The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Some there are who may take civic pride in our having housed two armies within a fortnight, not to mention our brief eminence as the capital of no less a thing than a republic. Castlebar cannot change. Low houses, mean people, as the jingle has it. We will again be drowned in our obscurity, and the windy rains will sweep away all traces of their presence—the discolouring in Castlebar High Street where the brave English gunner held his ground, the rivulets of blood on the near side of the small humpbacked bridge. And I will remember best a sight which I did not see save in the imagination—John Moore backed against the wall by the menacing riders, his eyes able to see at last beyond hope or desperation.

  Later. A ploughboy, who knows of my interest in such matters, tells me that some days ago he heard the clack of woodcocks in the woods beyond Sion Hill. That would have been soon after the great battle there. One would have thought that the sound of the cannon had driven away birds forever. What can they make of me, fellows like that ploughboy—a man who studies the habits of birds and notes them down in a book? But it is a pleasant and an instructive pastime for me, and also, I am pleased to say, for young Timothy. Now that the two boastful armies have moved away we may perhaps be able to resume our Sunday walks.

  Bellaghy, September 4

  The Ox Mountains. The rain had ended hours before, and a pale moon hung from the black, endless sky. MacCarthy knew the road. He had taken it with Elliott. Now circumstance had changed it beyond recognition. It was not a road now, but part of the boundaryless country through which an army moved, darkened by ignorance. They were camped upon a slope, and the mountains towered beyond them. A cluster of cabins had given a name to the slope. Bellaghy.

  MacCarthy, squatting on his heels above the wet grasses, looked first at the dim mountains and then at the deserted cabins below. Three of the Ballycastle men, Lawrence’s tenants, crouched near him.

  “It is to wild Ulster that they are taking us,” one of them said, a man named Lavelle. “And well you know it.”

  “To Sligo,” MacCarthy said. “The road runs through Tobercurry and Collooney into the town of Sligo.”

  “And from Sligo northwards into Ulster. More men than yourself have walked that road. If it was to the midlands they were taking us, we would not have passed Swinford.”

  “It is a terrible thing,” Lavelle’s friend Staunton said, an older man, with a small, toothless head round as an apple. “To carry us far off in the black night, with no word of our destination.”

  “It is no business of commanders to be telling their minds to the likes of you,” MacCarthy said. And never had been. Kernes and gallowglasses, trailing their pikes down bog roads, stumbling into bloody death upon unrecognised meadows. “If you had stayed in Castlebar, you would be dead now. They got us safe out of that.”

  MacEvilly, the third man, said, “So that we could be killed somewhere else.”

  “You know no more than we do,” Lavelle said, peering up at MacCarthy. “We are only a pack of poor fellows following like hounds after Frenchmen who are ignorant of any civilised language, whether Irish or English.”

  “And how many words of English have you?” MacCarthy said. “You have not even the English for loy or spade, which are the only words needed in your station in life.”

  “The word pike is needed in my station in life,” Lavelle said, and spat between his feet. “And my two hands are needed to carry it.”

  “What you could do, Pat, is to get away out of all this, yourself and your two friends. Let you climb down the slope and head back towards Swinford, and into the hands of the redcoat soldiers. Let you discuss the civilised English language with them before they string you up.”

  “Ach, sure, Owen. What talk have we had of running away? We are better off where we are.”

  “You are so,” MacCarthy said, walking away from them.

  It was a most extraordinary sight, what there was of it beneath the pale, clouded moon. A small army stretched along either side of the narrow, twisting road, voices low and exhausted. Those were fools surely who were sitting or lying on the wet earth. It might be the death of them. He walked down the road to the village, where men had crowded into the abandoned cabins. He heard from one, suddenly, a woman’s high-pitched scream, and stepped to the door. There were a half-dozen men inside, and, half lying on the floor, her back pressed against the wall, a very old woman, black-dressed, her white hair scanty and thin. One of the men, bulky and near middle age, was holding her hand in his. The turf fire cast a russet glow.

  “She is terrified, poor creature,” the man said. “When the people ran off they left her here. What a dreadful thing to do!”

  MacCarthy knelt down beside him. The woman stared, mad, fierce eyes. A web of saliva hung from her loose mouth.

  “God help her,” the man said. “She doesn’t know who we are or why we are here. Suddenly all the neighbours were gone and the village was filled with more people than she had ever seen together in her life.”

  MacCarthy took her other hand. A bird’s claw. Fleshless, yellow. “You are safe, mother. The lot of us will be gone soon, and your people will be back.”

  She did not turn her head towards him. Small, shapeless sack of cloth, with scarecrow head above it. When she was young, Aughrim and the Boyne were recent history. All through the dark century, she grew, weathered, shrank. Our history is here, an old woman huddled with fear in a cabin beneath mountains.

  “Let her be,” he said, rising and putting his hand on the man’s shoulder. “She doesn’t see us.”

  “She is not blind. She moves her eyes.”

  “She does not see us.” But the man did not move. He rubbed the bird’s claw between his heavy hands. MacCarthy backed out of the cabin, bending his head beneath the low, rough doorway.

  Ireland’s image in the dark poetry of penal days. A crone, withered, she revealed beauty, youth, to the poet’s attentive eye. Silk of the kine. Roisin dubh. Had any of them ever looked at an old woman, skeleton-thin, milk of sickness a film across the eye? History, unbidden, unrecognised, had entered her cabin. Kinsmen vanished. In terror, she retreated to foolishness. Spit dribbled from her slack lips. A symbol shattered on her brittle bones. Moons are far safer for poets. Remote, austere, they sustain our words, protect our images. High above now, dim and cloud-obscured. Mountains stretched away beneath it.

  “There is little enough that we can do for her,” someone said.

  “Nothing,” MacCarthy said. “Nothing at all.”

  At one A.M. that morning, Michael Geraghty brought in the men from the lands between Ballina and Killala, after a march of twenty-five miles over the Ox Mountains. Humbert and Teeling had given up on them. The sentries saw them first, a moving forest on the crest of a hill, and ran shouting to the camped men, who roused themselves up and stared in wonder. A forest in winter, thin leafless branches wind-ripped, their pikes against the moonlit line of sky and hill. In silence they moved down the steep path until they reached the encampment.

  Humbert, unbuttoned, bleary-eyed from an hour’s sleep, came from a cabin to welcome them. Sarrizen and Teeling, standing behind him, at a distance, made a quick count. Three or four hundred men, most of them armed with pikes, a few with muskets. Some of them seemed unarmed, standing confused and useless. Geraghty bobbed his head, embarrassed and uncomprehending, before Humbert’s rapid French.

  Later he talked with MacCarthy. “It was an endless fucking journey, as though we were all headed for some hiring fair in China, first the rain and then a night as dirty as the back of your arse. And terrified every minute of the time that we couldn’t find you, or that you would be long gone, or eaten up by the English. But we dropped down the last slope and there you were, as the man said in the note that you would be.”

  “Who said?”

  “Teeling is his name, is it not? The Irishman in the French uniform. He said that we would find you where the path drops to meet the Sligo road, near a village. He said that that was the order of the French general. And h
ere you are, by God. By Christ, he must be a wonderful man, the French general.”

  “He must indeed,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis a village called Bellaghy. The people are all gone out from it. I marvel you did not find them in the mountains.”

  “There is nothing alive in those Ox Mountains but wild goats and owls. They are a sad excuse for land. Nothing to be seen to the left or right or up and down but the brown, dreary hills stretching away and lonely mountain lakes. I wonder that there was even the path, unless the goats beat it down. No one has ever gone that way before.”

  “Long ages ago,” MacCarthy said. Diarmuid and Grania with Finn following after. Hugh O’Donnell from Ulster, the great prince. No path or rock or tree that lacks its legend. “We are going into O’Donnell’s country, ’tis said. Into Donegal.”

  “God help us,” Geraghty said. “The poor Donegals. Why would the French general take us into such a savage place?”

  “I don’t know,” MacCarthy said. “But that is what is said by O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell and some of them.”

  “Do they say where the English soldiers are?”

  MacCarthy shook his head. “I declare to Jesus, Michael, they might be all around us. There were a hundred men we left behind us in Castlebar, and they must all of them be dead this minute by the sword or the rope or the cruel lance.”

  “Did you know any of them yourself, Owen?”

  “I don’t even know who they were. It was only an hour or so before we left that they were told to stay, and so they did. Some Frenchmen stayed with them, to work the guns. And John Moore stayed.”

  “May the Lord spare him,” Geraghty said, making the sign of the cross.

  “The Lord may,” MacCarthy said, “but Cornwallis will have other ideas.”

  “I was talking with him in Ballina, and the two of us having a drink in Brennan’s, down near the river.”

  “I know Brennan’s,” MacCarthy said. “Mr. Moore is less comfortable tonight, and so are you.”

  “There was a look of death in his eyes that day.”

  “Ach,” MacCarthy said. “There is never a man gets into bad trouble but that someone will rise up to say that there was the look of death in his eyes.”

  “They were empty eyes,” Geraghty said. “As empty as the sea at Downpatrick Head.”

  A good phrase. “We may all be in bad trouble before this is over.”

  “By God, we may, so. ’Twas but a short while ago that we had no thought but of the harvest and the fine weather, and see where we are now and what has been happening.”

  “You were a United Man yourself, were you not?” MacCarthy asked.

  “I was. I took the oath from Elliott and Randall MacDonnell. But sure, what am I at all but a farmer who was a great one eight or ten years ago at the faction fighting and the hurling, before I began to lug this around with me.” He slapped his heavy, sagging belly.

  MacCarthy shook his head. “It is a strange business, farmers and ploughboys tramping about like rapparees. I was talking about it tonight with some of the Ballycastle men.”

  “Ballycastle men!” Geraghty broke into unexpected laughter, and put his hand on MacCarthy’s shoulder. “Sure, those poor devils would do anything to get out of Ballycastle, and who could blame them?”

  “ ’Tis a sorry, Godforsaken bit of land, right enough,” MacCarthy said.

  He left Geraghty and walked past seven or eight French soldiers huddled in a loose circle, their uniforms invisible in the night, and barely visible their dark, foreign faces. When they saw him staring at them, they fell silent, and looked up at him, impassive and uninterested. A horse whinnied. Beyond the village there was only the blackness of the night, cloud-shrouded moon. He shivered and went in search of O’Dowd, who carried a bottle in either pocket.

  O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell were together, against a cabin wall. One of the bottles was empty, but O’Dowd opened the other one and passed it to him. Officer and gentleman. Gentleman’s whiskey, it poured smoothly down his throat. Small, golden explosions of warmth, promise of sun. He wiped his palm across the mouth of the bottle and held it towards O’Dowd, who shook his head.

  “Keep it for a bit. ’Tis running out of me. Teeling says that we will be leaving this miserable place now.”

  “To the north?” MacCarthy asked.

  “In Sligo town, where I was born,” O’Dowd sang.

  “One of the French patrols up ahead caught three British soldiers and killed them,” MacDonnell said. “There are British behind us, and British ahead of us in Sligo.”

  “Jesus,” MacCarthy said, and took another long swallow. He had not been drunk in days, and it would be pleasant now. Let the army march off and leave him to crawl into one of the cabins with his bottle. Settle down in the deserted village of Bellaghy as its sole proprietor. Sweet Bellaghy, loveliest village of the plain. Greet the farmer when he slipped down from the mountain and offer him a drink. It was a miracle, the way whiskey could give you fresh ambition.

  Humbert emerged from one of the cabins, rubbing his hands briskly, then passing one of them across his eyes, like a man roused from sleep. Cool, strange Frenchman, his head packed tight as an egg with plans. He shouted out orders to Sarrizen and Fontaine, called Teeling to him. We follow. Hounds behind his horse.

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOTT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  I am assured by British officers who have spoken to me in this place of imprisonment that the celebrated battle of Castlebar was a less impressive military accomplishment than the skill with which Humbert slipped us past the armies which were gathering against us. That may well be so, but I lack the experience and the skill needed to judge such matters. For me, and for most of those on the forced march of one hundred and thirty miles from Castlebar to Ballinamuck, the enterprise scarce merited a name, so incoherent and bewildering did it appear to us. Now, studying a map, I can perceive that our march did indeed cut a wide, bold arc across the face of Ireland, and can readily accept that to have carried us from the first of its tips to the second was a demonstration of shrewd generalship, for all that it appeared to us but senseless blundering in the dark.

  We were oppressed and frightened by the knowledge that Crown forces pressed us from the rear and were awaiting us beyond the mountains. Indeed, at two O’clock of the first morning, as we were at rest in a straggling village, a British scouting party encountered our pickets, and had they been allowed to report back to Sligo, matters might have ended then and there. The members of the party it was of course necessary to kill upon the spot, for our circumstances did not permit us to take prisoners. And they did inform us that they were indeed soldiers in General Taylor’s army but that he had sent forward their Coolavin Yeomanry to the town of Tobercurry, at no great distance from us. They were Irishmen, and although it was Frenchmen who put them to the sword, the responsibility must be shared by all of us.

  The close presence of this British force occasioned the first of a number of increasingly bitter arguments among our officers, the true grounds of which held me for a time deceived. Colonel Teeling argued vehemently that the British, by reason of their numbers, should on no account be engaged, but rather that we should continue to evade them, if possible, and move either towards Ulster, whither we were now headed, or else the midlands. But Sarrizen and Fontaine pressed Humbert to make an immediate attack upon the British in Tobercurry, in the hope that those elements of Taylor’s army might be caught unprepared. In this manner, so they asserted, we might win a rout second only to that at Castlebar.

  We were assembled in one of the cabins, a badly thatched and pestiferous hovel with an inadequate fireplace, so that the smoke from the turf fire stung our eyes.

  Humbert heard us all out patiently, almost with indifference, nodding his approval of Sarrizen’s impetuous eloquence, and grinning with ill-bred delight at Teeling’s fluent but heavily accented French. But so far as I could judge, which was no great distance, thi
s was not an issue which admitted of two solutions. We were, on paper as it were, a victorious army, the conquerors of Ballina and Castlebar, but in fact an ill-armed and motley force, on the run, with superior strength massing itself against us. Our one hope, so it seemed to a novice like myself, lay in moving towards safe ground, if not towards new allies. And this was the very case which Teeling argued, not with eloquence, but with a hard, flinty logic. Indeed he pressed also the case that we should march not towards his own Ulster, but rather towards the midlands, and with all haste and by whatever roads lay open, trusting that the rumours of an impending uprising there were well founded. But he was no oratorical match for the two Frenchmen, with their torrents of words that fell as thick as rain, and those accursed words la gloire and la victoire pattering like rhyming hailstones. And all this time, Humbert turned his head first to one man and then to the next, like a spectator in a playhouse following the speeches of the actors in a performance of Racine.

  At last he waved his heavy, fish-white hand to silence all three of them. “I have no intention of ending this campaign in the shadow of savage mountains. What exactly we shall do I will allow circumstances to explain to us. But there will be no battle fought here if I can avoid one. Teeling’s view of the situation is most obviously the correct one, and I am astonished at you, Sarrizen, astonished at your frivolous arguments. And at you, Fontaine. Like a pair of schoolboys.”

  To this Sarrizen said nothing, but rather turned off his eloquence as abruptly as though he had twisted a spigot in his tongue. He contented himself with folding his arms and contriving to look at once condescending and respectful, an attitude which I have found the French to be peculiarly skilful at expressing. Thus ended my first military conference, in what I supposed was a victory of the cause which I favoured. Later, however, when Teeling and I were walking up and down the road to stretch our legs, I found him far from jubilant.