Traitor's Field (43 page)

[SS C/T/49/46]

In the monstrous madness of battle, there is no difference between a shout and a scream.

By 11th September the artillery of the English Parliamentary Army had knocked breaches in the south and east walls of Drogheda, and late in the afternoon Cromwell sent his regiments thundering in to seize them. The gut-lurching moment of doubt, the treacherous jolt of sense that questions the stupidity of what you’re about to do, the sick glances to left and right for sympathy, the ominous inevitable shoulders immediately in front, muscle-knotted and shuddering and denying the reassurance or release that a face could, denying the humanity. Around you the sobbing breaths, the muttering and the silly boasts and the pissing, and the loneliness that creeps insidious into the crowd, and then from another world the whistle or the trumpet of command, and then one shout and then everyone is shouting and if you shout your body must explode with the same energy and so if the implacable back in front of you starts forward you must go with it, shouting like a madman because only by madness can you justify what you are doing.

A scream is the body’s complaint at the breaching of nature, an animal’s futile protest that something has gone grotesquely wrong. So is the shout of the men in the charge.

Your head rings with pure empty noise, and this is what madness must sound like, and so the madness around you is normal. The head-clanging shouting and screaming, and the world is the jostle of arms and shoulders and pikes around you, metal and leather and wood and hats and straps and coats in the scrum, the thumping of boots on the earth and the lurching trot over ground that rises and drops step by clumsy step and still you scream because if you take even the smallest breath the spell might be broken and all this might be real. Ahead the smoke, the cannon mouths, the muskets of the defenders, the pikes, the violence and it doesn’t matter because all sensation is a storm where nothing is felt normally any more, and the smoke billows and roars and swallows you in and the noise rises and soars and you are gone.

Wars belong to politicians and planners. Fighting is this: that there is no limit of soul or sense to the stupid destructive bravado of young men gathered together. And it is no more than this. To the south the attackers pushed enough men into the breach that they created a defensive position of their own, holding the defenders with pike and sword among the rubble before the defenders summoned a new charge and threw them back, until more men could be flung forward and again the breach was captured. To the east a futile battering against the defenders, lines of red and brown coats clambering up the stones and flung back down by musket balls and the vicious scything of chain-shot artillery, falling and dying by tens and twenties, and Cromwell sent more regiments into the furnace.

In the storm of smoke, bodies begin to float and tumble, collapsing forward and rearing up and cartwheeling, and the storm is colours and coats and the stumbling is now a slippery clamber over leather backs and a tripping on fallen pikes, and now the bodies are part of the rubble of the wall and you climb the backs and boulders into the roaring black cloud of the breach and, such is the all-swallowing numbing trancing chaos of the world of shouts and screams, that for an extra second you do not feel the pain.

Finally there is Cromwell, dismounting at the edge of the carnage, horse and man dusty and muddy and sweating with the day’s fury. The battle is won now; Drogheda’s defenders have broken and flee through the streets, or barricade themselves in strongpoints, or scrabble panicked through ditches and bushes in the hope of a way out of the ruined town. Cromwell stands still and fierce at the eastern breach, staring grim at the bodies of his men around him. He walks towards the breach, and the scattered bodies become a carpet, and then a wall. Up the slope of rubble the dead have piled two or three thick, broken sprawling bodies tangled among each other. His men have died in heaps, and as he stands among them his unblinking stare absorbs the great volume of destruction and also its little details: broken pikes and scattered clothing and shot-severed limbs.

Part of his mind is accounting the strategic: winter hurrying nearer, and Ormonde as well, a town that refused a fairly given invitation to surrender, precious days lost, towns unconquered and defiant and pagan ahead of him. Another part is gazing at the white faces of the men on the ground, battered or shocked or contorted or mewing fitfully, his Godly Englishmen, pious and well-drilled and far from home, come from counties like his own to die in this heretic island in this unnecessary war. The whole ground seems to writhe at him, red and brown and slicked with gore and moaning its wounds, as if the earth itself were in pain.

A man is near him now, a Colonel – he thinks he recognizes him. ‘General, we—’

‘No quarter.’

‘Sir?’

Oliver Cromwell is a solid man, a rock strapped and wrapped in leather and armour, and the heaviest darkest thing about him as he turns are his eyes. The two words rumble low and hard again. ‘No. Quarter.’

And so it begins.

Cavalrymen guard the outskirts of the town to prevent escapes. Men are executed at close range with muskets. Men are stabbed to death with swords by other men, or hacked. Priests are treated as soldiers and killed. Throats are cut. St Peter’s Church is burned, and more die in the flames. The heads of sixteen Royalist officers are cut off and will be stuck up on spikes outside Dublin. Many men are beaten to death.

The beating of a man to death: the first blow from club or musket butt does not kill – it stupefies, and knocks only the fortunate ones unconscious; the second blow, to the man crawling and shuddering spasmodically on the ground, is sure to crack the skull if the first has not, and will begin to savage the flesh and organs of the face; even the third will probably not kill, but the recipient will no longer know it, the brain and its awareness being delicate and easily dulled; it takes four or five goodly blows with a club or other stout weapon to kill a man.

Drogheda rings with shouts and screams. In the monstrous madness of battle, there is no difference between exultation and anger and pain.

[SS C/S/49/158 (LATER DECYPHERING)]

The town of Wexford: notorious stronghold of Catholics and Royalists; the haven for a fleet of pirates who plunder English ships and thereby fund the royal alliance in Ireland.

Cromwell and his Army have had the town surrounded for more than a week: thousands of men, and among them mighty siege guns that will shatter masonry. Already fresh food is impossible to find. The flow of supplies into the city has shrivelled. There are uneasy fears about the water; people are falling sick. The daily thunderstorm of artillery was first terrifying, then the rallying call for a fragile pride, and only now do people start to see, in staring sleeplessness and silly habits and quarrels and tears, the permanent damage it has done to their nerves. The artillery has smashed two holes in the castle walls.

What has been happening to captured towns is well-known now. The news has travelled on horseback and running feet; repeated and magnified, it has travelled on the wind and the water. It can be read in scratched frantic letters; it can be read in the staggered faces of refugees; it can be read in the severed heads outside Dublin.

In the town, there is bitterness and muttering. Anonymous papers of protest are appearing. Soldiers are spat on. Seditious words are heard against the commanders who refuse to surrender. Food is being hoarded. Ships carrying coin and papers and children are sneaking into the predawn mist. More people are going to church. More people are being robbed in the streets.

In his commandery in the town, the Royalist Colonel in charge of Wexford reads for the fourth time the short letter from Cromwell. His hands won’t keep still; his heart is beating hard – that seems to happen a lot now. Cromwell offers terms for the protection of life and property if the town is surrendered.

It is 11th October. It is exactly one month since the slaughter of Drogheda.

In the town, rumours of the letter have spread helter-skelter; hungry mouths will find food quickest. Cromwell has offered generous terms. There have been other stories spreading, stories of towns that surrendered honourably and were spared. Cromwell will not want to cause outrage unless he is forced. Perhaps the stories of Cromwell’s monstrosities are exaggerated. Surely a man of God is a man of peace. Imagine the relief of the siege ending, this frozen anguished existence changed instantly.

The Colonel’s heart continues to hammer at his head. Pride. Pain. Honour. Escape. Duty. Fear. Ormonde’s relieving forces coming nearer. Disease spreading in Cromwell’s camp. Negotiation. Cleverness. One more exchange of letters. An extra concession for his people.

Then there is sound, sound outside his head, outside the room. From beyond the city a shrillness rises like angry birds; not birds – men, screaming in the charge and cheered on by artillery that applauds against his walls. Cromwell is attacking, and in his shock the Colonel knows that it cannot be,
because I am holding this piece of paper and the paper is real
. Then the world crumbles in explosions and wooden hammerings and faces and reports and impressions. The castle is surrendered. The castle is falling. Confusion. The walls have been abandoned. Shrieking panic in the streets. Fear.

Something has gone wrong. The laws, the conventions, the agreement have been forgotten. The assault is under way, with shouts and swords, and no arrangements have been made for mercy.

And so it begins again.

The crown of Henry Tudor, the seventh of that name, was twenty-two jewelled inches in circumference: seven across and as many high, from its padded brow-furrowing base to the tip of the flat cross at its summit. A little gleaming Golgotha, the last surviving crown to have touched the head of a King of England, the sacred relic now huddled in darkness in a mean unvelveted wooden chest. As the chest swayed in the hands of the man carrying it, the crown could be heard sliding across its base, a rat in a dungeon, or a usurped King.