The Year of the French (63 page)

Upon the ride southwards, to Lough Allen, he found the spoor of his quarry, for Humbert had abandoned his heavier guns, the prizes of Castlebar, and retained only the light curricles—the certain marks of a forced march. Drumkeerin, the first village along the new line, Crauford entered but hours after the French forces had vacated it, and here he paused to rest horses and men, and to allow Lake to move forward. And in Drumkeerin, it must be confessed, he occupied himself in his customary brusque manner, for without trial or ceremony he hanged the local United Irish leader, a blacksmith named Falvey, who had furnished one of his sons to Humbert’s army. Falvey, so Crauford was to report, went to his death cursing the King, begging pardon from the Almighty, and protesting his innocence, a self-contradictory cast of mind which was common among the rebel leaders.

It was, I must confess, a distressing experience for me to learn, from Crauford’s own lips, of the methods which he had so casually employed, and all interspersed with accounts of exploits and rapid decisions which won my deep and ready admiration. He was in no sense a cruel man, but he assumed that rebels had placed themselves beyond the law and were better dead. Such sentiments were of course repellent to Lord Cornwallis, as he was amply to demonstrate, yet this most humane and Christian of commanders could not withhold praise for Crauford’s enterprise and dash, and such praise, being set forth in despatches to London, put Crauford upon the high road to those honours which he was to reap under Wellington in the Peninsula. But it was unsettling to me to face Crauford as he sat at his ease, boots off and tunic unfastened, and know that those firm, square lips had ordered men lashed and hanged. My youthful mind could but too easily imagine his dragoons sweeping down into such villages as Tobercurry and Drumkeerin, their sabres at the ready. That the red passion of battle may sway the judgement and destroy the charity of any man I was myself to learn, most bitterly, upon the field of Ballinamuck, but a day or two later. And yet I believe most firmly that the finest soldier is he who wields his sword as the surgeon wields his scalpel, drawing such blood as is necessary, but not a drop more. Cornwallis was such a man, and although I have heard him condemned as a “political general,” I dispute the charge.

We were spending that evening as the guests of Mr. Otway of Summerhill, a pretty house which stands upon a rise of ground above the Shannon, some two miles from Carrick. The river is most pleasant there, wide but quick-moving, and spanned by a bridge of graceful arches. A river more stained by history than the Boyne: were such stains visible, it would surely be rust-brown. For centuries, Carrick has been the town by which the upper river has been held, as we held it now, and yet it is but an Irish country town, more handsome than most, with wide and well-tended streets, and the houses of the gentry, such as Summerhill, are crisp and solid seals upon the land.

Seated in the small octagonal library, Cornwallis gave his orders and disposed of his forces with a map spread before us on the table, and I observed that the campaign now moved within a constricted circle. He traced the circle with a thick-jointed forefinger. Moving southwards past Lough Allen, Humbert would of course seek to cross the Shannon, but not at Carrick, which he knew we held. Accordingly, he would use the bridge at Ballintra, seven miles north of us. Cornwallis did not propose to march against him there, leaving to Lake the task of pursuit. Rather, we would move eastwards early in the morning, keeping ourselves between the Frenchman and the rebels of the midlands, and maintaining a flexibility sufficient to attack Humbert or come to the aid of the midland garrisons, as occasion demanded. The two armies, to put it briefly, would be racing for the town of Granard.

“But we shall not reach Granard, either of us,” Cornwallis said, and he drew a small, neat circle around the town. “We shall intercept him at one of these villages a bit to the north—Cloone, perhaps, or Ballinamuck.” He drew a second, larger circle, which impinged upon the first. Then he took off his spectacles, folded them, and placed them in their case of red leather. “The hunt is ending.”

Colonel Atkinson was uneasy, a short, dumpy man but a dependable officer. “Might we not do better to move now, sir? The Frenchman is on forced march, and we know how quickly he can move.”

“Not quickly enough, Atkinson. Take a look at the map. He doesn’t have wings, you know. He has been on a long march, with but a few hours’ rest, and he will arrive exhausted upon the field. So will Lake, poor fellow. But we shall have profited by a good night’s sleep. Sleep is worth a battalion.” He tapped his spectacles case against the map. “That Frenchman is very good, isn’t he? My word, the things he has done, and the distance he has travelled, and all with a thousand men and a rabble of peasants. I look forward to talking with him. Don’t suppose he knows any English, eh?”

“You haven’t done badly yourself, my lord,” Atkinson said, studying the map. “If you had taken their advice in Dublin, the city would lie open to this fellow.”

“Oh, no,” Cornwallis said. “That would not have done.” He stretched. “He is fleet as a deer, this Frenchman, but he has nowhere left to run now, save straight into our muskets.”

“He plans to use the midlands rising to slip past our flank,” Atkinson said.

“He plans. Yes indeed. But we have other plans. By the time he reaches the County Longford, there will be no rising there. The impudence of those bare-arsed peasants! Much good Irishmen can do without a regiment of Frenchies to put iron in their backbones.”

“Dear, dear,” Atkinson said. “What can possess them, to rise up like this against all hope of success, against common sense itself.” He was a kindly man. Since his arrival in Ireland, letters had been flying ceaselessly between himself and his wife in Dorsetshire. They had a boy, their eldest, with Wellington.

“Who can hope to understand these poor creatures,” Cornwallis said. “They live in a different world, locked away with their superstitions and their barbarous speech. And I fear that their gentry and their nobility do precious little to bring them forward into civilisation. God send that we can do better by them.”

“They might at least have the sense to know that their pikes and scythes are useless against an army.”

“So they might,” Cornwallis agreed. “So they might. But perhaps their priests assure them that the holiness of their cause will protect them against musket and cannonball. Some such belief was current in Wexford. But pray remember that only a fraction of the peasantry has involved itself in this wretched business. The great bulk of them are like all poor creatures. They want only food in their bellies and a bit of quiet.”

“A bit of rope more likely, for the peasants with Humbert,” Atkinson said.

“They are rebels against the Crown,” Cornwallis said after a pause. “They have destroyed property and they have murdered. That is the ugly part of the business.” He turned towards me suddenly. “Well, young man, what do you think now of the things soldiers must do?”

I got out some kind of reply. I scarce knew what he expected of me.

“Something must be done for the wretched poor of this island,” he said, “but they must also learn that rebellion is the most hideous of civil crimes. Dear God, must we teach them that lesson once a century? Can they really want it taught to them by Cromwell’s methods? I shall have none of those, by God. If the landlords expect to have the island policed by hangmen, let them send to the Turk.”

I know now that Cornwallis, even upon the eve of battle, was turning over in his mind the plan to bring to an end the trumpery “nation” of greedy landlords and venal legislators, to unite the two kingdoms of Britain and Ireland, and thus to bring to all of the Irish, master and serf alike, the benefits and safeguards of British law, and the prosperity of British commerce. Which plan was brought to its happy fruition within two years’ time. A wealthy land Ireland can never be, but she has since the Union proved herself abundantly capable of acting as England’s granary, shipping to us her cattle and the produce of her fields, and thus ensuring her own modest measure of our prosperity. And so shall it continue, for so long as the potato proves able to supply her poor with a cheap and universal food. Ireland has had her continuing share of civil disturbances in this present century: she has been racked by tithe wars and new outbursts of Whiteboyism; O’Connell, the bloat-bellied demagogue, has stirred up once more her ignorant masses, but her population continues to grow. Indeed, as I pen these lines, more Irishmen stand upon her fields than at any other time in her troubled history. Long may flourish the Union and the potato, say I, and three huzzas for honest Paddy in his cabin.

Curious it is to reflect that the plans for all this were nurturing within the old man’s capacious mind, as he sat in Summerhill’s small library, with his back turned to Mr. Otway’s Livy and his Gibbon. He insisted upon hot whiskeys for us all before sending us off to our beds, and the cup stretched to a second and a third. I was by then a bit mellow, although he was as keen-eyed as ever, discoursing upon his campaigning days in America twenty years before, and most interestingly upon the subject of Washington, whom he regarded as a most overrated commander, although a man of estimable personal qualities. I was the last to quit him, and tarried until his man had brought in his robe and his Turkey slippers. I remember him with as much affection as respect, for he was not only my commander but my father in the field, a wise Priam schooling an unlicked cub.

A wide avenue of beeches ran from the house to the river, and before turning in, I walked along it. I found it agreeable to have this half hour to myself: in the field we live atop one another, and thoughts cannot properly be called one’s own. There was no wind; the heavy-leaved beeches could barely be seen by starlight. Presently I was alone with the river, which flowed invisibly before me, its quick murmurs filling my soul with a curious contentment. I have always been, after my fashion, as true a worshipper of nature as Mr. Wordsworth himself, although I am a sorry hand at finding words with which to speak of my divinity, an ability which puts to shame the drum rolls and harness-creaks of my profession.

Far off, to my left, two lanterns glowed faintly from the bridge, like fallen stars. Below the arches of the bridge, the waters of the Shannon flowed to the distant sea. But I turned my head, rather, towards their source, marvelling that the two armies should now be so close, for the rebels would now be moving along Lough Allen, and would reach the river sometime in the morning. My profession, of its nature, tears landscapes to shreds, sending jagged red lightnings across them, ripping them as a drunk man might rip an engraving. Yet perhaps for this very reason, I cherish nature in her tranquillity, and have ever found in her my truest and deepest feelings. A strange avowal by an old soldier, the reader may find this.

These were feelings which would doubtless have amused Lord Cornwallis, for he was in every fibre a man of the old century. America, India, Ireland—the theatres of his career lay spread across the world, but he had discovered nothing of the romantic in them but rather spoke of them as vexing problems which had been parcelled out to him. The great kingdom of the Moguls, America with its boundless forests and mighty rivers, its painted red-skinned savages, and now this misty bog, haunted by the ghosts of its hideous history—all were one to him, a soldier and statesman serving his King as best he could. He possessed, like others of his generation, a settled confidence that the world made sense. And yet, when he surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, did he not instruct the bands to play “The World Turned Upside Down”?

For a lad like myself, his sword unbloodied and his spurs yet to be won, this dark island was as large as the globe itself, and as I stood by the river I tried to imagine the army moving towards it—Humbert with his swarthy veterans and the Irish rebels. Throughout the long centuries, Ireland had hung beside us as a fireship, as a battered, black-hulled pirate craft might hang beside a man-of-war. By day, its fields were as bright and as abundant as any in England, but at night they were lonely moors stretching towards savage mountains. There was no wind, no sound save the water at my feet, the great central river of Ireland. Strongbow, Bagenal, Grey, Mountjoy, Cromwell, William—Cornwallis was but one in the series of commanders sent to reduce the island. Such were my youthful reflexions, romantic, melancholy, a bit fearful, upon the evening before we marched eastwards to Ballinamuck.

Drumshanbo, September 6

Lough Allen lay open before him, between folds of hills. The road swerved, and ran beside it. Reeds grew by its bank, straight, pale green. He climbed a low, grassy hill and sat down to stare across the quiet blue water to the far shore. The sounds of lake water, soft and insistent, filled his spirit. Sounds twined and entwining, he read the water’s music. Dust of shattered diamonds, sunlight broke upon the surface. Water rebuked the parched roads of Mayo and Sligo. Coarse grass lay beneath his hands. Lake, foreshore, hillock were cradled safe from history. Far different from the lakes of Munster, history clinging to every rock, twining itself around root, tangling with reeds and grasses. The lake of the French, they may call this one in time, or the lake of the armed men. Not yet. A man might rest here forever, hands cupped behind his head, singing to himself or studying the clouds or lost in memory.

The foreshore of his life lay all disordered, a tumult of noises, a blaze of forms and faces, cannon shot and running men, bodies emptying their blood and bowels upon pastureland, Humbert a great cat beside a midnight fire, Duggan’s bull shoulders, bloodshot his eyes. At the crest of Castlebar High Street, a red-haired soldier lay sprawled upon his gun. Images crowded his skull and beat against its sides. Let time bleach away their colours. He wanted only the whiteness of clouds, lapping of water. None was an image he could call his own; they had been thrust upon him.

His self lay hidden behind those jarring images, and he called to it as to a distant friend: footing it along the roads of Kerry and West Cork; at tavern ease, his feet propped against a bench; or a woman’s long white legs beside his, her breasts open to his touch. Or, most vividly, alone at night, fingering words as bright as jewels, stronger than chain. He was invincible within the sturdy keep of his language. Now he was stripped to the bare skin of his feelings. Let them come after him, they would find him gone. He longed for Munster, a familiar old coat to cover his nakedness.