The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Hardy has not left the French coast,” Humbert said. “You may be certain of that. And he will stay there until it has been made clear and public that he is needed to complete a campaign which I have begun with great success. That old aristocrat down in Dublin, Cornwallis, is not sitting still. He is bringing a large army northwards to meet me. If he finds me, there will be no second Castlebar. But if this island bestirs itself, and if I can avoid him for three weeks, Hardy will be here.”

  “Avoid him for three weeks?” Teeling asked incredulously. “On an island this size?”

  Humbert shrugged. “It is larger than the Vendée. Much larger. I can avoid him. With luck.”

  “And when Hardy lands, if he does land, where will we be?”

  Humbert made a curious gesture, closing his fist and then opening it over the table, fingers spread wide.

  “May I ask, General, how good our chances are?”

  “The odds are against us. Too many things must work properly. Local uprisings, and you are yourself doubtful of these. Hardy’s prompt arrival, and after him Kilmaine. The manner in which Cornwallis disposes of his forces. The chances are that he will be able to scoop us up in the net he will throw out, and put ropes around us. I say only of my plan that it is the best one in the circumstances.”

  “Best for the Irish, or for France?”

  “For France, of course,” Humbert said. “Best for France. It was you people who came to France for help, you know, yourself and Wolfe Tone and Fitzgerald and the others. We did not seek you out, to seduce you from your loyalty to England. You needed us, to make your disloyalty effective. And here we are. With luck there will be more of us. But we are here in the service of our country, as you serve yours.”

  “Your country,” Teeling said. “Not the Revolution.”

  “France is the Revolution,” Humbert said, with sudden, unexpected passion. “My victory here will strengthen the Revolution, just as Buonaparte’s victory in Egypt will probably destroy it.”

  “What meaning do you think that has for the ploughboys you throw against the English cannon?”

  “Ask yourself that. They are your countrymen, not mine.”

  “I am asking myself that question,” Teeling said. “It is an ugly one.”

  “Yes,” Humbert said gravely. “An ugly question. War devours men. We throw our children to the cannon. It is not a question to ask in the middle of a campaign.”

  “I will write out a fair copy of your despatch,” Teeling said. “Will you want a copy?”

  “Of course,” Humbert said. “And see that it is sent off by a reliable messenger. The boat should leave on the first tide.”

  At the door, Teeling turned. “It is wasteful of men, is it not, General—a frontal attack across open ground, without cover?”

  “It was successful,” Humbert said. “This time.”

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOTT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  On the day following the battle of Castlebar, I was directed to ride eastwards into Sligo to ascertain the state of the United movement there, and to learn what I could of conditions in Ulster, for Humbert regarded a juncture with what remained of the northern rebels as one of his possibilities. I was accompanied by Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, the schoolmaster. If, as seemed possible, some part of the Sligo road was held by peasants, MacCarthy stood a better chance than would I of explaining matters to them. To speak more plainly upon that point, the roads were no longer safe for anyone markedly “Protestant” in dress, manner, and speech. In the event, we did not encounter this difficulty, although parts of western Sligo have indeed gone into insurrection.

  Our journey carried us through Swinford, Charlestown, and Tobercurry, and a most ill-matched pair we must have looked, for MacCarthy jounced along most painfully, although without complaint, remarking at one point that his horse, which had been requisitioned from Lord Claremorris, was clearly worth but four pounds eighteen, a reference to the old penal statute which prohibited Papists from owning horses valued at more than five pounds. He proved, however, a most intelligent and sagacious man, albeit an eccentric one, and I found fresh occasion to deplore the artificial distinctions by which the several classes in society are held separate. He was, all in all, a most excellent companion, barring only his determination to stop at every tavern we passed, thereby disclosing a prodigious head for spirits. At several of these he was known by name as a writer of verses in the old tongue. Concerning the aims and objectives of the United Irishmen he was largely uninformed, although he had read several of our pamphlets. His head was crammed with curious learning and pseudo-learning, but most of it was bounded by the four seas of Ireland, although he had a good knowledge of the classics and had read Goldsmith and Shakespeare.

  “My wife,” I told him, “is a great reader of Ossian.”

  “Who?”

  “The greatest of the poets in Irish,” I answered, surprised. “Ossian. Or perhaps he was Scottish. Mr. James Macpherson has made him celebrated in London.”

  “Usheen, is it?” he asked, after a pause. “That fellow.”

  When we were first married, Mrs. Elliott had me commit to memory a passage from Macpherson’s eloquent translation, which I now recited for him: “Oh torrents, tumbling down upon fair Caledon, raise up your mighty spirits to murmur to the drowsy Gael. Quake not, oh slumbrous heroes, but sally forth unto the fray.”

  “Well now,” MacCarthy said, “that is elegant indeed, and no easy task for the memory. ‘Quake not, oh slumbrous heroes.’ You don’t come upon that sort of thing every day.”

  “Does it lack accuracy of sentiment or expression?” I asked him, somewhat nettled by a remark which I considered sardonic.

  “Not at all,” he assured me, with an almost excessive politeness. “It is grand stuff entirely. ‘Slumbrous heroes,’ by God. That one is worth remembering. There is a maker of verses in West Cork who would slap down shillings on the counter for the use of that one.”

  We had come from great distances to share at last the same road, and yet there was much which held us separate. Ireland, in my judgement, is held in check by oppressive laws and a corrupt parliament, by a government and an aristocracy which make certain of their power by fostering animosities between Protestant and Papist, by the armed might of England’s alien armies. To all this, MacCarthy gave a ready assent, and yet it seemed of no great interest to him.

  “My father,” he said, “was what you would call landless, a labourer feeding the two of us as best he could. But his father before him had had a bit of land on Lord Blennerhassett’s estate, outside Tralee. Well, the bad years came when there were two poor harvests, the one after the other, and he couldn’t pay the rent and so was driven off. Now would the United Irishmen prevent that from happening?”

  “There are rents in all countries,” I said, “and landlords have debts of their own which must be paid from the rents.”

  “When I grew up to be a young man,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “I was teaching school in Macroom and there the Whiteboys started up again. A man named Paddy Lynch was behind it. He was up to all kinds of deviltry. Malachi Duggan of Kilcummin is an altar boy beside Paddy Lynch. When Paddy Lynch was rampaging through West Cork the landlords went slow on the evictions. If there had been Whiteboys in Tralee in my grandfather’s time he’d not have had to end his days on the road.”

  “It is only a beginning we are making now,” I said, hearing within my head the emptiness of my words. “We must go one step at a time.”

  “My grandfather went one step at a time, until one winter’s night he went to sleep by a ditch and in the morning they found him there, and my father beside him, crying and shivering.” He bit his lips in thought, and then he said, “Sure, there is no one cares about people like my grandfather.”

  Swinford had been seized by the insurgents themselves, upon news of the Castlebar victory, and without help or word from the French. The village was verdant with green bou
ghs and trees of liberty in the narrow street. They had taken the local tippling shop, although the proprietor was himself a Papist, and there was much singing and carousing in broad daylight. A corpulent young man of the sort who is foremost in faction fights had declared himself their captain, and exercised an ill-defined authority over them. When they learned from MacCarthy’s boasting that we had been at the battle of Castlebar, they crowded around us for information, plying us with drinks which MacCarthy would not refuse. And it was much the same in Charlestown. In short, the line of march eastwards across Mayo was open, and the villages in friendly hands. But we could learn nothing about Sligo. We were to discover as we proceeded, however, that some of the Sligo villages were in rebel hands and others were held by companies of yeomanry, but many were undeclared and living their lives as if nothing had happened. But the town of Sligo itself, a larger and more formidable town than Castlebar, was held by a strong British force which had been reinforced by troops from Enniskillen, in Ulster. Sligo to the north and Boyle to the south, in Roscommon, were the two anchors of the line by which the British hoped to hold us within Connaught until Cornwallis could move into position. If we were to reach Ulster, we would either have to fight through this line or slip through it.

  The day, as we continued eastwards, was splendid, and the evening long in coming. Far off on our left, towards the Atlantic, lay the Ox Mountains, blue-purple against the pale sky. We felt ourselves distant not merely from Dublin but from Castlebar. Here and there, on rises of ground or half hidden by plantations, lay the big houses of the gentry. But for the most part we had before us open rolling plains and the cabins of the peasants. We stopped at a cabin for bowls of milk, and nothing could have been farther from the minds of these than battles and insurrection. It gave my conscience a sore twinge to know that they would soon become a part of our turmoil. For what had they to do with kingdoms or republics, with equality and the rights of man? They had but their lives to live and their crops to harvest.

  FROM “YOUTHFUL SERVICE:

  WITH CORNWALLIS IN IRELAND,”

  CHAPTER THREE OF MY CAMPAIGNS,

  BY MAJOR GENERAL

  SIR HAROLD WYNDHAM (LONDON, 1848)

  The city of Dublin received its northern and southern boundaries from the arcs of two canals, the Grand and the Royal, which thence stretched out across the midlands to join the capital to the Shannon and the ocean. They were, and they remain, marvels of the arts of engineering and inland navigation, bearing to the city the rich crops and herds of the luxuriant Irish meadows and fields, for shipment to England. During the years of the French and the Napoleonic wars they were lifelines indeed, binding England to Ireland, which served as her granary.

  It was by the Grand Canal that Cornwallis proceeded towards Connaught. I would myself have been fuming and fretting, but he sat quietly on the deck of the barge, puffing on his long pipe and sipping innumerable small cups of chocolate. It was from Cornwallis that I received in my youth the invaluable lesson that haste and swiftness are not the same. The unfortunate General Lake reinforced the lesson by his sorry example of the consequences of haste. To be sure, as Cornwallis set out, he had not yet learned of the disaster of Castlebar.

  “By the time we arrive,” Cornwallis said, “Lake may have smashed the Frenchman. If not, we shall take a look around and decide what to do. This is a most peaceful countryside, is it not, Wyndham, along this stretch of the canal? It might be France or the Low Countries or even England. This is how the people of this land would live, if only they were given the chance. They are a people with a great love of justice, some old chronicler has observed. Some Englishman.” As it happens, he was looking towards the great Bog of Allen, where no one at all lives, peaceful or otherwise, and yet his observation was a most sage one. The Irish people have been much maligned. They seek the blessings of a government which deals with them justly yet mercifully, save when their passions have been stirred up by demagogues. As for their belligerence and hot temper, of which so much is made by their detractors, when it is harnessed to the discipline of the British army, as it has been for the past forty years, they make the finest soldiers in the world.

  It speaks well for the breadth of Cornwallis’s vision, and for his humanity, that these should be his thoughts even as he moved into battle against the misguided multitude in Connaught. He had been sent to Ireland by Pitt with two missions, one avowed and the other, as yet, concealed. First to pacify the island, and then to tumble down into ruin the so-called Kingdom of Ireland, thus bringing the country at last within the full governance of the English Parliament. And yet both of these plans he discussed with me in an open and candid manner, and no lieutenant of twenty has ever received a finer education in the combined arts of war and statecraft. To pacify while at the same time laying down the foundations of a lasting social settlement is the ambition of every soldier-statesman, and Lord Cornwallis possessed the necessary largeness of vision and instinct for the wishes of humanity. At the time, however, I lacked the wisdom to profit to the full from this unparalleled opportunity.

  The old man (younger, I must confess, than I am now) spoke quietly as the afternoon darkened with the wonderful gentleness of Irish summers.

  To either side of us stretched the red brown bogland, marked here and there by the labours of turf cutters, dark, shallow trenches crossing and recrossing the wide, level expanses. Many centuries of the past lay as yet untouched by their spades, indeed all the layered melancholy of the land’s unhappy history converted by time’s slow chemistry to dark, odorous fibres. I carried in a portfolio of red Russia leather Cornwallis’s maps and the notes which he had dictated to me on the movements of our troops, but he found no occasion to ask for them. All these details were fixed in his mind, which looked beyond battle and sudden victory to the imposition of permanent law, of a just and fecund tranquillity.

  A net was being cast over Connaught, with four sturdy knots strung along its border—Sligo, Boyle, Castlebar, Galway. The rebels would be held within this net while the main body of our troops assembled to the south. Then the net would be pulled tight. Having settled this in his mind, and having issued his orders, Cornwallis could now settle at ease in his chair, his gouty leg resting upon a small cushioned stool.

  We disembarked at Tullamore, a prosperous canal town, and proceeded by coach to Athlone, which lies twenty-five miles to the northwest, on the banks of the Shannon. It guards the principal bridge across that river into Connaught. Control of Athlone, and thus of the Shannon, was bitterly contested in both the Cromwellian and the Williamite wars. In June of 1691, it was attacked by an army of twenty-one thousand Williamites, who subjected it to the most fearful bombardment in all Irish history, fifty cannon hurling ton upon ton of bombs and stones over the walls of the city. Cornwallis, whose imagination responded to history, was inspecting the battered castle and the remaining fragments of the city wall when word reached us of the disaster at Castlebar.

  It was carried in the most humiliating manner possible, by light dragoons who had fled from the battlefield, scarcely pausing until they reached Athlone. They were taken before Cornwallis to make their report, but not even his stern manner and august bearing could bring them to coherence. As they would have it, overwhelming masses of the peasantry, howling like demons and spurred on by their priests, surged up and down the roads of Connaught. The principal towns between Castlebar and Athlone, including Tuam, had fallen. Cornwallis listened to them in silence, doubtless trying to strike a balance between their frenzied exaggerations and the bare fact of a defeat to the north.

  Turning away from them, he resumed his inspection of the town, moved now not by historical piety but by his need to know whether Athlone could be defended against an attack in strength. He also sent a rider westwards to Tuam, to discover if that crucial road junction remained in British hands. After nightfall a messenger galloped in from General Lake, bearing a despatch couched in terms more disgraceful than any which had ever before been sent by a British office
r in the field to his commander, a mixture of bluster, pity for himself, and indiscriminate condemnation of his own officers and men. British troops, he reported, had given way to abject panic, fleeing like the cowards they were from a battleground which he had prepared with care and which he had sought to defend with bravery. But the next paragraph contradicted him, placing upon General Hutchinson responsibility for the order of battle. The despatch spoke not a word as to why panic spread so disastrously among soldiers who outnumbered the enemy and who held the high ground. Neither was there a word of generous praise for a daring and resourceful foe, whose victory had been made possible by a night march which a lesser commander would never have attempted.

  I remember, with a vividness which years and age have not dimmed, Cornwallis standing on the bridge, one hand resting on the parapet to take the weight from his bad leg. The dark waters of the Shannon moved beneath it, and we faced the darker Shannon shore. In the town behind us, alarm had begun to spread, one rumour feeding upon another. He crumpled Lake’s despatch and held it over the water, but then, regaining his composure, smoothed it out and handed it to me.

  “See there,” he said. “If General Lake had heeded my advice and given himself a night’s sleep, he would have been spared all this.” Then, summoning Colonel Crauford to his side, he said: “If we still hold Tuam, I propose to move there tomorrow with two regiments. Our forces, as they arrive, are to be sent forward to join me there. When I possess the strength necessary for the purpose, and not later than two days from now, I shall advance into Mayo. Draught despatches that the road eastwards must be held at Sligo and at Boyle. An urgent message must be sent to the War Office that additional forces may be required to guard the approaches to Dublin. Young Wyndham here will help you with the spelling. You dragoons can’t spell worth a damn.”

  “Is it that grave, sir?” Crauford asked.

  “We shall win, of course,” Cornwallis said. “We shall win. We have been fighting wars here for several centuries, and winning has become habit with us. But we shall not win as quickly as I had hoped. And Crauford, the two regiments that I take into Tuam are to be English regiments.”