The Year of the French (33 page)

“We know as much as Cooper, and he was part of an army.”

“That is not at all a comforting example. Cooper and his yeomen were make-believe soldiers, and the real soldiers smashed them like eggs. The English too have their real soldiers in this island. Thousands upon thousands of them.”

O’Donnell slapped his arm. “Will you break loose out of your gloom? Your damned poems have come to life all around you.”

“My poems.” MacCarthy drained off his glass, and signalled for another round. “You are right there, Ferdy. Figures from my poetry are rising up all around me in the streets of Mayo, captains and colonels and generals and ships from France. And yet who is to be the leader if not Randall MacDonnell the horse dealer, with a crowd of ploughboys at his back?”

“And who for a captain but only Ferdy O’Donnell from a mountainy farm near Kilcummin, why do you not add that? Well, Owen, we are what is left. There are no chieftains or proud Sarsfields, and have not been for a century. Ireland is only horse dealers and farmers.”

“And peasants,” MacCarthy said. “Like me. You have grown eloquent in your handsome uniform.”

The innkeeper brought them their whiskeys.

“By God,” O’Donnell said, “it is only a few nights ago that the Protestant yeomen were in here, putting fire in their bellies to warm themselves for their cruel tasks.”

“The wheel of fortune,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis oiled by whiskey.”

“You have said many the time to me, Owen, that we were slaves. Will we ever see a better chance to fight?”

MacCarthy moved his glass forward and back on the rough table. “No,” he said at last.

“Then come with me to the minister’s house and meet Teeling. They will have need of men with learning.”

“Faith, they will,” MacCarthy said, “if Randall MacDonnell is to be the measure.” He drank off his whiskey. “No, Ferdy,” he said. “I will not go. But I wish you luck with your sword of steel.” On impulse, he reached out his arm, and squeezed the heavy shoulder in its unfamiliar cloth.

“Don’t wait too long,” O’Donnell said.

Killala, August 22

Humbert sat alone in a small room off the drawing room. A map was spread before him on an oval table, held flat by bound volumes of theological tracts. Until Hardy arrived, he was in complete command. Not even in the Vendée had he had such freedom of choice. He looked at the whole of the island, deliberately ignoring its details. By tomorrow, Lord Cornwallis, in Dublin, would be sitting before such a map. A most competent old man, it was said. An aristo, doubtless gouty and querulous, as elderly British officers always were. What will he have heard? That a small French force has landed on the Connaught coast and is recruiting allies. How will he move? To seal us off as close to the coast as possible.

He bent closer to the map. There would be a strong English garrison in Galway, and one to the east, perhaps less strong, at Sligo or at Enniskillen. If these commanders had sense, they would move at once. They would move towards this town here—he placed his finger on it—Castlebar, which controlled all the Mayo roads, and was doubtless already garrisoned. He could move to Castlebar himself, and perhaps knock them off balance, but to do so he must first take Ballina, Foxford, Swinford, towns strung like beads along the only road south to Castlebar. If he defeated that garrison, and captured Castlebar, what then? Cornwallis would be moving slowly towards him from the south, his armies spread wide. By then, Humbert would have his thousand men and perhaps five thousand raw allies. Local uprisings would be ignited as he moved, and would pin down the local militia. The trick then would be to slip past the English armies, cross the Shannon, join with the United Irish in the midlands, and make straight for Dublin.

He had already sent off a fishing boat from Westport with word that he had landed and had taken Killala, and he would send a second after he had met and defeated his first force of English. That would bring out Kilmaine. The Directory could not allow a victorious army to perish for want of support. And then Buonaparte, that power-hungry little bourgeois, would have some of the gilt rubbed off his uniform. It was a good plan, but with one defect: it was difficult to the point of impossibility. The odds were heavy against even reaching Castlebar.

He stood up and walked to the window. There was still music in the courtyard, a tall fiddler leaning against the wall, and it was still crowded with peasants, laughing and singing. They were a curious people, not at all what Tone and Teeling had led him to expect. He had imagined sober, implacable men, grim, perhaps a bit bloodthirsty. The ideals of the Revolution, Tone had assured him, formed their Bible. But these men were primitive, with something wild and terrifying in their appearance, like huge children. The Chouans had been lacking in manners, God knew, but they would have fled in terror from these fellows. All for the best, perhaps; terror had its uses. Many of them were holding pikes, a most effective weapon against cavalry, and formidable against unseasoned infantry. What kind of life did they have in this strange land of moorland wastes? Did they seek liberty, a pikehead thrust into a tyrant’s throat? Liberty, they would discover, is elusive and problematical.

Ballintubber, August 22

Standing on the entrance porch, facing the cool dark waters of Lough Carra, John Moore bade farewell to his brother.

“At twenty-two, I am too old to be given orders.”

“Nor do I presume to give you any. But you will shortly be taking a great many. How many of our people are leaving with you?”

“None. I am riding ahead to Killala. But two hundred men from Ballin-robe will follow. About sixty of them are ours.”

“It is my intention to speak to our tenants and warn them against this enterprise. None of them will follow you, if I can prevent it.”

“You must do what seems proper to you,” John said, shrugging. “The estate is yours.”

“How many have the French landed?”

“The first messenger wasn’t certain. The second said about a thousand men, under a general called Humbert.”

“Humbert!” George said, startled. “A general called Humbert. You have caught yourself a Tartar.”

“Why? Is he well known?”

“He was the general of the Vendée. A Jacobin. Clever, coarse, unprincipled.”

“A good general?”

“It was a special kind of war in the Vendée. Peasants and ambushes.” Like Mayo, Moore thought. “I cannot imagine why so shrewd a man would allow himself to be trapped in Mayo with a thousand men.”

“He has brought one part of an expedition.”

“That will depend upon the winds, the British fleet, and especially the Directory, as famous a collection of rogues as has ever been collected in one city. It is useless to preach to you, but I will make one effort. Your General Humbert will never get past Castlebar. Cornwallis will scoop him up like a weasel. And the rebels who take his arms will be traitors. When you ride down that avenue, you ride straight to a gallows.”

“I may. But I believe that most of the people are prepared to make a stand.”

“Make a stand. Your very language comes out of penny pamphlets.”

“I have never claimed to be a scholar.”

“You are wise in your modesty.”

They stood facing each other, motionless.

“Tell me this, George. You believe that we will not succeed. Do you hope that we will?”

“I do indeed. In that event, you will not be hanged.”

“No other reason?”

George looked out towards the lake. Wind-rippled. The melancholy wind of late afternoons. “This insurrection is destined for so certain a ruin that I feel only despair. Many men will be killed or destroyed and among them my own brother. I could not be more certain.”

“We are an odd pair of brothers, George. The world is full of luck and chance. Perhaps you will see me ride through the streets of Castlebar in all my glory.”

George laughed. “It would become you well, John. You are a fine handsome young man, and you would look splendid in uniform.”

“That would depend upon the colour. Red wouldn’t suit me at all, for example. Wish me luck, George.”

“I wish with all my heart to see you here again. Our father managed to get back from Spain. May you have his luck.” Awkwardly, he embraced his brother.

Later, he walked along the shore of the lake. Its waters lapped against stones. If only he had been less stiff, lecturing the boy like a schoolmaster. Romantics like John had no ears for lectures. History loved them, chose them as its favoured victims. It flung them, bright as new-minted coins, into the puddles of disaster. John should be courting girls, riding to hounds, gaming, writing sonnets. Instead he was involved in this trumpery melodrama, a few thousand peasants and a devious French general. The lake was clear. Rushes moved softly, faintly. A melancholy hour. Some distance away, a wild swan floated with her cygnets, elegant and calm. Her ugly feet could flail and trample, fouling the shore.

FROM THE
MEMOIR OF EVENTS
,
WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOT
IN OCTOBER, 1798

In the early afternoon of August 22 I rode into Killala and presented myself as agent to County Mayo of the Society of United Irishmen. I was received most cordially by General Humbert, who seemed delighted to encounter anyone who possessed even a smattering of French, and was placed upon his staff to serve under Bartholemew Teeling, who was to act as a liaison between the French and the Irish forces. At that first meeting I gained but a shallow impression of Humbert, a slow-moving and large-bellied young man with soft, dangerous eyes. He had established his headquarters in the residence of poor Broome the clergyman, and the courtyard and ground floor were crowded with men, intent upon a dozen errands, but Humbert moved quietly among them in his ill-fitting uniform, his paunch pressing against his waistcoat. All of them save for Teeling were French, and he was in French uniform. The Irish were in the outer courtyard, a mob of countrymen. They seemed leaderless and bewildered but most excited. Later in the day, the men who were appointed to command them rode in one by one, Randall MacDonnell and Cornelius O’Dowd and George Blake, but in those first few hours, they were left to themselves while the French secured the town and requisitioned horses and food.

Teeling and I had known each other for some years and had a great mutual trust and respect: I was most happy to discover him here with us. He found an early opportunity to discuss our situation. The French had been shamefully derelict in not setting sail upon first news of the uprisings in Wexford and indeed might not have sailed at all had it not been for the persistence of Wolfe Tone and the energy of Humbert. They sailed, however, in the belief that those insurrections were still in progress, and word of their suppression came as a hard blow to Teeling, who was a close friend of the unfortunate Henry Joy MacCracken. It was a blow from which he soon began to recover. Rarely have I met a man of such calm and equable determination, nor, as events were to prove, of such swift and unreflecting courage. He seems to me now a figure from Plutarch, measured and just in his actions, stoical in adversity. There was somewhere near the centre of his being a dark pool of melancholy, but this I attribute to his life in Ulster, a chill and forbidding province, as I do also his occasionally mordant and sardonic speech.

Although I then knew little of soldiers or warfare, and know little more now despite my experiences, it was at least clear to me from the first hour that we had taken up a difficult task. Peasants had been pouring for several hours into Killala. Four days later, after the battle of Ballina had been fought and won, their number had swelled to some five thousand. Far less even than myself, of course, did they have knowledge of military life or of the ways of war, save for the occasional clandestine drilling which some had received. The French sergeants began their training on the second day, but with no happy results, for each group was to the other a source of ridicule, barbarous and strange, speaking not words but an outlandish gabble. Those who were placed as their commanders knew almost as little. These for the most part were down-at-heels Catholic squireens, such as Randall MacDonnell, George Blake, and Cornelius O’Dowd, or else strong-farmers and celebrated faction fighters, of whom the most notable were Ferdy O’Donnell, Malachi Duggan, and later Michael Geraghty, one of my own tenants. These men were denominated as colonels or majors of those whom they brought in with them, and in turn they appointed their subordinates. But large numbers of leaderless men also drifted in, and these were formed into companies by Teeling, and made to choose their own captains. The streets of Killala were also clotted that day by men who had come in from idle curiosity or in hopes of being given one of the French firelocks. It was in this manner that Owen MacCarthy hung about on the edges of the crowds. I saw him twice that day, once lounging in Broome’s courtyard, and once holding conversation in the tavern, with his long legs thrust out, a hazard to those passing by. He seemed to me then a large-boned, hulking peasant, much given to whiskey and idle laughter, and I would not have remarked him at all save for his friendship with Ferdy O’Donnell, a virtuous and steadfast fellow.

I well remember the arrival of Corny O’Dowd. It was late at night on the first day, and the French had fixed torches along the street and in the courtyard, for they were still shifting supplies. There rose a general hubbub in the street, with wild shouts of greeting, and several muskets were fired off. I left the house, and walked towards the courtyard gate, beyond which I could see O’Dowd riding in at the head of a hundred men, mounted on a handsome mare, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, like a preacher’s, with a blackcock’s feather fixed in its brim. The men behind him were farmers or labourers, clad in frieze and a number of them barefoot. Some carried pikes of straight ash. There was no attempt at order; they walked quickly but not in rank, and they shouted out to friends whom they recognised in the crowd. These were men who had taken the oath of the Society, but it was some older and deeper loyalty which brought them into Killala that night. They were a feudal band, mustered behind their chieftain. When O’Dowd came abreast of the gate he reined in, and at the same moment he saw me standing there, and greeted me with a shout. “Elliott,” he called out, as he dismounted, “is Randall here?” “He is here,” I told him. “In Broome’s house, or in the tavern.” “How many did he bring with him?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Damned few, I will wager,” O’Dowd said; “they are a mean-spirited lot, the Ballycastle men. I have more than a hundred men from Enniscrone here, and they are spoiling for a fight. Where is the Frenchman?” He walked over to me, a tall man but bow-legged. “Take a look at them,” he said; “have you ever seen the like?” And I had not. I tried to make out their faces where the ruddy lights burned into the darkness. “Are there men here from Ballina?” he asked. “There will be,” I said. “I rode on ahead of them.” “Weren’t you the cute whore?” he asked with a delighted crow; “commend me to the Protestants. You have us beat every time. Are you a general now?” “There is only one general that I know of,” I said; “the Frenchman.” “That will never do,” he said. He jerked his head backward towards the Enniscrone men. “Those fellows know as much about Frenchmen as about the man in the moon.” “You will need to talk to a man named Teeling,” I said. Two days later, before the battle of Ballina, O’Dowd was made “General of the Army of Connaught.” It was an empty title, but it delighted him, and for a time it made Blake and MacDonnell furious. There was a hat that went with the honour, black and dripping with lace. O’Dowd transferred his blackcock’s feather to it.