The Year of the French (57 page)

Nor had I long to wait for confirmation. We had been but twenty minutes on the road before Teeling fell in beside me, and we rode in silence for a space. Then he said, “When Humbert meets with us, he will tell us of a decision he has made. I will support him in this. He would welcome your support as well. And so would I.”

There was nothing I need say in reply, and after a pause, he continued. “We are not destined to see Ulster after all, it would seem. He proposes to turn southwards at Manor Hamilton, and make for the midlands by forced march.”

He spoke quietly, and in so easy and conversational a tone that for a moment I did not grasp the import of his words. But when I did, I said, “No,” as much in incredulity as disagreement, and in a voice so loud as to startle several near us. He put his hand in caution upon my arm, and I began again, more quietly.

“We cannot do that,” I said.

“We can,” he said. “We can take the southern road at Manor Hamilton.”

“The midlands are distant from us by a hundred miles at least. We have been moving northwards and east. Away from the midlands. If that had been his plan—”

“I do not know whether it was his plan or not. Neither, to judge by their responses, do Fontaine and Sarrizen. It is his plan now, and I am most ready to support it. So should you be.”

“Why, in God’s name?” I asked, keeping my voice low with an effort.

“The French officers have lost whatever confidence in this enterprise they may have had. Hardy’s ships have not arrived, and there is little likelihood that they will do so before Cornwallis closes with us. Sarrizen argues that they should surrender while they can still obtain honourable terms from the English.”

“He can argue that a few hours after winning a victory?”

“Victory,” Teeling repeated, and his tone gave the word an underscoring of contempt. “Victory over some local colonel in command of militia. That means very little. But that fellow behind us, hanging on our footsteps, he is a different matter. And somewhere or other, Cornwallis is waiting for us with a great mass of troops. That is the truth of the matter. Perhaps we can slip around Sligo; perhaps, with more luck than we deserve, we can reach Donegal. Then what? It is what they expect of us. But if we cut loose suddenly, if we vanish and make for the midlands, what then? We have a hope of reinforcements there. If they join us, we can make straight for Dublin. It is worth a try.”

“I have never heard so desperate a notion,” I said. “It is madness itself. MacDonnell and O’Dowd have kept up the spirit of the men by telling them that soon we will all be safe in the mountains of Donegal. Now you would ask them to turn their backs on the coast and go far into the heart of the island. They will not go. And the French will not go.”

“That is very likely,” Teeling said. “The French are in a bad mood. There is no doubt of that. Humbert would have no choice then. He would surrender in the morning.” He shrugged again. “He has made a good fight of it. Not even the Directory expects the impossible. He would go back to Paris with his credit undamaged.”

It was now so dark that I had difficulty in making out his features, and sought therefore to judge him by his voice, a flat, drawling voice, with the burr of northern speech.

“It is possible,” he said. “If the midlands have risen up. If they hold the roads to the south.”

“If,” I said. “We have heard nothing of a midland rising. And there is an army between ourselves and the midlands.”

“Dennistoun is a good man,” he said. “A determined man. You know him. Dennistoun is worth a gamble.”

“You cannot bring them with you,” I said, referring to the noises which surrounded us. “They are already terrified. They have been terrified since we left Mayo.”

“Neither can they turn back,” Teeling said. “Frenchmen have the choice of surrendering. But not Irish peasants in arms against their King. They should count themselves lucky to go anywhere Humbert is willing to take them. They should count themselves lucky for every day they stay alive.”

At this, I reined in my horse, and addressed the level, maddening voice. Men moved past us in the darkness. I was whispering now. “You speak of them as dead men. Men marching under a sentence of death.”

“Perhaps not,” he said. “If we are very lucky indeed.” He was still speaking softly, but not whispering.

“And that is Humbert’s purpose?” I asked in sarcasm. “To keep them alive? I had not known that he possessed so deep a well of humanity.”

“Not at all,” he said easily. “Humbert has always had one purpose. To win. He will play every card in his hand.”

“And this is the last one.”

“Very nearly. I cannot think of many others. He is desperate to win, and I do not understand his desperation. Perhaps it is no concern of ours.”

“What of your own desperation?” I asked him.

“The question is fairly put. I think that Humbert’s plan is in fact the best one. And I believe that we have an obligation towards these poor fellows whom we drew away from their homes with our promises and our fine words. We have an obligation to the oath we both took, and which we persuaded them to take.”

“To them, certainly,” I said. “But to no oath. It was in a different world that that oath was taken.”

“I asked for your support,” Teeling said, in the tone of one bringing a conversation to its close. “I have not had your answer.”

“Oh, as to that,” I said. “You will have it. What choice have we but to follow him? But he will lose his gamble.”

“He has been lucky thus far,” Teeling said, almost with indifference. “Lucky and skilful.”

His luck held for him that night, when he met with his captains. They sat ranged in a semicircle around him in the darkness, and he stood facing them, with Teeling beside him to act as translator. We could barely make him out, a heavy, indistinct figure, and only a handful of us could understand his words. What carried the day for him was his tone of voice, as confident and as easy as it had been that morning when he stood on the steps of the Castlebar courthouse. There was incredulity at first, and a fear which masked itself as bluster, but he painted a picture which fanned hope in them—the midlands in flame, and the road to Dublin open. Then he played upon their fears, an army behind us, and another one waiting for us somewhere ahead. He boasted shamelessly, recalling what they had done, and magnifying every skirmish into a mighty triumph. It had been all along his intention, he told them, this long march to the northeast to mislead the English, and now this sudden swerve southwards, plunging deep into the countryside. In a hundred years’ time, he told them, the world would still be talking of the march which the men of Mayo and the men of France had made across Ireland. He paused then, and joined his hands loosely across his bulging paunch. “I will lead you,” he said. “I led you here and I will lead you to Dublin. There are brave men waiting for you in the midlands.”

“Between us and the midlands there are a great many men waiting to kill us,” Randall MacDonnell said.

“If they can,” Humbert said. “We all know that. Why should I deceive you? But I will not permit that. And when we join the men in the midlands, we will be unbeatable. Trust me. I know my trade. I am better at that trade than any of the English generals. You saw that today. The full garrison of Sligo came against us, and we threw them back.”

“One garrison,” MacDonnell said. “Cornwallis has an army.”

“If we can move past that army into the midlands, it will be behind us, and the road to Dublin open.”

“You can talk all you like about a midland rising,” MacDonnell said, “but not a word have we heard from them.”

“Malcolm Elliott has,” Teeling said, and I picked up my cue.

“I was there,” I said, “not two months ago. In Longford and Granard. They are better organised than we were, and there are more of them. I know Hans Dennistoun, and so does Colonel Teeling. You may depend upon it that he has raised the midlands.”

“We depended on a second fleet,” MacDonnell said, “but we haven’t seen it.”

“You can depend upon that fellow,” Teeling said, pointing to the west. “He will be after us night and day if we don’t shake him off. He is the beater, and he has been set to drive us against the guns. We’ll not play their game.”

Humbert could not of course understand Teeling’s words, but nevertheless placed a hand upon his shoulder to cut him off.

“I spoke to you once before, on the night before Castlebar. Do you remember that? You were reluctant to take the bad road, along the lake and then over the mountains. But I was in the right then. We took that road and we defeated an English army and we won a famous battle which will never be forgotten. I knew then what I was doing and I know now. I cannot hold you with me. You can all run off and stay alive for a day or so or a week. A week of life is better than none. But you would be fools and cowards, as would the men whom you have brought here with you. We are an army, a small army but an army, and we have won our victories. Not once have we been defeated. Now let us in God’s name march southwards as an army. This is your country and you have a right to it. It is a country worth fighting for. But it is not my country. I will take you to where you should go, and I will show you how to fight. The rest is up to you.”

“And what about your Frenchmen?” O’Dowd asked. “Will they fight?”

Almost before Teeling had translated the question, Humbert exploded. “My French! My French are soldiers. How dare you ask such a question? Look at them. Look at my brave Sarrizen and Fontaine. They are soldiers of the French army, the army that has challenged the kingdoms of Europe. They have fought in Italy and on the Rhine. And they have fought in Ireland. I have no need to preach sermons to French soldiers.”

Fontaine and Sarrizen had reluctantly accepted Humbert’s decision, and now, to do them justice, they managed to make doughty and resolute noises in the darkness. They believed that we were launched upon a hopeless enterprise, but they contrived to give no sign of this. Humbert’s confidence was matched only by his duplicity.

It seems to me fitting that this most fateful conference took place in a darkness not moderated by so much as a single campfire. We had after all been moving in a kind of darkness of the spirit and the intelligence since crossing out of Sligo. Now, in the true darkness, our irresolutions and desperations seemed spread out around us, with Humbert’s will and determination ranged against them. We had placed ourselves under his command, and no choice was open to us save that of remaining there. He might, for all we knew, be mad, or obsessed, or drunk with vainglory, but that was of scant account. Now that I have time to reflect, and the best of reasons for doing so, I find that his nature remains hidden from me. At present, I am informed, he enjoys a most comfortable confinement in the Mail Coach Hotel in Dawson Street, as he awaits repatriation. British officers, visiting him there, have found a soft-spoken, rather coarse-mannered fellow, of most defective education, and inclined to barracks-room humour. He talks readily and willingly of the campaign, and is especially proud, first of the attack on Castlebar, and then of the forced march into Longford, threading his way between two armies. Those of us who followed his commands saw little of this easy affability. He was a naked will—fierce, cajoling, whatever served his purpose. I would never have made a general, and have no regrets upon that score.

“Now then,” he said. “It remains only for the Irish officers to explain to their men that we are moving southwards, to join with our brave comrades, and to fight the last battles, as we have fought and won the earlier ones. But before we move out, we must implore our brave and good priest, who has shared our dangers, to again call upon God to bless our cause. For the men ranged against us are not only foreigners to this island, and its oppressors, they are heretics, whose eyes have not received the light of God as it shines through the powerful lamp of our sacred Church. The Church marches with us. God marches with us.”

We were not to be spared even this. At the request of Humbert, to whom religion is of less account than it is to Tom Paine, the wretched Murphy delivered to us all one of those sectarian harangues which came to him so readily, setting upon us the blind seal of his bigotry. His voice, rasping and hoarse, was well suited to his discourse, and so too—though here I may display my own prejudices—was the language of its delivery, that Irish tongue which speaks to me of bogs and the rank life of the cabins. And yet it was not as a Protestant that I took the greatest offence. I had once seen in our conspiracy a union of hearts, pledged to sweep away forever the rancorous discord of creeds by which our land was disfigured. It had proved a vain hope, nursed in Dublin and Belfast by city-bred men, lawyers and merchants and physicians. Beneath the dark skies of Ireland, between bog and ocean, moorland and hill, it crumbled to dust.

I could not make out all of his harangue, for he spoke too rapidly, the words tumbling out and falling upon each other, but I had no need. The air had grown chill, though it was windless, and his voice shattered the silence. I turned away before he had done, and shouldered my way to the edge of the crowd, where I found myself standing beside MacCarthy. He was leaning forward, his hands hugging his elbows.

“An impassioned orator,” I said.

MacCarthy cleared his throat and spat.

“We have a long march before us, it would seem,” I said.

“I made a longer one once,” he said. “All the way from Kerry. But mind you, I made it at my leisure. A night in this town, and six months in that. A more comfortable method entirely.”

“The men are more ready than I had feared they would be,” I said.

“What else can they do, the poor hoors? That fellow will buck them up,” he said, and his voice gestured contemptuously towards Murphy. “Those were the best times I ever had, those times when I was on the road. And I didn’t know it then. You never know.”

“No,” I said. “You never know.”

That was to be my last conversation with MacCarthy, save one. I walked away from him, and stood by myself, my back to a thorn tree. Murphy’s voice moved at last from scream to drone, and then fell into a silence. There was a stirring about me. We would rest here, until dawn, and men moved to the soft grass of pasturelands. I heard them talking, their voices woven together, Irish and French. I felt myself separated from all of them. There was a void at my centre, devoid of thought, into which memories drifted unbidden, pale and fragmentary.