The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  These men in loose frieze, long-lipped, black hair or red hanging loose, were held in a loop of history’s long coils. Hands hardened by the plough clutched musket or pike. Ignorant and uncomprehending, they scrambled up hills, walked or half ran beside starlit waters. When colonels and chieftains had been scraped away, these men were left.

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  The day, which all who have passed comment upon these events describe as a most extraordinary one, opened at six in the morning, when our force, after its arduous march across that wretched country, emerged upon rising ground, facing the British who held Sion Hill, some thousand yards distant from us. An hour earlier, they had been brought word of our approach, and they had set to work redressing their lines, a task which they had not yet completed. Humbert stood for a time in contemplation of the scene before him, as though viewing men placed on parade for his inspection, and then moved us forward to the shelter of a hill called Slievenagark. We were still outside the range of the British guns.

  He then ordered the Irish, under O’Dowd and Teeling, to charge the guns. Accordingly we moved forward in a mass, receiving, at a distance of about fifty yards, a wall of musket fire. The Irish charged and routed the infantry who stood lined to protect the cannon, but then the cannon, which until then had been silent, commenced bellowing explosions which battered wide holes in our ranks. Our losses were heavy, although at the time I had no thought of that, for the world seemed to have dissolved in smoke and a terrifying noise. While this action had been taking place, however, Humbert had been moving forward the rest of his forces in files, using hedges as his cover, and then assembling them in a formation which flanked the English. We were ordered then to charge again, and we did, if only because we could think of nothing else to do. The grenadiers had moved behind us, and pressed us forward.

  I can claim no distinction for myself. I remember firing my pistol at a gunner, and I remember cutting down at men with my sword. It was my task, I knew, to encourage our men, but when I opened my mouth it was dry and stiff. But I saw O’Dowd shouting, his hat in his hand, beating it across men’s backs and shoving them forward. What I best remember are the noises, musket fire and screams. Their cavalry was left with no room in which to manoeuvre, for the Longford militia stumbled backward upon them, and then the Irish with their pikes fell upon them, slashing and hooking murderously at horse and rider alike.

  And yet what won the battle was the flight of the enemy, as much as it was our charges upon them. When O’Dowd’s men scaled their side of the hill, they ran past guns which had already been deserted. The Kilkennys and the Prince of Wales’s Fencibles, it is said, were the first to buckle, and as they fled backward, they threw into panic the line behind them. The Frasers held, and fought their ground with resolute bravery, swinging their muskets like clubs. But the rest of that army, which so greatly outnumbered us, turned and fled. Humbert later confessed that he had not expected it. By throwing away the first wave of Irish as a sacrifice to draw the artillery, and then attacking from the flank, he had calculated upon a victory, but the manner of our triumph was without precedent.

  I can describe but I cannot explain what is now called a most ignominious defeat for British arms, the battle of Castlebar, or, as it is derisively termed, “the Castlebar races.” Humbert’s night march down through Barnageragh had much to do with it, of course, for it forced the British into a new and awkward plan of defence, hastily chosen and ill considered. Perhaps Lake erred in taking command upon a field to which he had but recently arrived, but I do not believe that Hutchinson or any other officer would have fared better. Save, perhaps, Humbert himself. All of us, even the Irish-speaking peasants from Nephin, had come to share Humbert’s confidence in his own abilities. It was a mysterious elixir, and we had all drunk of it. Dropped upon an alien and savage coast, commanding men whose language he could not understand, he moved and gave his orders as one persuaded that success was casual and inevitable. In the two months that have passed since then I have become far more cynical upon that point, but on the morning of the Castlebar battle, I risked my life upon his nod, as did the others. The British officers with whom I have spoken dismiss almost entirely the rebel attack, and attribute our victory to Humbert’s seasoned infantry and his grenadiers. Our Irish, they say, were but a mob flung forward to create a diversion. But upon that point I am less certain. It was a mob flung forward by history, and had, perhaps, its terrifying aspect.

  It is certain that the British fled. They fled towards Castlebar, abandoning their guns and dropping their muskets as they ran. In the narrow streets of the town, their cavalry rode down and trampled their infantry. Some hundreds of them were brought under control by the officers and fought a creditable action at the bridge to protect their comrades’ retreat, but they were overborne. And the gunners who manned a curricle which had been placed in the town attempted to maintain a fire, which was most courageous of them. I have heard it said that one of these men was killed by Owen MacCarthy, but of this I have no knowledge. He was unarmed on our night march, but when a man named Cafferty was shot down, a peasant who served as a captain under MacDonnell, MacCarthy took his place, and was present during the fighting on Sion Hill. Thereafter, some in the Irish army termed him “captain,” part in jest and part in earnest.

  Looking over these lines, I find that I have indeed set down in most flat and perfunctory manner both my account of this signal victory and of my own first experience in battle. After the battle, I was both elated and confused. I was part of a small, desperate army which had achieved a most improbable success, through luck, skill, and the cowardice of the enemy. The English defeat was utter and entire. All was left behind them— cannons, munitions, muskets by the hundreds, battleflags. They did not pause in their headlong retreat until they reached Tuam, where they rested briefly before proceeding to Athlone to await Cornwallis, a march of sixty-three miles. And they carried with them, whence it spread throughout Ireland, word that a large and ferocious army was on the move. Three hundred of the Irish died in this encounter, the greater part of them blown to pieces in the minutes before O’Dowd began his charge upon the cannons. A few of them died at my side, and I saw British soldiers skewered and ripped open by pikes. This was the battle, now famous, of Castlebar.

  Castlebar, August 27

  MacCarthy stood dazed in Castlebar High Street. As though, a boy in Tralee, he had won a footrace, chest heaving, senses muddled. He remembered moments, held in sequence but disconnected, a night of red stars. Men shouted, smoke smeared and stained the grass of summer. A footrace past the dying. Uniforms, red and hearty, held Sion Hill, but when they turned and ran some were left to writhe upon the ground, faces contorted, eyes wild.

  At the foot of Sion Hill, Cafferty stumbled and fell forward, his chest smashed in by cannon shot. The men he had been leading stopped in their tracks and stared at him, a pool of terrified quiet within the noise. The noise of the cannons was horrible, a voice given to blood, to bodies changed into butchers’ meat and sodden cloth. A man beside MacCarthy stumbled, tripping upon his own awkward feet. MacCarthy seized his shoulders, held him upright, and they looked at each other without recognition. “O Jesus save me,” he said, and lurched forward. The cannon exploded within MacCarthy’s mind and he felt his guts loosening. Red uniforms tended them, packed death into their black, yawning mouths, opened wide to scream. “Stop them,” MacCarthy shouted to Cafferty’s men. He grabbed one of them and shoved him forward. “For Jesus sake, stop them.” He ran forward then himself, bellowing like a bull to shut out the noise of the cannon. He paused to look backward, and saw that they were following him, about twenty of them. To his left and right were many others, running towards the Longfords, a great mass of men running up the gentle slope, their pikes held awkwardly, peasants who knew how to swing a blade against corn or downwards into the turf. What would they have done had the Longfords held their ground, thin
murderous bayonets grouped together? But they buckled and ran, fear spreading beyond them like a contagion. It was a message, passed in silence along the long lines of red uniforms. Turn. Run. The rebels ran towards them, courage mounting when they saw that suddenly they had no cause for fear, nothing facing them but men to be run down and butchered. Cannon abandoned, nothing filled the air but voices. The ghosts of cannon fire, wraiths of phantom sound, filled MacCarthy’s ears, and he paused to press his hands against them. Then, like all the others, he ran across meadows still slippery with dew towards Castlebar, nestling in its cup of soft hills.

  Now he stood in Castlebar High Street as men ran past him. He saw muskets, abandoned and kicked aside. Where the British troops had gone, he neither knew nor cared, but it was up this street that most of them had poured. At the top of the street stood a curricle gun, the gunner sprawled across it. A brave man, working his murderous engine as murder-minded men ran towards him. What would possess a man to do such a thing?

  Corny O’Dowd flung an arm across his shoulder. “We bet them, Owen. We smashed them all.” His eyes were mad with excitement.

  MacCarthy nodded. That was what it was. A battle fought and won. He felt nothing save the dried saliva of fear upon his tongue.

  “By God, ’tis a lucky stroke for you that you are here,” O’Dowd said. “There will be a poem out of you about this someday.”

  “About this?” MacCarthy asked. Distant now, at the edge of his imagination, cannon belched noises harsher than thunder. Lines of verse by other men jumped at him, vanished, wraiths from a bog. Chieftains banished from lime white mansions. O’Sullivan Beare retreating northwards towards Leitrim, savage in his desperation. Sarsfield’s night raid, small victory drowned in the red waves of Aughrim and Limerick. “About this?” he asked again, but O’Dowd was gone, jaunty rider drunk with triumph.

  Men were running more slowly now, slackening to a walk, halting to stare about them, as MacCarthy had done. MacCarthy stood by a huckster’s shop, exotic now as any Arab tent, separated from him by the vast distance created by what he had seen and heard on Sion Hill. He turned to look down High Street, and saw Humbert crossing the bridge which lay at its foot, the little humpbacked bridge lifting him up above his men. Teeling, the Ulsterman, rode behind him, and Elliott, the Protestant landlord. Humbert’s face was difficult to make out, even when he moved closer, a face which could hide itself from other men. He was smiling, as no doubt generals always did in victory. He rode up the street of this town which he had never seen before like a squire coming in from his farm, but it was a stranger’s face, dark and unknowable.

  MacCarthy walked on, towards the curricle gun. The gunner’s scarlet coat was a splash of colour in the street of gaunt grey buildings. MacCarthy looked into his open eyes. His hair was red, MacCarthy’s colour, and his face was familiar. And why not? Weren’t the two of them Irish, MacCarthy and the dead gunner from the Longford midlands? Racial resemblance, more certain than coat of frieze and coat of lobster red, joined gunner and schoolmaster, red hair, hard jaw, long lip. MacCarthy reached out a hand, across the gun, to touch the gunner’s face, then drew it back in haste.

  With angular, loping strides he left gun and gunner, pushed past the men who filled the street, and turned at the top. He watched the stream of men cross the bridge, climb the hill’s easy slope, divide in two to pass the dead gunner. What poem would ever harden from that imprecise image? The loud voices were jubilant, shouting in heavy-vowelled Irish across which French cut like the rattle of musket fire.

  Randall MacDonnell rode up to him, blood brother to horses, no grace to him save when he sat astride one. Centaur and bumpkin. The mists had been burned away. In the clarity of flat, pale sunlight, MacDonnell reined in and leaned down towards him.

  “Do you know who their general was? It was Lake himself. It was Lake and the entire army of Connaught that ran away from us.”

  The flat, hard monosyllable jogged MacCarthy’s memory. The two United Men from Wexford, on the run in a Mayo shebeen. Cromwell come again, General Lake marching across Wexford and Carlow, in his wake an avenue of gallows and whipping posts, invincible coats of lobster red, shrill of fifes and beating drums.

  “There is a poem for you in that, boy.”

  First O’Dowd, now him. Poems on demand. Go into a tavern and scribble it out, then hawk it through the streets of Castlebar. Make a few shillings out of it, like the jinglejangle ballads that were made in English after races. Poetry was somewhere else. Not here.

  Come all you true-born Irishmen, attend unto my lay

  Of the race we won at Castlebar one gallant August day.

  “Would you like a sporting poem, Randall?” he asked, throwing humour as a wall between them. “How the race was won at Castlebar?” He was hoarse. Had he been bellowing like the rest of them, an uncontrolled animal?

  Puzzled. Hat pushed to the back of his head of tight black curls. Then he laughed, high-pitched, hand pressed down on short, full thigh. “By God, that is exactly what he did. Lake won the Castlebar races. He had us bet by a mile. That wouldn’t do at all, though. We must have a noble poem of triumph, suitable to the occasion.” They had been talking in English. He touched his whip to his cap and rode off. A jockey’s whip carried into battle. But he had a great pistol strapped around him, and another in a saddle holster.

  At the top of the High Street, the French soldiers turned and moved down Castle Street, past barracks, courthouse, gaol, hard, angular buildings bruising the mild air. MacCarthy stepped aside, into a cobbled alley.

  Humbert rode behind a guard of grenadiers, a large man, larger than MacCarthy, his face swarthy with its private thoughts. Teeling, an even-tempered meditative man; watchful, intelligent eyes. John Moore, young and fair-skinned, full lips and delicate nose, hair yellow as corn. Young hero of a poem, claiming the conquered city. MacCarthy, hugging his elbows, leaned a shoulder against cool brown stone. The substance of poetry, young heroes and triumphant generals. Perhaps such moments had always had the look of this one, layered grains of sunlight and actuality running across passion, across myth. Men whom he knew well, and other men no different from them, walked past him, ploughboys and spalpeens. They had the walk of men who lumbered at break of day across fields wet with dew. A while before, they had been screaming as they climbed Sion Hill, skewering men with their murderous pikes. A battle was an hour ripped out of the flank of existence. Sunlight soothed the wound. The commonplace, a huckster’s shop, a wall of rough stone, a ploughboy’s lumbering gait, grew a skin over the wound and healed it.

  Above the courthouse they raised the banner of green silk which had been carried from France, the harp without the crown. The officers of Humbert’s staff, French and Irish, mounted the steps, and the mob which now could be called an army stood looking at them. The French band, with its drums and flutes, began to play. When it had finished, the air was silent. Then, notes flinging themselves like coins from a pocket, a pipe. MacCarthy looked through the crowd, but could not find the piper. One of the O’Donnell marches; he had heard it often in Killala. Hugh O’Donnell sweeping down from the north and laying Mayo waste. No town here in O’Donnell’s day, no courthouse. Now, from the winding alleys of cabins, townspeople were drifting towards the courthouse square.

  All that shouting had given him the father and mother of a thirst. It would be pleasant to walk down to Sean MacKenna’s shop, and take him off for a drink. Those taverns would be open soon, one way or another. As though nothing had happened at Killala or Ballina or here in Castlebar. Of all the dead that he had seen that day he remembered only the gunner with clarity. A man with a face like his own, but with the alien eyes of the dead.

  But on the way to MacKenna’s he met MacDonnell again, dismounted now, a chunky, bandy-legged man, and went off with him to look for an open tavern. Time enough later for a drink with Sean. A quiet man like Sean would have no taste for wandering about in such a scene.

  “This is a great bloody morning,” MacDonnell s
aid.

  “Bloody enough,” MacCarthy said.

  “It was,” MacDonnell said. “There were three hundred of our lads slaughtered, but by Christ the other fellows caught the worst of it. They fled like deer with us hacking away at them.”

  “I saw that,” MacCarthy said.

  MacDonnell smiled, small teeth with spaces between them. “The Castlebar races.”

  There had been a battle and it was won and MacCarthy had taken part in it. Not as a poet trailing along to pick up the odd image, an eye out for leaders to flatter in verse. He had climbed up Sion Hill to the militia, raced after them across the slippery grass and weeds, stood looking down at the dead gunner.

  “By God, Owen,” MacDonnell said. “Things will never be the same again.”

  10

  FROM AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE

  OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1798,

  BY ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME

  The appalling news of the disaster at Castlebar was at first received with incredulity by the loyalists of Killala. Killala, it must be remembered, was now cut off from the rest of Mayo, and remained so until the very end. The roads south, east, and west were held by the rebels, who allowed no loyalist to travel upon them, and we were therefore dependent upon the rebels for such news as they might give to us, and this news, of course, became increasingly alarming. Despite this, we had been confident that the rebels and their French allies, when once they encountered a British army in the field, would be dispersed and scattered.