The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

“What?”

  “Lord Cornwallis. At Yorktown. He lost the American colonies. He has described it to me. When he sent his sword to Washington, he had the bands play ‘The World Turned Upside Down.’ ”

  “That was different,” the major said and resumed his inspection of the battle. It was amazing how closely the scene resembled those engravings of battle plans, which had always seemed to me improbably neat and spruce, with their lines and arcs to indicate the positions of infantry and cavalry, and triangles to represent parks of artillery. Our cavalry and infantry were still at the advance, and now a second regiment of horse moved forward from the village. Its line of attack was upon the right flank of our infantry, as Crauford was placed upon the left, and if the lieutenant was correct in his surmise it would drive against the rebels holding the road. There were no lines of retreat open to Humbert unless he chose to scramble up the hill or fall back onto the soft, wet bogland. It was as though a map had been unfurled before me, the colours blurred and indistinct, but the lines and contours sharp. The excitement which I had felt earlier in the day rose within me again. No one, I believe, has ever witnessed his first battle under more agreeable circumstances, and it was therefore with feelings of sharp and pleasurable anticipation that I bade farewell to my new-found friends at Cloone and rode down towards the village of Ballinamuck.

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOTT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  Of that wretched half hour at Ballinamuck I propose to say little. I am told that Humbert and the other French discussed it at length in Dublin, where they were entertained, and doubtless their account has been recorded for posterity. Even if I wished to describe the disaster I could not, for it was swift, and my recollection of it fragmentary and confused. I marvel at the clarity and precision which military historians command, for my experience of battle is of a bloody tumult in which men butcher each other like beasts, and minds are distracted by their screams and by the hideous objects into which, dying, they are transformed.

  We were midway between Cloone and Ballinamuck when they fell upon us, and our march became a rout, lacking in all order. We turned and stood at Ballinamuck because we had no choice, and because Humbert welcomed the advantage given to him by the hill. It is a point of pride with generals that they obey the precepts of their trade, taking advantage of high ground and the rest of it. The French and perhaps a third of the Irish, myself among them, he placed upon the gentle slope of the hill, and the other Irish, under Teeling’s command, he placed athwart the road which led from the hill to the village. He made a brave show of barking out orders, and telling us what we should do and where we should stand, but his mood seemed to me one of savage despair. Of artillery we had now but two small curricle guns, and these he left upon the road to be worked by gunners named Magee and Casey. I think it likely that he intended that the Irish should take the first shock of the British as they moved upon us from the direction of the village. His fury, for I can call it nothing less, was directed not towards the British but towards his allies, and even Teeling he addressed with a brusque contempt.

  In fact, however, we were attacked first by Crauford’s dragoons, coming down upon us in a line lying at an angle to the village, and riding up the slopes with fearful shouts, their long sabres slashing the air. Humbert had barely time to turn about before they were upon us. They were driven off a short distance, however, by MacDonnell and his pikemen. I could see MacDonnell among the English riders, his theatrical plume flapping. And yet I drew no pride from his courage. I felt only fear, a thin nerve beating against the numbness of my brain. By this time we had already taken losses from their artillery. Taken losses: a fine grey phrase. Grapeshot and chain shot ripped chests and bellies open, chests sodden with blood, and bowels spilled open from bellies. A man knelt beside me on the grass, his spread hands holding bowels which oozed between his red fingers.

  Humbert ordered me to move the Ballina men to the support of MacDonnell, who had now fallen back. Patches of grass were already slippery with blood, and in our haste we stepped over wounded men, who clawed at our knees. MacDonnell turned to look at me: his eyes were wide and staring and his mouth slack. I had supposed from the vigour of his defence that his fox hunter’s bravado was sustaining him, thinking him childish to the last, but saw now that he was terrified. “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for me,” he said, and then, his voice twisting to a scream, he shouted out a string of obscenities in Irish.

  The British infantry had begun their advance upon us, walking steadily through the long grasses, their muskets held out before them. I turned my head to look at Crauford’s cavalry, which stood poised ready to sweep forward a second time. Magee fired off our two curricle guns, and I saw several of the British stumble and fall. Teeling was sitting his horse beside the guns, his drawn sword in his hand. He now made a gesture with the sword, as if asking whether he should move his men up from the road to join us upon the hill. Humbert motioned him to remain in position. Humbert had dismounted, and was standing with his legs spread wide apart, his hands on his hips. He moved his head constantly, as though looking for something which he could not find. As if in answer to the curricles, the English now let off a volley of musket fire which was answered by the French. Of the Irish, not one in ten had a musket. The others were armed with pikes, and thus far had done nothing but wait upon our ground for the grapeshot and the musket balls. Some were retching, leaning forward with hand pressed to knee.

  Crauford was taking no more chances. He held his dragoons as the infantry came towards us, reloading as they walked, and then a second body of cavalry rode up from the village. Now the infantry paused again and fired another volley. Crauford moved his sabre in a downward arc, and came forward at the gallop.

  I told my men to hold their pikes at the ready, and if I should fall to take their orders from MacDonnell. But they no longer heard me. They gripped their pikes and waited, not because I had told them to, but because there was nothing else to do. Behind us, the bog stretched for several miles to a line of low hills. There was no battle beyond the hills. Cows stood in their pastures. Perhaps in farmhouses like mine at The Moat men were sitting to their morning tea.

  Crauford cut through us like a man wading through a litter of puppies. He was looking not for us but for the French behind us. A dragoon cut down at me and missed, then rode past without giving me a second glance. But MacDonnell took a sabre full in the throat; the blood gushed out as though the blade had opened a fountain. When Crauford found the French there was a bloody scuffle, but it lasted no more than five minutes. Humbert, as though he had at last discovered what his darting eyes had been seeking, put his hat upon the point of his sword and held it high above his head in token of surrender. The momentum of Crauford’s charge could not be stayed, however, and his men smashed into the French, who held their muskets like swords to ward off the blows. But in a minute or two the charge had ended. The French officers were imitating Humbert’s signal, and the men were laying down their muskets upon the slippery grass. The second body of cavalry had now reined in and stood looking at Teeling’s Irish, but the infantry continued to advance. Crauford’s trumpeter sent them a signal. It meant, doubtless, that resistance on the hill had ended. But I saw that Teeling had not told his men to drop their weapons.

  I turned back from Teeling towards Humbert. He handed his sword to Crauford, who touched his fingers to his hat and then accepted it. He held it a few inches from the hilt, as though weighing it, and then passed it to a dragoon. Then he looked straight into my eyes. He had a long, high-cheekboned face, the face of a hunter, and although his eyes were calm and chill, his shoulders were heaving.

  FROM “YOUTHFUL SERVICE: WITH

  CORNWALLIS IN IRELAND,” BY

  MAJOR GENERAL SIR HAROLD WYNDHAM

  It might well be argued that I was not present at the battle of Ballinamuck, for I witnessed its opening from Cloone, and it had come to its close before I reached the village. For several mi
les beyond Cloone the road is thickly wooded and I saw nothing as I rode towards the roaring cannon and pattering musket fire, but before I was clear of the trees I had begun to hear, faintly at first, the shouts of screaming men. It was as though I were passing through a tunnel from one world to another.

  But beyond the trees, fields, hill, and bog lay beneath the even light of morning, a bright clarity which revealed the vivid uniforms, the splendid horses, the cannon. The scene, so orderly when I had viewed it from Cloone, was a confusion of movements and sounds, hooves, rumbling wheels, muskets, shouts, puffs of smoke, rattling drums. I paused upon a slight rise of ground, like generals in the old military prints who sit mounted, above the battle, gesturing with furled battle map, and I had a clear sight of the action which ended the battle, Crauford’s second assault upon the hill. It was an immensely exciting moment, scarlet horsemen and their black and chestnut mounts sweeping forward irresistibly, clattering past the pikemen and pointed straight as arrows towards the French. I spurred forward, but before I had reached the village the charge had ended and the battle with it. The sudden close astonished me.

  And yet Ballinamuck was in sober truth but a bloody scuffle, and so great was our superiority in men and arms that it scarce merits the name of battle. I had seen the pikemen swinging forward and back their fearsome weapons and the sabres cutting down, and from my distance it seemed the bloodless sport of children at play in a garden. But an hour or so later, as I walked amidst the fallen bodies, stepping several times upon the pikes which lay beside them, I knew that the sport had been bloody indeed. The Irish pike is a singular instrument to encounter upon a modern field of war—a long straight shaft of ash, and a three-pointed head, a broad blade at the centre and curving away from its base two shorter prongs for seizing or ripping. It was a weapon from an earlier century and so too was the wretch who carried it, lumbering forward from the bog of the past. They lay together upon the field, weapon and man, broken upon the wheel of history.

  By the time I had reached the village—the usual narrow, filthy street of mean cabins—the echoes of cannon and musket had faded from the air. The street was crowded: I narrowly avoided a wagon loaded with heavy canvas sacks of grapeshot. Lake had brought to his battle enough musket balls, grapeshot, chain shot to scatter an army, but his ordnance was sloppy and the village was a scene of frantic, ill-directed activity presided over by gesticulating captains and bellowing sergeants. At the time I could not judge such matters and believed that the bedlam was necessary to the proper disposition of his forces. But I could judge correctly the temper of his men. A tiresome and disagreeable campaign was ending, and for all the angry orders which were being shouted at them, they were cheerful and good-natured.

  Lake had taken up his own position in a pasture beyond the village, commanding a view of the long, narrow plain which stretched towards the enemy. He was standing with his long, heavy legs spread wide apart, a soft, tall man whose plump face was bullied by a fierce, beaklike nose. He dominated over the officers who stood near him, as much by height as by rank. Despite the hubbub he caught sight of me at once and called out cheerily, “Almost in time, Mr. Wyndham. Almost in time.”

  I dismounted and saluted. “Lord Cornwallis sent me forward with instructions that you may engage the enemy.”

  “Instructions which I have carried out to the letter,” he said. “To the letter. Look over there.”

  The scene on Shanmullah Hill—as yet of course we did not know its name—was extraordinary. The French had drawn themselves apart into a compact body and stood as quietly as men waiting for a horse race to commence. Near the western base of the hill stood the rebels through whom Crauford had cut. A second and far larger group of Irish had been placed athwart the road which led from the village to the hill and there they still stood. They had not dropped their arms but held them clutched at every angle. A French officer sat mounted among them, or so from his uniform I judged him to be, although in fact this was Bartholemew Teeling, a notorious United Irishman. He was one of those later taken to Dublin, as was one of the men on the hill, a Mayo squire named Elliott, and there they suffered the fates appropriate to their crimes. Stretched out in a series of lines at the foot of the hill stood our massed infantry, flanked on either side by Crauford’s dragoons and Roden’s horse.

  The air must surely have been noisy with shouts, and yet I remember it as a quietness which troubled the mind, like the sky after thunder.

  “It might be best to march the prisoners down here,” a colonel said to Lake. “Keep them out of harm’s way.”

  Lake bit his lip and then nodded. “It would,” he said. “It’s a mess there on the hill, everyone crowded together.”

  It was a clear, windless morning. The wide Irish sky, a small island but the greatest of the world’s skies, stretched bright soft blue over us. The sky made one with the quiet, an immense blue silence.

  Lake turned to his aide. “Ride down and tell Colonel Crauford that I wish all the French prisoners to be moved towards the village. And remind him that they have made honourable surrender.”

  “Crauford understands the rules of war as well as we do,” the colonel said in a stiff manner. He was Irish, with a faint but unmistakable brogue. “He took the Frenchman’s sword.”

  The aide was midway to the hill and about even with the infantry when Crauford moved, sending his men down upon the hillside rebels with sabres raised to shoulder level. They rode with a most ferocious shout, which soon was joined by the screams of the Irish. The aide reined in and looked back towards Lake. Crauford limited his killing to the men on the hill, and he had given orders that Elliott and any others with officer’s insignia were to be spared. It seemed an endless time. The troopers kept shouting, to keep up their ardour, perhaps, or to fill their minds with their own voices, but I believe from what I now know of the necessities of war that they were then as mindless as men at work in an abattoir. An hour later they may have been suffused with shame at the recollection of what they had done. And a few years later, in tavern talk, each would have his tale of the man he had spared or the villain who had tried to pike a comrade in the back. For many of the rebels indeed seized their weapons and sought to defend themselves, but they had been taken by surprise. I could not tear my eyes from the hill, and I was astonished that the skies were not raining blood. But they remained clear and bright, and still the figures on the hill were scuffling children playing at war. The French stood quietly to one side, their backs turned to the slaughter.

  Crauford moved his troopers forward and back, their hooves indifferent to the fallen bodies. Then he rallied them and led them towards us across the field. As he passed the infantry they set off a great shout and raised their helmets. He rode past them without turning his head, but Lake listened to them, vexed, gnawing his lower lip.

  Crauford had done his own share of the work, for his sword when he brought it to the salute was red and wet. I almost puked. This was the first blood I had seen shed in battle, deep red and shiny, not yet turned thick. He had carried it to us from the hillside.

  “A brisk ride,” he said to Lake. He was panting from his exertions, but struggling to keep his composure. He looked from one of us to the next.

  “I had sent young Boxhill to you to give you your orders,” Lake said in a strained voice.

  “But I did not wait for them,” Crauford said, and, glancing towards me, winked. “Any more than you waited for Lord Cornwallis’s.”

  “Unlike yourself,” Lake said, “I was empowered to act at my discretion. You most certainly had no orders to ride down upon unarmed men.”

  “Unarmed,” Crauford said. “That is very much a matter of definition. Those people there could not be called unarmed.” He gestured to the Irish upon the road, who at Teeling’s instructions stood prepared for our assault. “With your permission, sir, I will give those people a taste of steel.”

  “You will not have that permission, sir. The infantry can deal with them.”

  Althou
gh they held their pikes at the ready the rebels stood as quietly as the French who looked down upon them from the slope, as the cavalrymen who stood guard over Elliott’s handful of survivors. They were a sea of mist-coloured freize.

  “General,” the Irish colonel said, “I might suggest that they be given the chance to surrender.”

  “Surrender, do you say?” Lake said angrily. “Rebels against the Crown, standing with weapons in hand? No, by God!” He thrust his hands flat into the pockets of his trousers. “We shall drive them to the bogs, and bring back those who can make it. Give them a taste of steel, as Crauford says. They are still in arms,” he said plaintively. “You can see that for yourself.”

  He needed bayonets as bloody as Crauford’s sabres, I thought suddenly, or else the honours would all go to Crauford. He had to wipe out the disgrace of Castlebar.

  The colonel had made his point. Now he shrugged. “Into the bog, then. Or until they throw down their arms. Perhaps you have no choice.”

  “None at all,” Lake said briskly. “No choice at all.”

  He gestured to his orderly, who brought forward his horse. For a man of his size and weight, he climbed up nimbly, as though setting off for a gala. His staff turned, more slowly, towards their own mounts, with the manner of men who have accepted a disagreeable duty.

  Lake spied me then, and said, “Your first whiff of action, isn’t it, boy? Come along then. No need for you to be left out.”

  I took a deep breath and screwed up my courage. “Of course, sir, if you so wish. But Lord Cornwallis instructed me only to deliver his despatch and then return to Carrick.”

  He glared at me with lips pursed. “You are not under my orders,” he said angrily. “Stay or not as you please.” Fierceness and irresolution were at war behind his watery blue eyes.

  I watched them ride across the long pasture. As they approached the infantry, several of its officers rode out to meet them and then sat parlaying. I was aware now of the smell of battle, the air stained by smoke. Lake was not much liked by the men but they cheered him now, lifting their helmets above their heads. Answering, he drew his sword and held it at arm’s length, pointing towards the ground. He looked across the field towards the Irish. The drummers, upon a command which I could not hear, commenced a steady, dry rattle.