Blood's Campaign

by Angus Donald

  His mare suddenly lifted its head. Hogan did likewise. The guns had stopped. There was an eerie quiet across the battlefield. Hogan fumbled in his waistcoat and pulled out an ancient watch: it was exactly ten o’clock.

  He stood up in his stirrups and, craning his neck, he could make out the ford at Oldbridge, and the gently smoking rubble of a pair of cottages a little way from the river’s edge. Why had they stopped? Had they run out of ammunition? No, they couldn’t have, after coming all this way. They’d have brought a few extra kegs of powder and cannon balls with them, surely.

  He had his answer a moment later. On the far side of the water, from a sunken road that led to the ridge – stepping through a curtain of leafy fronds, the arms of weeping willows – came the forms of men. Marching men with blue coats with bright orange turn-backs and glorious orange stockings, each one gripping a gleaming musket. William’s famous Blue Guards. His finest men.

  At this distance they looked like children’s dolls. Hogan took out his glass and trained it on the far bank of the river. Lined up eight men abreast and countless ranks deep – big men, he could see now, grenadiers, all over six feet tall – the guardsmen came out of the tunnel-like mouth of the road in a slow and steady tramp, like a huge blue caterpillar emerging from a gigantic burrow, and spilling out on to the flat, grassy water meadow before the slow brown river.

  There was something stately, even majestic, about the advance of the Blue Guard. They came straight ahead, with a measured tread, paying little attention to the bank of the river, the leading rank jumping straight in and beginning to wade across, water up to their thighs, muskets held shoulder high, the men behind following in their splashes, their legs whipping the water white.

  On the south bank, Hogan could see red-coated Irishmen, poking heads up from where they had been taking cover, and their officers were beginning to marshal them. A goodly number had survived the artillery barrage, thank God. Many hundreds. Even thousands. Whole companies, scores of men, erupted from half-crushed buildings, taking their places on their knees by mounds of steaming rubble, levelling their muskets. Other formations, company or even some battalion-sized, were forming up behind the shot-torn hedgerows and crumbled smoking remains of stone walls that had once been little cottages.

  Hogan felt a flame of hope burst into life in his heart.

  The first Irish volleys crashed out, precise, deadly, and Hogan saw five grenadiers in the front rank of Blue Guards fall, splashing into the brown water. But their places were immediately filled from the wading ranks behind. More volleys. The musket balls whipped into the advancing column, lashing it from the front and both sides now. Lead balls thumping into human meat. Dutchmen fell, again and again, plunging sideways into the water, gouts of red splashing the dark coats of their fellows, the bodies drifting away eastwards with the current. The men of Clanrickarde’s Regiment of Foot, the foremost red-coated battalion tasked with guarding the ford, were on their feet near the water’s edge, firing as fast as they could, reloading and firing again into the oncoming ranks. Sergeants were screaming, directing the onslaught, and the Irish muskets smashed into the column with fire and lead, and a desperate fear-driven fury.

  Still the Dutch came on. Not one man of them had fired a shot.

  The water of the Boyne was thick with bodies but the slow blue caterpillar forged onwards, and yet more men were coming out of the sunken road, pushing the column into the withering fire of the enemy. Now, incredibly, tall Dutchmen were stepping out on the dry south bank, diverging left and right, splitting into smaller units, still under a murderous, unrelenting storm of Irish musketry. They were forming ranks by companies, wounded men falling with every beat of Hogan’s heart, toppling out of their formation. Others dropping to their knees, sprawling, coughing blood but trying to stand up again and rejoin their comrades. Somehow, in the face of the hurricane of fire, the Dutch ranks were properly formed. Officers and sergeants carefully ordered the lines, with halberd and sword, indifferent to the storm of musket balls that shredded the men all around them. On the right, an elderly officer with a pink sash was shot full in the face. He fell. A sergeant hauled him away and took his place, standing broad shouldered and proud as Lucifer, bawling out his commands.

  Hogan was appalled – and awed. These men could not be fully human.

  Twenty yards from a hedgerow, which was lined with thirty redcoats, all madly firing and reloading as quick as their fingers could work, the leading Dutch company formed up, calm and cool as if on the wind-swept parade ground outside The Hague. They levelled their pieces, the command came briskly from a sword-wielding gentleman in a silver wig, and the first Dutch volley smashed into the hedge, wiping out all but two of the redcoats pitted against them. The second Dutch rank stepped forward, threading though the first; they straightened the line and a second volley swept away this final pair.

  All along the south bank the Dutch were advancing in step, stopping to dress their ranks and firing with a chilling precision. Slaughtering their foes. Some of the blue guardsmen, detached from the main bodies, were throwing grenades, lighting the match fuses on the fist-sized iron balls and bowling them, underarm, towards the enemy-lined hedgerows, where they exploded and did terrible damage, shredding hawthorn and beech to the roots, ripping the flesh off the cowering redcoats behind. The Irish were being pushed back. And yet more of these blue automatons were streaming across the Boyne. There were several hundred Dutchmen now on the south bank in a bridgehead seventy yards wide, thirty deep. The blood-puddled ground, churned to a mire in places, was scattered with dying guardsmen, dropped arms and equipment everywhere.

  Clanrickarde’s battered men were outnumbered on the south bank and were beginning to make an orderly retreat. This was no rout. No panic. The redcoats would pull back thirty yards, to a fresh hedge or the remains of a wall, reload their muskets, form a ragged line, level their pieces, wait for the command and smash a devastating volley into the advancing Dutch.

  Hogan heard the faint rattle of drums and a tinny blast of trumpet over the thump of musket blasts and the screaming of wounded men. He saw that a full battalion of redcoats – six hundred men, King James’s own Foot Guards, some of the finest soldiers in the Irish Army – was advancing on this bubbling, smoking cauldron of carnage on the south bank. These big, bold Irishmen, half-pikemen, half-matchlock musketeers would push the Dutch back in the water.

  Hogan was sure of it.

  And then he scanned the bridgehead with his telescope and suddenly he wasn’t so sure. The flow of Dutchmen across the River Boyne had in no way slackened. And many of the blue guardsmen were snug behind the rubble defences that the Irish had recently abandoned. And what was this? Further east from Oldbridge, near the spit of land called Grove Island, Hogan could see more Williamite units advancing to the far side of the river. Musketeers in grey with leather baldricks. Huguenots, he believed, from the split crosses on the flags. Protestant Frenchmen who’d been ejected from France by Louis XIV.

  Whose idiot idea was it to send away the bulk of the army?

  The Irish Foot Guards were now hand-to-hand with the Dutch Blue Guards in the battered ruins of Oldbridge. The musket smoke, thick as soup, almost obscuring the field, but the regular crash of the volleys and the howls and moans of wounded men were still clearly to be heard. Hogan saw the two companies of Irish pikemen, in a single red block a hundred-men strong, lower their sixteen-foot weapons and begin their advance. Nothing could stand in the way of their phalanx; no body of men could hold without being skewered on the sharp pike points. Then out of the smoke on their left flank, a platoon of twenty Blue Guards appeared as if by magic, straightened their lines and began to maul them with disciplined volley fire as they marched past.

  The pikemen could do nothing. Volley after volley crashed into the pacing redcoats. And the Dutchmen to their front – fifty men formed up in the ruins of an orchard – added their fire to the general carnage. Shooting for their lives, rank after blue rank poured their lead missi
les into the slowly advancing redcoats. A pair of grenadiers ran forward from the right and tossed smoking spheres into the centre of the pike formation. A boom and spray of lethal red-hot metal shards erupted in the forest of pikes. Ten men fell. Then moments later another bang, another dozen men dead or mortally wounded.

  More grenadiers darted forward. More bombs were hurled. More men died. The galling platoon fire ripped again and again into the flanks of the marching pikemen. And savaged from front and flank, and from the heart of the formation, too, the pikemen stumbled and fell, legs lacerated, groins punctured by red-hot iron, tripping on the corpses of their friends in the smoke, blundering out of formation. Blinded by smoke. Battered by musketry from all sides. In a few short moments, the vaunted King’s Foot Guards disintegrated into a disorderly terrified mob, the soldiers hurling their unwieldy pikes aside and taking to their heels, haring away south as fast as their pumping legs would carry them.

  And further east several hundred grey-clad Huguenots were already halfway across the river, muskets high, wading through the brown water, and there were many more units coming down the hillside behind them – Williamite redcoats this time – streaming down to the river on their left to join the attack.

  We cannot hold them, Hogan thought. This fight is surely lost.

  ‘Captain Hogan,’ shouted a voice to his right, ‘Captain Hogan, sir!’

  He took the telescope from his eye and turned to see a young pink-faced lieutenant of Tyrconnell’s Regiment galloping towards him waving his hat.

  ‘The Duke’s compliments, sir, and he desires you to lead your men down to the river to attack those infantry in grey as they come out of the water.’

  The pink-faced lad pointed at the mass of Huguenots milling on Grove Island. ‘The second, third and fourth squadrons will follow you in support.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Hogan. ‘And what is the rest of His Grace’s Regiment going to do in the meantime. Sit up here with their thumbs up their fat arses?’

  The lieutenant’s pink face became even pinker.

  ‘I believe . . . that is, I’m not sure, sir . . . but I think . . . His Grace means to charge the enemy at Oldbridge and push the Dutchmen back into the Boyne.’

  ‘Hrmpf,’ said Hogan.

  ‘Do you understand your orders, sir?’ said the boy.

  Hogan ignored him. ‘Paddy Gallagher,’ he shouted, startling his bay mare into a little jig. ‘Get the lads ready, if you please. We’re going down in there.’

  *

  Hogan’s men hit the enemy when they were at their most vulnerable, with only two score musket men from the first Huguenot battalion on the south bank of the Boyne and the rest of the division – the other two battalions – either waist deep in the water or on Grove Island in the middle of the river preparing to cross. The raparees came out of a small patch of woodland at the full gallop, the men shrieking their war cries, whooping and shouting like godless savages, and fell on the disordered Huguenots, shooting off their carbines then mauling the enemy with swinging swords and darting half-pikes.

  The horsemen smashed into the grey-clad men from the east, riding them down with the sheer momentum of their horses, or slashing at their faces, necks and scalps as they passed, leaving great flapping, bleeding wounds. Those with spears or cut-down pikes skewered the Frenchmen through the body and left their weapons waggling deep in their Protestant flesh. After the first pass, Hogan rallied his own company, halfway between Grove Island and Oldbridge, and got them back into some semblance of order. The casualties had been mercifully light – two men missing, presumably fallen in the carnage by the riverside, and half a dozen with minor wounds and still in the saddle.

  The three squadrons of Tyrconnell’s Horse, who had followed the raparees in the charge, were still down at the water’s edge, sabring the beaten infantry, hacking and slashing at those desperate men still on their feet.

  Yet the Huguenot companies were far from toothless – their advance guard had been more or less annihilated on the bloody, muddy bank but more men were coming across the water, hundreds more. On Grove Island, fifty yards way, there were companies forming and beginning their volleys.

  The Tyrconnell squadrons were still on the riverbank, the horses milling in circles, the men slashing at the last few cowering victims of the sudden attack. Some men even bloodying their shiny swords on corpses, just for the look of it. But the grey ranks of musket men on the island were keeping up their fire – and steadily taking their toll. As Hogan watched, he saw a dozen grey jets of smoke all in a row erupt from the island and three Irish saddles emptied on the bank. Why were Tyrconnell’s men not pulling back? Ah, now he saw it. The senior captain, distinguishable by his scarlet sash, was lying with his legs in the river, hatless, half his head gone. The Tyrconnell squadrons were leaderless.

  Hogan had a sudden urge to ride away. They had done their part. Now it was time to find that wee French shite and be gone from this Hell.

  He knew he couldn’t do it.

  ‘Sound the charge, Paddy,’ he said. ‘We’ll give ’em a little more pepper.’

  They went in again, this time more cautiously, carbines empty, but horse pistols out, shooting the men in grey as they came out of the water. Cutting down those who had already made it to the shore when the pistols were spent. Hogan shot a Huguenot in the dead centre of his chest, and pulling out his cutlass, he slashed another fellow across the forehead, the blade chunking into the skull under the hat brim, sticking there a moment till he wrenched it free from the falling body.

  Yet the regular banging of the Huguenot muskets on Grove Island was constant and unceasing. The musket balls zipped and whizzed and cracked all around them. And Hogan’s men were dying, one by one. There were too many of the enemy, hundreds of faces, still coming on, ever coming on through the brown water under their square orange banners, shouting their barbarous French war cries, some firing off their flintlocks at them when their grey shanks were still in the river. Others, their musket barrels plugged with razor-sharp bayonets, reaching up, snarling, to stab at Hogan’s riders as they passed by on the bank.

  A flood tide of enemies. Unstoppable.

  ‘Pull back, pull back,’ Hogan was shouting at his own poor men and the remaining Tyrconnell squadrons. ‘Regroup in the woods.’ He saw a big man in water-splashed grey level his musket at him. Fire. And behind he heard a grunt and turning saw that Gallagher had been hit by a ball in the belly. The big man hunched forward over his pommel, swearing, his grubby chemise blooming red.

  ‘Pull back to the tree line,’ Hogan was shouting. No one seemed to hear him. He seized Paddy Gallagher’s bridle and began to pull the horse after him.

  Yet half his own men did heed him, and began to disengage, loosing their last pistol shots over their shoulders and withdrawing to the relative safety of the woods. The rest of them, the regulars of Tyrconnell’s Horse, were caught up in the orgy of bloodletting, slashing and screaming, cursing and stabbing their foes on the water’s edge when the musket volleys took them. They were overwhelmed, it seemed, in a few moments. The few score men still alive swamped by the grey-clad hordes.

  Hogan watched them as he reloaded his long horse pistol at a safe distance of a hundred yards. He looked about him: under the trees were perhaps ninety men, half his original numbers, some of his own, some of Tyrconnell’s men, more than he had expected. They were busy binding up their wounds, gulping water or ale from their big round canteens, boasting to their mates of the great deeds they had done that day. They seemed cheerful – even exuberant. Christ! More than half of his men were dead or wounded – it had been a bloody slaughter. That was courage. That was fighting spirit. In that moment he loved them all – every mad-bastard one of them – more than he could ever express.

  The battle was not done. A whole enemy battalion, five hundred grey-clad men, was now on the south bank – with another Huguenot battalion halfway across the water coming to join them. Hogan dearly wanted to run. Had they done enou
gh? Surely they had done enough this day. Hogan looked at the busy riverbank, where the Huguenots were massing, forming their companies, preparing to advance, the sergeants carrying away the dead – both kinds – and stacking them like cut logs by the water’s edge.

  Beyond the Huguenots, to the west, the battle still raged around Oldbridge. The redcoats and the blues were engaged in ferocious individual combat in the ruins of the village, soldiers of both sides mingled in the smoke-wreathed mêlée, stabbing with pike and sword and plug-bayonet, pistolling each other at a range of only a few feet, the musket volleys crashing out again and again. He could see the rest of Tyrconnell’s cavalry there, swinging their sabres, yelling their hatred, smashing down the Dutchmen. And some men of Colonel Parker’s Regiment, too. An orgy of noise and smoke and stench and slaughter. Neighing horses. Gore and filth. The screaming of men unceasing, ringing out like the bells of Hell.

  Hogan took a great deep breath. ‘One more time, lads,’ he said. ‘Once more for King James and for our own dear Ireland. Come on, lads, charge!’

  *

  Hogan’s men crashed into a half-formed Huguenot company, tearing it apart, sabring men bloody as they tore through their ragged ranks. And then they hit the formed ranks of a double company as if it was a stone wall; a massed volley smashing into the galloping Irish horsemen like a giant’s knock-out punch.

  The pistol was blown from Hogan’s right hand. His bay mare was bucking like a mad thing, uncontrollable, and with his numb fingers Hogan could barely remain in the saddle, let alone direct his mount. A second volley exploded around him like a lightning storm at sea, noise and fury and streaks of orange light – and he knew then that it was enough. He had had his fill. His men had had their fill. Their courage had reached its end. Those who survived the two volleys were now riding away, galloping back towards the Hill of Donore.

  There were few enough alive. A scant two dozen of his comrades and a score of Tyrconnell’s riders. All that blood and death – and for what? Hogan let the horse carry him from the cheering Huguenots, at a canter, his aching body loose in the saddle, and at three hundred yards he reined in, quieted the old mare and let her graze in a miraculously untouched patch of golden corn.