Blood's Campaign

by Angus Donald

  The low-born bumpkin himself looked to his left along the line of the small ridge. The infantry formations looked decidedly shaky, to Hogan’s experienced eye. In the centre, beneath his magnificent standard, the Duke of Berwick sat on a silver-grey horse. A slim, handsome young man in a blinding golden coat and white hat plumed with a gold-dyed ostrich feather, the duke was surrounded by a dozen aides, gallopers and personal guards. And with him was the slippery Frenchman Narrey, also well mounted, and his bruiser Guillaume. Would the Frenchmen fight, Hogan wondered, or were they here to observe? Berwick and his entourage were stationed a dozen yards behind the duke’s three foot regiments, fifteen hundred men, pikemen to the fore, red-coated matchlock men behind, the smoke from their lit matches curling, trickling upwards in the air.

  These Jacobite soldiers were recently recruited from Cork and Kerry – some had signed up to serve only a few weeks beforehand – and many did not understand the officers’ orders, which were usually given only in English. Their training had been mostly delivered to them on the march from the recruiting depots in the south. As a result, Berwick’s regiments were not in perfect linear alignment, some were bulging absurdly in the middle as the men, already fearful of the bloody fight to come, crowded together for safety. Groups of sergeants with halberds or poleaxes patrolled the edges of the formations shoving the men this way and that in an attempt to get them back into their correct places. But the result was that bodies of hundreds of men contracted and expanded, shifted and swayed like huge schools of fish below a sea-going boat.

  The rain had held off, for once, and it was a bright February morning. A little cold, but dry. That would make the musketry easier, Hogan told himself. Rain often extinguished the burning match cords, unless they were protected, and bad weather rendered a matchlock no more than a heavy lump of wood. Indeed, it treated more modern flintlocks with a similar contempt. Nothing like a good Irish rainstorm to reduce a battle to a muddy, bloody shoving match between groups of men wielding only wooden clubs and wicked blades.

  On the far side of Berwick’s regiments, Brigadier John Wauchope’s men were in better order. Their lines were straight, their private men standing almost perfectly still. They had been in Cavan for some months and their Scots commander had made an effort to see they could all at least parade respectably.

  They had the numbers, then. But what about the quality of the men? Hogan looked down the slope at the thinner English lines. The Inniskillingers were in the centre, a couple of hundred musket-men in grey, in three small company-strong blocks, and to their left a large single block of men in blue coats with orange facings – Dutchmen, he assumed. King William’s vaunted Blue Guards. There were English redcoats to the right of the Inniskillingers, maybe two full companies. Veterans, too, by the look of them. And now the Williamite cavalry was coming forward, grey-clad Inniskillinger dragoons, what looked like two full troops, and some curassiers, three, no four troops of them, steel breast and back plates worn over long yellow coats with red facings, the metal armour blacked to stop it reflecting the sun and giving the cavalry’s position away on the march. The curassiers were forming up on the far side of the dragoons, twenty yards in front of the lines of Williamite infantry, dressing their ranks, the trumpeters blowing complicated sequences, a dry riffle of drums now. Hogan thought they might be Danes. He had heard that King William had sent over some first-class Danish mercenaries with General Schomberg’s force.

  The curassier officer spurred out ahead of the yellow-clad heavy cavalry, and drew his sword. It flashed in the weak sunlight. That was bold – did the curassiers mean to charge? Uphill, against a numerically superior enemy? With no artillery to soften them up? Yes, they did; the dragoons too.

  The ranks of the dragoons were moving forward, at walking pace, but it was definitely an advance. An attack. And one in a style he was familiar with from his time as a youngster in the late wars against the Dutch in the Spanish Netherlands. It seemed clear now to Hogan what they planned to do: the dragoons would ride up, dismount at a hundred, or perhaps even seventy yards, if they were brave, from the red Jacobite lines, fire off their carbines, a couple of concentrated volleys perhaps, maybe three, hoping to kill, wound and generally terrorise a large section of the Duke of Berwick’s battle line. Then once the dragoons had done their work, the curassiers would charge home into the now disordered ranks, screaming their war cries, firing their horse pistols, swinging their long, straight lethal swords, smashing into the line of weakened men. The Danish curassiers hoped to chop through the enemy lines, right in the centre – and, if they managed that, then the real killing would begin. Broken, fleeing enemy infantry was easy meat for these heavy horsemen to ride down. The English Foot would follow them up the hill, no doubt, and charge into the gap the horsemen had made. And that would be it. The Duke of Berwick’s whole army would be done: dead, defeated or driven from the field.

  It was a good plan. Berwick’s raw infantry were shaky. The English could see that. Having a couple of troops of dragoons – a hundred and twenty hard men – riding up and noisily firing off their carbines at your company from close range, seeming to aim at you personally, was terrifying to a novice redcoat. Even if the men held their nerve, they would break and run when the Danes came thundering in, long swords swinging. That would be the end.

  Or not. Not if Mick Hogan had anything to do with it.

  He turned to his bird’s-nest-bearded lieutenant, sitting placidly on a bay beside him: ‘Get the boys ready, Paddy. We’re going to take a hand in this.’

  Hogan turned his mount and trotted over to the captain of Berwick’s Horse, a fat, extremely short-sighted fellow named Sir Robert Cleverly, who wore a rich plum-coloured velvet coat and a gleaming lobster-pot helmet from the late civil wars.

  ‘We’re going to charge them, Sir Robert. On my command the cavalry will advance and take the enemy in the flank.’

  ‘Excellent news, Hogan. My men will sweep these Protestant rogues from the field. Show them our mettle, eh? So, ah, straight down the hill and at ’em?’

  ‘No, Sir Robert. Absolutely not! Not down the hill. We’re not going to charge their formed infantry ranks. We’d achieve nothing except to scatter ourselves across the landscape. We’re going to charge their attacking cavalry.’

  ‘Their cavalry, eh? Excellent. And which cavalry would that be?’

  Hogan saw the man was peering across the field. Why had this purblind mole been put in command of the Duke’s Horse? Hogan knew the answer: Sir Robert was someone’s cousin or brother-in-law. Or someone owed him money.

  ‘Their cavalry are advancing – see over there. The dragoons are coming forward. The horsemen in grey?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. The grey dragoons. I see them clearly now.’

  Sir Robert Cleverly was staring at a small copse of silver birches by the side of the main road that cut through the centre of the battlefield.

  ‘I tell you what, Sir Robert. When I give the word you and your merry band of cavaliers follow after me and my men. Stick with us. Is that clear?’

  ‘Quite so, quite so. At the word, we’ll come out hot on your heels.’

  ‘Very good.’

  *

  The dragoons advanced at the walk. Halfway up the slope they came to the trot. And for the last few dozen yards they were at the canter. Then they stopped abruptly. The Inniskillingers slid from their horses’ backs at about eighty yards from their enemy, in front of the centre-right of the line, equidistant between the Duke of Berwick and Galloping Hogan. The Jacobite musket fire began almost immediately, individual pecking shots, barks and flashes, that kicked up mud and earth near the feet of the dragoons or whistled overhead – Hogan could hear the outraged roaring of the sergeants and officers telling their Cork and Kerry men to hold their damned fire.

  The dragoons were untouched by the sporadic barrage – muskets, even in the hands of well-schooled men, were notorious for their inaccuracy at anything over fifty yards. One dragoon in ten was designated
the horse-holder, and the nine other dragoons calmly passed their reins to him before advancing, walking into the sputtering fire, carbines in hand, to form up at a distance of sixty yards from the Duke of Berwick’s men.

  The officers around the duke were staring over the infantry’s heads at the dismounted enemy horsemen, a hundred yards away, beyond effective range. One aide galloped away along the rear of the line, carrying an order.

  The sergeants and officers were shouting again, trying to organise a combined fire, but as many men in the Jacobite ranks were now unloaded, only a weak, raggedy volley sputtered out from their red ranks when the order was finally given. The dragoons ignored the splattering fire as they dressed their line, taking their time to ensure that they were exactly the same distance apart from the man on either side. Only then did they shoulder their carbines.

  One dragoon was hit, and fell back like a nine-pin, knocked down by a Jacobite ball, his face a mass of blood, but the rest of the Inniskillingers – a perfectly still grey line of men, muskets levelled – were unscathed.

  They fired. A single crashing sound, then smoke plumed from a hundred barrels and a dozen men in the centre of the Duke of Berwick’s lines staggered and fell. The dragoons began to reload, calmly, methodically, seemingly without a care in the world, oblivious to the enemy wall of red sixty yards in front of them. And the wall feared them. It was shifting, moving back and forwards. Individuals breaking free and running to the rear. The sergeants were bellowing, ‘Close up. Close up. And hold your goddamn fire!’ Once in a while a shot would ring out, a lone musket fired off by a fearful man.

  The dragoons were reloaded. They shouldered their carbines again, and at a command from their officer of ‘Give fire!’ discharged them as one in a rippling crash that ripped into the enemy ranks. The wall of redcoats twitched and wavered, another dozen men fell. Some were trying to edge away from the line of fire. Somebody was screaming: a terrifying animal noise.

  It was at that moment that Hogan’s fifty-odd raparees and the two hundred eager gentlemen of Berwick’s Horse cantered on to the field of battle. Their drumming hooves reverberated through the turf. Their war cries could be heard over the crash of the muskets and the screams of the wounded redcoats.

  The dragoons, until now so perfect in their discipline, turned their heads at the sound, saw the Jacobite cavalry pounding towards them and . . . panicked. They ran, some hurling their empty carbines away, every man scrambling to get back to their horse-handlers and their mounts twenty yards away, sprinting from the line, desperate to escape before the oncoming catastrophe overtook them.

  Hogan’s men crashed into them at the full gallop. For the most part the raparees merely rode down the running men, the weight of horse knocking humans to the turf before the churning hooves milled over him. Some runners they slashed at with sabres, other horsemen pulled out their pistols and fired into the backs of their fleeing foes. The red wall of Jacobite recruits was cheering now – revelling in seeing their erstwhile tormentors taking this punishment. Men were trampled, sliced and stabbed by plunging swords, faces back-cut to the bone. About twenty of the Inniskillingers, the fleetest men, had managed to get to their horses, into the saddle and were kicking their frightened beasts down the hillside. A few of the dragoons, bizarrely, ran towards the Jacobite lines, crying out that they surrendered, calling for mercy. The frightened young men from Cork and Kerry waited till they got within twenty yards, then shot them down like dogs.

  Hogan’s men, with Berwick’s Horse mixed in among them, chased the fleeing dragoons off the summit of the hill and north down the grassy slope. The outnumbered dragoons saw the cuirassiers advancing towards them in their neat lines and, recognising their allies, they spurred madly towards their yellow-coated ranks – despite the desperate cries of the Danish officers that the broken dragoons must steer clear to maintain troop cohesion. The grey horsemen, some slashed and bloody, others mad with pain or fear, ignored the Danes’ desperate warnings and barged into the ranks of the cuirassiers. They destroyed the neat order of the Danish advance, forcing their bodies into the safe crush of their ranks. In a moment, what had been an orderly attack up the hill which was supposed to crash into the Jacobite lines at the spot that had been weakened by the dragoons’ fire, became a rabble, a horde of milling horsemen. With the terror of the sweat-slathered dragoon horses infecting the cuirassiers’ fresh mounts, all discipline and order were lost in a few, mad, chaotic moments.

  Hogan’s horsemen made the most of it.

  His men plunged into the Danes’ ranks like an axe splitting a rotten bough. The impact of the Jacobite charge destroyed all remaining order in the yellow cavalry and tumbled it down the slope; Hogan’s men set about them with sword, pistol and carbine, some raparees wielding half-pikes like lances with a brutal efficiency. Hogan pistolled a curassier in the groin, avoiding his blackened chest armour, as the man rode past. The city gentlemen of Berwick’s Horse were yelling, even screaming with excitement, slashing with their fine blades, hacking down Danes and dragoons left and right. Others were battering at their foes with empty pistols and blunted swords. And the mêlée of warring cavalry – Hogan’s rough riders, Berwick’s ecstatic gentlemen, exhausted dragoons and confused and frightened Danish cuirassiers, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, jumbled in mad confusion, fighting, clawing, killing, dying – slid down the hill faster and faster, inexorably tumbling towards the English infantry lines.

  *

  Brevet Major Blood was standing one pace to the right and three paces in front of the fourth company of Tiffin’s Regiment of Foot. The company was formed of three ranks of twenty men each, a neat rectangle of grey-coated soldiery. The second company of Tiffin’s and the eleventh were on either side of Holcroft’s men. Beyond the eleventh, to his right, stood the statue-like ranks of the Dutch Blue Guard. Impressive, clean-shaven, taller-than-usual men with at least seven years’ experience of fighting in King William’s armies in the Low Countries and elsewhere. They were the Prince of Orange’s elite troops, the heart and soul of his armies, perhaps the finest soldiers in all Europe. They were the bravest in battle, the steadiest under fire. The best men. And they damn well knew it.

  The Blue Guards were also lined up in three ranks, although the formation was of a double company two-hundred-men strong. Behind them, and behind Holcroft’s Inniskillingers, were two companies of Colonel Kirke’s Lambs. These redcoats were hardy veterans: forged in battle from the sands of Tangiers, to the slaughter at Sedgemoor, to the siege of Londonderry the year before.

  Holcroft watched as the orderly advance by the dragoons and the Danish cavalry was turned into a rolling shambles by the sudden Jacobite flank attack. His heart sank. He had scanned the enemy lines a few minutes before with his glass and was almost certain that he had seen Henri d’Erloncourt in earnest conversation with the Duke of Berwick in the very heart of their formation. He was almost beside himself with impatience to attack. And now it seemed the cavalry had made a God-awful mess of it and been utterly routed. They were now galloping down the hill, enemy next to enemy, no formation at all: curassier and raparee, dragoon and Dublin gentleman, each slashing at the other, their horses biting and kicking, beasts and men barging and banging into each other and all heading towards his company.

  Holcroft nodded to Sergeant Hawkins, who bellowed: ‘Tiffin’s prepare to fix bayonets . . .’ and a moment later: ‘Fix bayonets!’

  A hundred and eighty-six Inniskilling men drew their new plug-bayonets from the stiff leather sheaths at their belts and rammed the handles into the clean muzzles of their flintlock muskets. Holcroft was aware that the sergeants of both the Blue Guard and Kirke’s Lambs were barking out similar orders.

  ‘Rear rank only,’ shouted Hawkins. ‘Just the rear rank, mind . . . that does not mean you, McNally, you stand where you are . . . rear rank, about turn!’

  The third line of each of the three companies turned around to face backwards. ‘Now then, lads.’ Hawkins’ voice had dro
pped in tone and volume but it still rang out clearly across the field. ‘First rank, kneel! Stand your ground, Tiffin’s; grip those muskets tight as your lovers. Prepare to receive cavalry!’

  Holcroft edged into the side of the fourth company, pressing close to the end file, and drew his small-sword, adding its shining length to the bristling hedge of plug-bayonets. The front rank was kneeling, musket-butts on the ground, barrel and bayonet pointing upwards at chest height. The second rank, standing, had their bayonetted muskets at port. The rear rank, facing backwards, also presented a line of bayonets. The whole effect was to nearly surround the company with lines of sharp steel blades, a double-sided defensive barrier.

  The nearest horseman, a blood-slathered dragoon on a wildly out-of-control horse, was only yards away. The dragoon was screaming, waving the infantry to move out of his path. The kneeling Inniskilling men flinched, ready for the impact of half a ton of horseflesh and the slice of madly kicking iron-shod hooves. They closed their eyes, gripped their muskets and prayed.

  The horse saw the hedge of blades and tried to halt its mad momentum, skidding on its back haunches, spraying mud and small stones, neighing madly – at the last moment the frightened beast side-stepped and swept past the company, missing Holcroft’s arm by inches, and bearing the astonished blood-daubed dragoon past with it.

  The horsemen came barrelling in thick and fast: curassiers sawing on their reins, trying to bring their animals under control, raparees whooping and laughing madly, waving their bloodied swords around their heads, whipping up the panic as best they could . . . But no living horse would willingly impale itself on the Inniskilling bayonet hedge and the wide gaps between the three grey companies allowed every one of the galloping horsemen to swerve round the huddled ranks of Ulstermen and horse after horse thundered safely past the clenched infantry and away towards the rear.