The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Far to the south another land lay waiting for him. Fields of soft green, headlands which looked upon an ocean kindlier than Connaught’s, towns which were strung beads of hospitality—Killarney, Mallow, Kanturk. Clonmel, loveliest of towns, civilised and courtly. Rivers which poets had wedded to words, Maigue, Shannon, Blackwater. An English poet as well, their greatest. The spacious Shannon, spreading like a sea. A sea at Tarbert, but not here. Here, at Drumshanbo, the Shannon flowed narrower than Maigue or Blackwater. Brief bridges, stumpy and humpbacked, crossed it. My world is bounded by river and bridge. A crossroads tavern my only fortress. Blackbird glimpsed in gap.

  Frontiers of silence expanded in the darkness. Beyond their verges ran webs of roads, river crossings, loughside paths, the streets of villages, of towns banked by cabin, market house, tholsel. Young, he had tramped the roads of Munster. Schoolmaster, late of Macroom, of no fixed habitation. Blackbird called. Balls of malt in poets’ tavern. By haystack’s yellow shade, a girl wove legs white, tentative, around him. Candlelight fell upon the white page; his pen traced characters, black curves and arches. The land of peace. Munster.

  Remembered joy, quicksilver freshet, flooded his dark pasture of fear. It surged from southern sources, far distant from armed men, blue or scarlet jackets, iron-belching cannon, lead-belching, torn flesh. Gap of brightness between hedgerows of armed men, their faces blank as those on crosses, washed flat by the rains of centuries. He discovered himself, where for weeks he had been hiding, in the silent dark. No sound but the rustling fields, stirred by faint wind. He lifted his pistol, trophy of Castlebar, and hurled it on high, invisible arc. He unbuckled the dragoon’s wide belt, and let it slip to the ground. Then he walked away from the rising.

  By a road which only the narrowest of carts could travel, too narrow for an army with wagons, he began to move south. Cowherd’s path. Coward’s? Blithe, he rubbed together two words of English, close together in sound. He shivered with the joy and fear of loneliness. In darkness he had found himself. A remembered self reclaimed his body. By first faint light, he knelt at a stream to drink and wash. Empty fields stretched across a hilly countryside. The air was pale and welcoming. The first birds stirred and began to cry, bird calling to bird. Free as a bird.

  14

  FROM AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE

  OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1798,

  BY ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME

  In the course of my desultory reading, for which my calling and my geographical situation have made ample provision, I have made the acquaintance of narratives written by some to whom has befallen the exciting misfortune of living within besieged cities or as the reluctant inmates of insurrectionary provinces. Reading these accounts of dangers bravely encountered, of turbulence, of starvation and threatened massacre, I am astonished by their uniform and constant intensity of feeling. This accords ill with my own recollections. For we were indeed aware that great dangers, both remote and immediate, threatened us, and in the final days we had cause to fear for our very lives, as shall be related in its proper place. And yet it was often the case in those weeks that the staple of our existence was a simple tedium, a fretful inactivity. The menaces which we confronted, sporadic and unpredictable, enfolded themselves within the monotony of our days. But perhaps in this I am deluded by memory, that treacherous spy upon our past.

  Our circumstances were peculiar in the extreme. Castlebar had fallen to British arms, and with it the most of Mayo—Foxford, Westport, Swinford, even Ballina a scant seven miles away. It was known that General Lake with a large army, and Lord Cornwallis with a larger one, had moved across Connaught. And yet our unhappy town of Killala, at the neck of its great bay, was allowed to remain in rebel hands, together with the lands from Enniscrone to Easky on the right side of the bay, and on the left from Rathlackan outwards to the wastes of Belmullet. We knew, or at least we hoped, that our swift deliverance would follow upon the destruction of Humbert’s forces, and yet it was a sore trial that a few thousand men had not been spared from that mighty host for the present succour of their beleaguered fellow countrymen and coreligionists. It seemed almost that Lord Cornwallis, angered that we had permitted the rebellion to commence, was now allowing us to stew for a time in our own juices. This was a most unjust surmise, but one which found favour among some of the loyalists, whose sentiment towards their mother country was at the best of times equivocal.

  Rumours reached us of an alarming sort, filtered through the wild gabble of the insurrectionaries. It was reported, for example, that the Crown forces guarding the approaches to Ulster had been smashed somewhere near the town of Sligo. And it was reported as well that the midlands had risen up, and that a great concourse of armed rebels was moving northwards to Humbert’s support. Most persistently, we were assured by our swaggering captors that a second and far larger fleet had set sail from France and would soon be dropping anchor in the bay. Each such rumour was celebrated in the town with drunken and clamorous demonstrations, flooding my windows with raucous noises of crude jubilation, and it is a blessing that the loyal gentlewomen who shared my captivity were ignorant of the Irish tongue, for it may be surmised that the language outstripped that of bargemen on the Thames. Standing in my library, which had mercifully been reserved for my use by “Captain” Ferdy O’Donnell, I could easily peer into the street below, and into their inflamed and clownish faces.

  At first I nourished the hope that the supply of spirits in even so bibulous a town must at last exhaust itself, but in the consumption of spirits there was never a respite, for the rebels had at their disposal the cellars of all the gentlemen of the countryside, together with vast quantities of spirits which had been illegally and villainously distilled. O’Donnell, perceiving in this general drunkenness a threat to his always fragile authority, made an early effort to suppress it, but with total lack of success. Late one night he sallied forth to the Wolf Dog, bristling with the sword and pistols which were his emblems of command. Towards dawn he was carried home by three of his “corporals,” two of them supporting his shoulders and one carrying his feet, with O’Donnell himself bawling out some tuneless and interminable song. I was once again forcefully impressed with the impossibility of such a people governing themselves, unassisted by a callous French soldiery, or by the sly Dublin schemers of the Society of United Irishmen, atheists all.

  I will not, I trust, be suspected of illiberality when I pass this judgement, seemingly harsh, upon a people capable, when left to their own resources, of courtesy, kindliness, and generous behaviour. It would not be reason able to assume that the Creator has portioned out equally all of the virtues to all of the nations of the earth, and the art of government lies as far from the native Irish as the arts of music and poetry lie close at hand. Witness in proof the spectacle of “Captain” O’Donnell, the commander of Killala, borne drunken and hilarious home by his drunken comrades. (I pass over in vexed silence the circumstance that the home to which he was borne was not his, but my own!) And yet this Ferdy O’Donnell was in most respects a superior instance of his race and class, to whom, as will be related, we may all of us have owed our lives and safety.

  He was a well-favoured young man, tall and slender, with a frank and manly countenance, candid in his manner, and as cheerful as circumstances permitted. Before taking over his father’s acres, he had spent several years in one of the French seminaries which had, in former times, prepared Irish Papists for their priesthood and had therefore the rudiments of an education, with good Latin and a smattering of theology, though this latter was redolent of Rome and the Dark Ages. It was not education of a sort sufficient entirely to shield his mind from the superstitions, the baseless hopes and fears, the childlike fancies of the peasantry, and yet it gave to his mind a welcome elevation and to his manners a crude but engaging civility. Why a man of his virtues should have cast his lot with ignorant and murderous banditti was a question which I was never able to resolve, and I have reason to know that he himself fo
und it puzzling.

  Late one evening we discussed the matter, delicately and with circumspection on my part, while Ferdy maintained that air of polite deference which was so attractive an aspect of his being. We were seated in the library, with O’Donnell perched upon the very edge of a straight chair, his hands grasping his bony knees. It was clear that he fully realised the gravity of his situation, a rebel in arms against his sovereign, and, moreover, one in authority among rebels, for whom no mercy or pardon was likely. That is, should order and true government be restored. But what if this distasteful and unnatural combination of peasants, atheists, and alien grenadiers should triumph? Wherein would life be more pleasant or more prosperous for the Ferdy O’Donnells of the island? What could justify the carnage they had wrought, the ravaged homes, the men slain on both sides? He could only answer, doggedly and repeatedly, that his younger brother had been unjustly seized up and flung into prison, an action which, as he well knew, I had myself protested most vehemently.

  “Sure your protests do great credit to your cloth, Your Reverence, but what good were they to poor Gerry? If the French had not marched upon Ballina, Gerry would be in gaol there at this minute, and he as innocent of wrongdoing as yourself.”

  “No,” I answered. “Gerry is not in gaol. He is a rebel in arms, off somewhere with the invaders. And if he isn’t killed he stands a fair chance of being hanged. Hanged, it well may be, without trial.”

  “Without trial, is it? By God, Your Reverence, that’s a good one, meaning no disrespect. If they are bound and determined to hang Gerry, it will matter little to him that the festivities are begun with a trial. Sure what has a trial ever been in this country but a way of putting red robes upon murder, and a most fitting colour in my opinion.”

  “Would you obtain a more perfect justice by placing those robes on the shoulders of Malachi Duggan, an ignorant and brutal man?”

  He shifted uneasily. “It is little that the likes of me will ever have in the naming of judges. But I believe that Mr. Elliott of Ballina would be a fair one, and he trained in the ways of courts. Or Teeling, the man who came with the French.”

  “A pair of sadly misguided idealists who have wandered off from their proper stations in life. Nations, Mr. O’Donnell, must be guided by the full weight of property and education, or else we are all of us plunged into the vilest anarchy. This is the teaching of your Church as much as of mine. It is the teaching of civilisation itself.”

  “Don’t I know that, Mr. Broome? Wasn’t I at Douai in the seminary when the innocent blood of priests and friars was spilled upon the stones of Paris? Don’t I have Mr. Hussey at me morning, noon, and night, to tell me that I am denied the Sacrament?”

  “Perhaps you prefer the teaching of Mr. Murphy.”

  Very few figures of the rebellion are as unlovely as Hussey’s egregious curate, and although not a vindictive man I cannot feign sorrow that he fell beneath a cavalryman’s sabre at Ballinamuck, and doubtless in his favourite posture, crucifix upheld to invoke the blessings of the Creator upon this most un-Christian of insurrections. Men such as O’Donnell had at least the excuse of believing that they made war against their oppressors, but Murphy was launched upon a Crusade, a Holy War, against the Protestant religion, being inflamed by theological passions at once rank and sulphurous, as though they had been steeping in the bogs for centuries. Ireland and religion were for him identical terms, which he shuffled with a conjurer’s skill to inflame his brutish followers.

  “Ach, ’tis little you would know of such men as Murphy, Your Reverence, but I saw enough of them at the seminary. Poor driven creatures so blinded by the light of faith that they can see only the light itself and not the world which faith reveals.”

  O’Donnell himself, it will be observed, had not spent idly his years at seminary, and had a ready tongue for those glib and silly sophistries which the Papist clergy prefer over sober and just reflexion. I believe that he shared my distaste for the hideous Murphy, but could not bring himself to admit this to a heretic, as doubtless he termed me when beyond my hearing. For the word heretic was often on their tongues, as though the Established Church was but a cluster of Cathars or Albigensians. It is surely one of the strongest arguments for a removal of the opprobrious laws against Popery that the depraved passions which dwell in darkness would then be lanced and cauterised by the beneficent sunlight of the common day. This I shall maintain against all illiberal sentiment to the contrary. Popery has fastened its iron manacles upon this people, who are by nature spontaneous and gay, the children of our islands, as we are its grey-bearded senators.

  By reason of my cloth, or perhaps merely of O’Donnell’s protection, I was free to wander the town, and even, on my parole, to visit parishioners in outlying farms. A grey and oppressive town, with its mean shops, some no larger than hucksters’ stalls, its malodorous taverns, no fewer than four of them, the streets greasy and foetid, straggling towards the dull and sullen waters of the bay. On days of mist or fog, the close-packed buildings seem to sweat, being covered with a cold film of moisture. Only at the water’s edge, by the rude pier, can one gain a sense of openness and spaciousness, yet this too has its particular gloom. Seabirds swoop through the mist, gulls, those most baffling of birds, or so I find them, for in flight they are the very emblems of grace and freedom, bending the winds to their will, but close at hand they are greedy and raucous beggars. Gulls, kestrels, gannets, creatures wedded to wind and water, reminding us that this is but a poor raggle-sleeved island, the despised and forgotten edge of Europe.

  A forcing-house of superstitions and dark conceits. Upon a small eminence within easy view of my window, Steeple Hill as it is termed, stands one of the cylindrical and grotesquely tall towers of this island, built in some unimaginable antiquity, of whose origins numerous theories exist, both learned and fantastic. That they precede the Christian dispensation is most certain, as has been demonstrated by the researches, at once erudite and ingenious, of General Vallencey and other dilettantes. The peasants, of course, have their own notions, but to rehearse these would strain the credulity of my readers. I have seen them standing in small groups beside this tower, peering outwards, beyond the bay, towards the open sea. For almost to the end, they maintained their hope for the second fleet which Humbert had so confidently promised them. Poised thus between their ancient and their present delusions, they offered a tableau pregnant with meaning. Children of the mist, they live by fancies rather than ideas. Songs, prophecies, long-winded ranting poetry supply the furniture of their minds.

  “There can be no denying what is written down in books,” O’Donnell said. “Were there not great victories won by the people of the Gael in the days of our princes and earls, and ships coming in on every tide with treasure and cannon from Spain and Italy and from the Pope himself.”

  “Centuries ago, my friend. All that ended at the Boyne.” And I could not but be moved by the thought of the brightly coloured pictures with which his mind was stocked, for these princes and earls were but ruddy-bearded barbarians prowling dark forests, glorified cattle thieves, swept easily away by history’s inexorable march, which is the march also of civilisation and true Christianity.

  “We took Ballina and Castlebar,” he said stubbornly, “and Foxford and Westport.”

  “Took them and lost them. My poor fellow, consider your position, I beg of you. There are more soldiers of the Crown on this island today than there were at the battle of the Boyne.”

  “Oh, by God, that would take some doing, Your Reverence. There were two crowns in Ireland for that battle. And the two kings, William and James.” He grinned at me mischievously, in the manner of this people, with their primitive habit of unseasonable japery.

  “A century ago,” I said again. “The plain fact of the present is that a wily and unscrupulous French general has seduced the people of this barony from their proper allegiance. And the day is fast coming when they will pay dearly for their folly and in blood.”

  “Were I you,
Mr. Broome,” he said, sober upon the instant, “I could not take so calm a view of the matter. Desperate men take desperate measures. If the British army moves upon Killala, there are terrible things could happen in the town before they reach it. There are dreadful fellows who come in and out of Killala at their pleasure and answer no man’s bidding. There is Malachi Duggan and his follyers. Damn all does he care about this,” O’Donnell said, flicking with a thumb his sash of office.

  “Barbarians!”

  “Barbarians, do you say? And what are the lobsterback soldiers, with their gibbets at every crossroads from Castlebar to Ballina? I wonder at you, the way you make every man with a pike a barbarian, and every man with a bloody English bayonet an angel of justice. There is a fierce satire that Owen MacCarthy wrote once on the soldiers, long before the trouble started. ’Tis a scrappy thing, but it has good lines in it. I asked him for a copy of it, but he said it wasn’t worth the trouble of writing it out. Let me see can I remember any of it.”

  “Do not trouble yourself,” I said in a bleak manner.

  Here was this MacCarthy, a man with little to recommend him save his facility at the composition of verses in the archaic Irish language, a tardy schoolmaster, a drunkard and libertine, a brawler and a lounger in alehouses. And yet he was quoted as a sage, much as red Indians and furry Siberians are said to give reverence to fools and madmen. The spoken word, adorned with whatever ridiculous furbelows of rhetoric and artifice, has great power among primitive peoples. I have considered the possibility that poetry and song express the childhood of a race, as philosophy and history express its calm maturity.

  “He knows more than many a man, Your Reverence. He is an exquisite scholar alike in Latin, English, and Irish.”