent, I have been told,” Teeling said; “not an aristocrat.” Humbert shrugged. “Ça me fait égal.” But he issued strict orders. Looting would be punished by the whip, murder by hanging.

  The French and the Irish camps were separated by the Rosserk road. Humbert visited them both, accompanied by Sarrizen and Fontaine, Teeling and Elliott. He observed with amusement that two priests in their vestments, Murphy and the Ballycastle curate, were visiting groups of men who knelt before them to receive the sacrament. Humbert, in his earlier days a spirited defiler of churches, took now a tolerant view of these priests. They confirmed his belief that he was making use of a primitive, incalculable people. No matter. He had once been a Mass-goer himself, kneeling beside his starched, black-clad grandmother.

  Cows from the Big Lord’s herds had been slaughtered and cooked on spits. The Irish sat on the ground working at them, joints and great gobs of charred beef. As though they had never tasted meat before. Seldom enough for most of them, poor devils.

  The Revolution had once been this, peasants invading the chateaux, doing away with the seigneurs, hauling the finery out onto the lawns and trampling gardens and setting fire to the buildings. What was it now but an ugly scramble for power—Barras and Rewbell and the rest of them. And, waiting to burst into flight, butterfly in its demure cocoon, their creature, Buonaparte. Carnot, the one honest politician, the organiser of victories, in exile since Fructidor. Hoche dead, the great general who was the true son of the Revolution. How he had hated and suspected Buonaparte! The Revolution had become a pit of coiling snakes, that Revolution which had made a general of a dealer in rabbit skins. They respected victories, though, those snakes in their pit, and this knowledge had sent Buonaparte to the sands of Egypt, and Humbert to a moorland waste.

  MacCarthy too wandered about in the rebel encampment. Perhaps he had taken part in the attack on Ballina. He was not certain. The Irish, as they moved along the Rosserk road, had not marched in the French fashion, disciplined and drilled. They were a mob, formed loosely into groups, though obedient enough to the commands of O’Dowd and Teeling. MacCarthy, leaning with folded arms against the gable wall of the Wolf Dog, watched them move out of Killala, his eyes searching out the faces of men he knew, cowherds and hillside farmers, faction fighters and tavern drinkers. They seemed puzzled, some of them, and a few plainly were frightened, some joked and nudged each other with thick elbows. But the faces of most were impassive, expressionless. They carried pikes sloped awkwardly along their shoulders, unfamiliar weapons, bright, menacing heads new-forged. He watched until they were almost out of sight, pulled himself away from the wall, stood hesitant in the street, and then ran after them. He was neither welcomed nor sent away. Randall MacDonnell, preoccupied, in command of the rear column, did not recognise him. It was just as well, MacCarthy thought. He did not know whether he was there or not. Along bother-na-sop, the road of straw, they came from the cabins with lighted bundles of straw, flames upon the black night, and stood motionless and silent, wraiths summoned up from the past, faces wavering behind the fires.

  The battle came when they emerged from the Rosserk road, at Teeling’s shout, and fell upon Chapman’s men, who were already in retreat. MacCarthy could not make heads or tails of it. It was all shouts and curses, a cattle fair at midnight. Most of the fighting was done by O’Dowd’s column, which was in the van, and hidden from sight. “Now!” MacDonnell shouted. “Now!” His voice shot upwards, shrill, on the tail of the word, and the men near MacCarthy ran forward towards the noises. MacCarthy ran after them, separated from them. But when he reached the Ballina road, there was nothing to see. The noises were moving along the road, towards the town. He slowed his pace, then stopped, and stood, wondering, in the road. Battle was shouting and darkness. There was just enough light for him to see a pike, fallen or dropped. He bent down and picked it up. His free hand moved along the shaft of ash, the straight blade and the curved blade which twisted from its base. He brought the hand away, wet, and, sick with knowledge of its cause, knelt down and pawed the roadside grasses. An hour later, he found himself standing in a dog-legged Ballina street which ran at a right angle to the Moy. MacCarthy rested the pike against the bridge and left it for someone else.

  Now, in bright summer sunlight, he walked among the victors of Ballina. Stretched out, at their ease, along pasturelands to the east of the town, they could be harvesters at their noontime rest, and the faces even of those whom he had never seen were familiar to him as well-worn tankards. They were the men among whom his life had been lived, the swarm of a nation, nameless. Swineherds and cowherds, they trailed their pikes across the pages of manuscript histories in Treacy’s library, huddled and anonymous at the tail end of sentences that moved like pageants. “August 3, 1599. On this day perished in battle, at Abbeyleix, Sir Miles O’More, with five other gentlemen of the county, and a hundred others.” “July 12, 1691. Lord Moycashel fell at Aughrim and at his side Sir Thomas Prendergast who was by marriage his kinsman. More than two hundred of the common sort died there upon the hill where he had taken his position.” They were spread out before MacCarthy now, those others who had followed the beating drums, had run forward with the yelping sergeants. What drew them now? The prospect of looting the big houses, fear of massacre, vengeful hatred, simple excitement? Perhaps only a pike or a musket, and a haunch of beef to chew on, then slither off into the darkness, vomiting the rich meat on a bog road and the musket hidden in the thatch. The heavy hive had been stirred, and these had swarmed out, spilling from the cabins and the lonely huts and the stinking, foetid streets. They rallied to a meaningless banner, a square of green silk with a gilt harp on it and three words in dog-Irish.

  MacCarthy, son of labourers like these, born and reared in a hut as mean as theirs, spun webs of words in which names like Moycashel and Muskerry hung like bright drops of dew, silver filaments shrouding the nameplates of defeat, Kinsale, Aughrim, Limerick. Fallen lords and colonels moved through his verses, imperious despite banishment and death. Their empty, silent houses, lime-white beneath the moon, were the landscape of his art. It was an art which could not stretch to bother-na-sop, a flame of straw upon the night, a woman running towards peasants with a bowl of milk. Three men from Belmullet passed him, huge, hulking men, their awkwardly held pikes spiky against the sky. Angles all askew, the pikes formed an instant’s image, unravelled, vanished. Moonlight glancing from stone or metal washed across his mind, faded. That was the worst of it with poems. The meaning was right there, in the image itself, and you had no idea what it meant, but the image knew. The image was wiser than the poet. It disclosed itself when it was good and ready, casually, totally.

  The Dublin-Galway Road, August 25

  General Lake’s carriage, with its outriders and its heavy escort of dragoons, did not pause at Athlone, at the fording of the Shannon. Heedless of Cornwallis’s concern for his sleep, he had set off for the west an hour after leaving the council chamber. He had sent messengers before him. General Hutchinson, if he had not already done so, was to move the Connaught army from Galway to Castlebar, where Lake would join him and take command. When the Frenchman attempted Castlebar, as doubtless he would, he would find himself outnumbered and outgeneralled. This i
nvasion and rebellion could be crushed while Cornwallis was making his stately, cumbersome progress to the field of action.

  Lake peered through the streaky dawn at the fields of Westmeath. It wasn’t merely age: Cornwallis had always been like this, first in North America, then India, now Ireland. Not a bad general at all, quite able in fact, but too cautious and too enamoured of administration. And ideas! God save the realm from generals who doted on ideas. Cornwallis and Burgoyne. A soldier was a man who sought out the King’s enemies and destroyed them. In Ireland they were everywhere and always had been. Cromwell had known how to deal with them, and in Wexford, Lake had taken a leaf from Cromwell’s book. At Vinegar Hill he had blown them up with cannon fire, cut them down at bayonet point, hanged them from a gallows or the nearest tree. And what thanks had he received from Cornwallis a month or so later? Praise in public and a private reproof, in that gouty, offhand manner of his. But there was only one way to deal with rebels. Cornwallis would have to discover that for himself. Only one way, and it must be done as quickly as possible. Lake detested rebellion. He had the ordinary prejudices of his profession, but his detestation ran deeper than these. Rebels in arms against the King and against law itself, they had moved beyond the pale of civilisation; they had cast aside their pretensions to humanity.

  Castlebar would put an end to them, once and for all, trampling deep into mud the seeds which had sprouted such evil flowers in Wexford and Antrim. If this Frenchman could be forced into battle, it would be one of the classic triumphs of British arms, a textbook battle. Lake of Castlebar. Lord Lake. Some honour would certainly be owing to him, and a peerage would be the most appropriate. An obscure market town, perched upon the unvisited crossroads of Mayo, but it would not be forgotten in the histories of British arms. Castlebar.

  But how rich the fields were in these days before the harvest. Rich to the point of bursting. Soon the reapers would be in the fields, as they would be in the fields of England, swinging the bright curving blades of their scythes. It might have been a landscape in England, were it not for the wretched cabins, the village streets which were straggles of mean shops and pothouses, no better than hovels. And this was one of the half-civilised counties of the pale; beyond stretched Galway and Mayo, the barbarous lands of the native Irish. At England’s doorstep, yet remote and alien. Lake imagined bogland and mountain, mist-shrouded.

  Castlebar, August 25

  Sean MacKenna made his prudent way down Castle Street, crowded with soldiers, keeping to the inside, close to the line of shops. No one bothered him, though he was jostled once or twice, by accident. He was an unobtrusive man, short and corpulent; hatless, his bald head glistened in the evening light. Those shops which boasted shutters had them fastened shut, and he regretted that he had never made so sensible an investment. Castlebar had retreated upon itself, Catholic and Protestant alike, and had left the streets to the soldiers. It was like market day, but with soldiers crowding into the town, not drovers and black-flanked cattle.

  Safe at last in his own shop, he called upstairs to his wife Brid and his small son Timothy, to say that he was there and would soon be ready for their tea. It was a word which he enjoyed saying, for it reminded him of their prosperity. Then he pushed aside several bolts of wool on the small counter, took down a heavy ledger book, and seated himself before it on his high stool. He inked his pen, read over the last entry, made a week before, stared into space as he composed his thoughts, and then began to write in Irish.

  August 25. The streets of Castlebar are now filled with more soldiers than have ever been in Mayo at any time in its history. Armies there have surely been here in the past, for battles were fought here in the old days, and especially in the reign of Elizabeth and during the years of O’Donnell’s uprising. But these, I suspect, were small battles, for all the extravagant words in the chronicles and the boasts of poets. There is now an army here such as those which fight upon the continent of Europe, and they have spilled out of the town and are in great encampments in the pasturelands, but they are in the town as well and have entirely filled the barracks. They have with them cavalry and cannon as well, great murderous engines. It is a sobering thought that the great nations of this world, England and France and the rest of them, can put so many thousands of men in uniform and march them where they will, flanked by their cannon and their cavalrymen, great tall fellows who have little regard for anyone save only themselves. But this is true in its way for all of these fellows, even the ones who have nothing better to do than to drive the carts. There was great fear expressed everywhere in Castlebar as they began to arrive, marching along the Galway road as though bent upon death and destruction, but it is little thought they have for us, and the reason is now known to all. They are making themselves ready to fight the army of Frenchmen and of our own people which has gathered itself to the north of us and has won a great victory in Ballina, should anything that happened in Ballina properly be termed great.

  It is a wonder to me that events so prodigious should be taking place, and yet find me calmly recording them in this journal, as though I were writing of the weather, or making record of a birth or of a neighbour’s death. For a century or more there has been fine talk by the poets, of France sending to us a great army for our deliverance, but I doubt whether in our hearts we believed that this would happen. Certainly I for one did not. What care about us need the French have, save that in the old days we would send them our young men to be blown apart and destroyed in their wars and thus spare the lives of their own young French boys? And if the French have indeed now sent an army here it is for their own purposes surely, and not from kindness nor from a desire to oblige our poets.

  What in the name of God is this army of the Gael, of which there is now much talk? Last night in the tavern Con Horgan the farrier was making great boasts that the army of the Gael had risen up and would drive all before it, with the French trotting after them to do odd jobs and cook snails. Where has it come from, this army of the Gael, that has hidden itself for so many years? It is a crowd of Whiteboys and faction fighters, and it is to some great faction fight that they believe they are heading, but these lads here in Castlebar with their cavalry and their dark cannon have no thought of faction fights. I did not point this out to Con Horgan, a bellicose man with hands on him like rocks, and who was far gone in drink, but the truth should be plain enough to any man with common sense. He was swelled up with vainglory, as though he had himself met and vanquished a regiment of militia, and the men who were drinking with him share this delusion, clapping him on the back and calling for more whiskey. And yet true it is that Ballina was captured, miserable village that it is.

  But soon enough all of Castlebar will have the opportunity to judge these matters, for it is in Castlebar that the great battle will be fought. Why else was the army of England brought here from Galway? And I for one could wish myself to be hundreds of miles from here, and Brid with me and little Timothy. At any time in the last twelve years I could have gone to Henry Rodgers, the Protestant carpenter, and for ten shillings he would have made stout shutters for the window of the shop and for the two windows above. I would by preference be in my native city of Cork, a centre of civilisation and polite learning, far removed from cannon and from soldiers shouting at each other as though the whole of the town were a tavern. But then if I had never come to this Godforsaken place to teach I would never have had this profitable shop, nor met my dear Brid, and there would be no Timothy, who is a great happiness to us both.

  9

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  I am told that the battle of Castlebar has attracted much interest and curiosity not only in this country and in England, but on the Continent, where exaggeraed accounts of it are current. That it was an extraordinary event is certain, although, as will shortly become evident, I am no judge of such matters. Several most civil British officers have visited me in this place, and have asked fo
r my account of the battle, and I have described it to them, much as I shall do in this memoir, but it must be remembered that my entire military career spanned a bare month or so, and that my ignorance of the craft of battle remains large. If it were a fox hunt, I could describe all that happened with energy and precision, and perhaps there are indeed resemblances between the two, but battles, if I may judge by this one, are spread across a landscape and all seems confusion, save perhaps to the two commanders.

  Ballina, as I can now perceive, was a mere rout, and reflected little credit upon our arms, save for the clever manner in which Humbert made use of the Rosserk road. That town, which holds so large a meaning for me because it is my own, was a mere way station, and ill defended. The true prize, but also the source of our greatest immediate peril, was Castlebar, where General Hutchinson had moved the Connaught army at first news of the French landing. That army was known to be a large one, and although composed in part of Irish militia, it had a backbone of English soldiers. Accordingly, Sarrizen and Fontaine argued eloquently, and for me persuasively, that it must at all costs be avoided. Until the arrival of the second and larger fleet of invasion, so they argued, we should limit ourselves to holding and securing our coastal and river position. Or, as an alternative to this, we might strike eastwards, towards Donegal, although this would bring us against General Trench’s garrison at Sligo. Humbert, however, would hear none of this, shaking his head impatiently, and drumming his wide, soft fingers on the tabletop.