Blood's Campaign

by Angus Donald

  As Holcroft stepped out on to the muddy turf, and accepted the reins of Nut from Sergeant Hawkins, he saw a red-coated galloper approaching along the riverbank, a captain he recognised from the council at Mellifont Abbey.

  ‘What news of the enemy, sir?’ Holcroft called out, as the man spurred his horse into the water. The rider reined in, and glancing round at the wagon and the guns, said: ‘The enemy is on the run, sir. He is soundly beaten. But I have grave news, sir, grave news indeed for the Ordnance. General Schomberg is dead. He fell a mile yonder in the mêlée, pistolled by an Irish blackguard.’

  The man spurred away across the water and Holcroft digested his news. He felt – nothing. The Duke of Schomberg was dead. The man who had expelled him from the Ordnance was no more. Holcroft had not wished him dead. But neither did he mourn his passing with much grief. Rest in peace.

  *

  Now that Holcroft was on the battlefield itself, rather than observing it from the heights above, the terrible intimacy of war was apparent. The torn corpses, redcoat and Blue Guard, were curled together in death like lovers, piled in rag-doll heaps. And even though the surviving Dutch troops were briskly clearing away the debris of war, as the small train progressed through the ruined village of Oldbridge, Holcroft and his men were constantly having to shift the bodies of the slain out of the path of their big, slow-churning, iron-shod wheels.

  Beyond the immediate battle zone in the village, the trampled cornfield behind was littered not so much with dead men and horses, as with the belongings of those who had fled. The cumbersome matchlock muskets – which the majority of the Irish troops had been issued with – were the first things they had discarded in flight, along with their bandoleers of dangling wooden charge-holders, and their bullet pouches. Not all had made it. As the small gun train rumbled along, heading south along a track around the eastern flanks of the Hill of Donore, they passed the remains of men who had fallen foul of the cavalry, usually marked with hideous wounds to the face and neck, great crimson slashes, some half severing the head from the body. And there were plenty of wounded enemy too. Piteous men crawling and mewling their pain, some lacking limbs, or blind, gore-streaked and desperate.

  Holcroft and his men ignored their heart-rending calls for water – or occasionally for the mercy of a bullet – and kept their course. He knew his duty – and it was not to succour the enemy wounded. The battle was not ended.

  He had made this point forcefully to Jacob Richards, before receiving his blessing to take the two guns, the ammunition wagon and the whole fourth company out into the field. The foe had been pushed back but Holcroft knew from his maps that they must cross the narrow bridge at Duleek. That is where they would find the enemy – and his duty, he told Richards, was to bring his two cannon into action as swiftly as possible, to aid the other branches of the Army as best they could in crushing the enemy.

  There was more to his urgency than Holcroft had admitted to the First Engineer. He had not lied to Richards, but neither had he been entirely truthful. In the back of Holcroft’s mind was a secret desire, irrespective of his ostensible duty to aid his comrades. Narrey – he wanted to get close to Narrey.

  Yet where was the French murderer hiding among all this bloody chaos? Had he fled at the first reverse of the battle? Was he out there somewhere among the wounded and the dead? Holcroft had seen no Frenchmen in white uniforms lying among the corpses – nor a slight, ginger-haired figure in black curled among the crushed wheat stalks. Was Narrey even now with the retreating Irish Army, flooding towards the river crossing at Duleek, where they might be forced to turn and stand and fight again? Where Holcroft might have his chance? By God, he hoped so.

  They saw several units of cavalry in the distance, galloping across their line of march, but Holcroft had no idea whether they were friend or foe. They were moving slowly, at the pace of the Inniskillinger infantrymen who marched in two files of thirty men each on either side of the little train. After an hour they were on the eastern slopes of the Hill of Donore, and above him, to the right, Holcroft could see the church burning beneath a thick column of smoke and groups of redcoats sitting on the slopes, peacefully eating and drinking, sleeping, or tending their wounds. Donore belonged to King William now.

  They came past a stately old mansion, with a large walled garden where there had recently been a cavalry fight. There were several dead horses on the grass, dead men, too, and patches of fresh blood, scarlet on the mown green grass, puddling in the deep hoofprints.

  A mounted Inniskillinger corporal – a neighbour of Sergeant Hawkins, of all strange coincidences – told them that this was Platin Hall, and the Jacobites had waited for their pursuers, attacked and fought them to a standstill, killing a dozen of his comrades and scattering his squadron. The enemy still had teeth, Holcroft noted. The Ulster corporal directed them to a cart track, half a mile to the east of the hall, which slanted down towards the town of Duleek.

  Another half hour and even on this established path through the fields the ground was becoming treacherous and boggy, as they came into the flood plain of the River Nanny. Roaring Meg, drawn by six horses at the head of the train, became stuck, and she needed to be lifted bodily by a dozen strong matrosses to higher, drier ground beside the track. Holcroft, up on the bank, waiting for the gun to be hauled from the mire, could see the dark mass of the enemy troops a mile ahead just by sitting up straight in his saddle.

  Half a dozen muddy horsemen came clattering up the track towards them from the direction of Duleek – all wore red coats but which side did they favour? Holcroft put his hand on the butt of the Lorenzoni pistol that was shoved in his officer’s sash. He heard Sergeant Hawkins bark the order for the company to form a triple line across the track, swiftly obeyed. With a small part of his mind that was not fixed on the oncoming cavalry force, Holcroft was gratified to see the Tiffin’s men taking their places smoothly and without fuss. They had not forgotten their parade-ground drill while he had been away.

  Lieutenant Francis Waters, his voice booming with new authority, gave the order for the company to present their muskets, and sixty-two barrels swung up into place as one. A single volley from their massed ranks would have wiped these horsemen – only forty paces away – clean off the face of the Earth.

  ‘Stand down, the fourth,’ said Holcroft. ‘At ease, men.’

  He recognised the leading rider. It was Brigadier William Wolseley, his old commander in Inniskilling.

  ‘Good day, Brevet Major Blood,’ said Wolseley, reining in a few yards for the first rank of muskets. ‘You’ve brought me some cannon. Good man!’

  ‘It’s Captain Blood again, sir, since I rejoined His Majesty’s Ordnance.’

  ‘Looks to me as if you are now in command of the famous fourth company of Tiffin’s Foot. Finest company in one of my finest regiments. That would make you still a brevet major, to my mind. But I’ll call you captain, if you wish. Good to see you alive after that fearful wound you took at Cavan.’

  ‘Likewise, sir,’ said Holcroft, and he found it was true. The beaming men of the fourth were also pleased to see their old commander unharmed.

  The pleasantries concluded, Brigadier Wolseley proceeded to outline the situation. Both Holcroft and he urged their horses on to the bank and while Holcroft took out his brass telescope to make his observations, Wolseley pointed out the deployments of the enemy with his drawn sword blade.

  ‘The rearguard are French,’ he said. ‘Four battalions. About a couple of thousand men, I’d say, drawn from General Lauzun’s Brigade.’

  Holcroft examined the blocks of white-clad troops, drawn up in four groups under their French banners on the north bank of the River Nanny about half a mile away. Between each white-grey rectangle of musket men, Holcroft could see the shapes of wheels and the bronze barrels of guns, a pair of small cannon, three pounders by the look of them, between each battalion. Six pieces in all. There were groups of horsemen, too, on the flanks of the infantry. A sensible formation. The taller
houses and a church spire of the town of Duleek could be made out a hundred yards or so behind, and to the right of the French position. Holcroft could make out the two low stone walls of the old bridge over the river, which was packed with jostling men and horses, struggling to get over the water and into the town and to make their way south to safety. Hundreds more, a vast multi-coloured crowd, were pushing forward urgently trying to get on to the bridge. This was the bottleneck.

  ‘The ground makes it very difficult for us to attack,’ said Wolseley. ‘My troops are almost entirely cavalry and they can’t gallop well over this soggy, treacherous ground. Worse than that, the horses won’t charge home into well-formed infantry. Certainly not infantry of the quality of the French Brigade. On the approach we would be mauled by their volleys; when we got close the horses would shy away from their bayonets. Those damned cannon batteries between the battalions would also cause havoc in our attacking squadrons.’

  ‘Where are our infantry?’ asked Holcroft.

  ‘Oh, they are coming up, fast as they can. King William is leading them himself, or so I’m told. But they are not here now and every minute we wait allows more of them to escape across the bridge. The Jacobite army will soon slip away, if we’re not careful and then this whole bloody mess will have to be fought all over again. And there hasn’t been a thing I can do about it – until now.’

  Holcroft was only half listening to Wolseley. He was scanning the three batteries of light artillery between the French battalions, looking at the faces of the gunners and their officers.

  ‘I said . . . until now, Captain Blood. You understand me?’

  ‘You wish me to bombard the French infantry, sir?’

  ‘I want you to soften them up so I can get my cavalry in amongst them. I would also like you to take out some of their gun batteries, if you can. I know you’ve only two small pieces but anything you do to weaken them will help.’

  Holcroft nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘It would be my pleasure, sir.’

  His glass was still scanning the faces of the men in the enemy batteries – and there! There was one he knew. In the central battery, the one nearest the Duleek bridge. It was Major Guillaume du Clos, late of his Most Christian Majesty’s Corps Royal d’Artillerie. Narrey’s henchman. And, in a time of battle, Du Clos was sure to be close to his master.

  Holcroft took the glass from his eye. He saluted Wolseley, and said: ‘We will set up on that patch of ground over there, sir, and begin as soon as we can.’

  He pointed to a slightly higher, flattish area of grass a dozen yards from the road and about four hundred yards from the French left flank.

  ‘I can give you an hour, Captain, to wreak as much damage as you can,’ said Wolseley. ‘Then I must send in my cavalry.’

  *

  The cannon ball screamed into the battery, clanging against the iron rim and exploding the big wooden spoked wheel in a thousand spinning shards, before skipping away behind the lines and splashing into the River Nanny. Major Guillaume du Clos took an involuntary leap backwards. He was no coward but three pounds of hot iron smashing into a bronze cannon beside your knee can have that effect on even the bravest souls.

  Du Clos took command of himself. One of the matrosses was down, his face torn apart by wooden splinters, and he was blubbering through the gore, probably dying. The cannon barrel was leaning drunkenly off the side of the carriage, the barrel pointing at the turf. The gun would not fire again – not unless a spare wheel was brought up and a competent carpenter found with the right tools to re-attach it. And that would not happen this day – the artillery equipment, all but a few dozen balls and a couple of barrels of powder and necessities, was far to the south by now on the road back to Dublin. They had what they had here and no more.

  The second cannon in the central battery – a three-pounder stationed a dozen yards from where he stood, and unharmed by the disastrous strike on its sister piece – was about to fire. Du Clos listened to the master gunner give the time-honoured commands. The crew stepped back, the match was brought forward, smouldering on its long pole. He covered his ears; the match touched the vent and the gun belched fire, rocking backwards on its wheeled carriage.

  He watched the flight of the ball – a faint streak of grey across the clear blue sky – and saw it bounce once on the spongy turf, twenty yards wide of the enemy battery – his God-damned battery, Blood’s battery – spraying a rainbow of water, leaping away like a salmon and harming no one.

  ‘Can none of you useless bastards shoot straight?’ he growled.

  The captain of the remaining gun, a veteran called Matthieu who was well into his sixth decade, wore a thick red woollen cap pulled low over his ears. He was, anyway, about three parts deaf after years of firing off his guns and gave no sign of having heard Du Clos’ insult. Guillaume was certain that the man had noted his slur but had not deigned . . . oh, so what? What did it matter? Matthieu might be a veteran gunner but he was still a poor marksman, and indeed, an incompetent old fool. Guillaume considered taking over the gun himself. He was certain he could do better. But, no. His duty lay elsewhere.

  The matrosse with the torn-up face was screaming like a soul in torment – which he would no doubt soon be – and his comrades were vainly trying to comfort him and keep him quiet, giving him cold water and soft words. The noise was deeply irritating. Why did they not cut his throat and be done with it?

  Major du Clos walked away from the battery, heading for his horse which was tied up to an alder bush twenty yards behind the last line of French musketeers in the neighbouring battalion. He left the battery without a word – what was there to say? They knew their duty. It was a pity they could not seem to accomplish it. He would seek out the Comte. There was only one surefire way of killing this pestilential English gunner – and that was with pistol or sword. This time he would run him through the heart, make sure he was dead.

  Major du Clos had been surprised to see, when he took out his glass half an hour ago, that the English officer commanding the two-gun enemy battery that had suddenly popped up on that grassy hillock a quarter of a mile away was in fact Captain Holcroft Blood. Alive. He felt sure that he had put a bullet through his head at Cavan – but he’d not checked to see he was dead. There had been enemies all around, savage Ulstermen in grey with a feral bloodlust in their eyes, and he had been forced to flee with the rest of the Duke of Berwick’s men.

  Perhaps the Englishman was protected by some dark witchcraft – he could easily believe it. He was a Protestant, after all, and therefore a damned heretic, which meant he was already halfway in league with the Devil. He would make sure of the man today. Blood had troubled his master for long enough.

  As he reached for his horse’s reins, he could hear the gun captain Matthieu going through the litany of reloading his piece, sponging out the barrel, recharging it with powder and ball – and then there was a far-off boom and gigantic clang, like a giant bell tolling the hour. He whipped round and saw that the enemy had struck again – so soon! – a direct hit on the half-loaded cannon, the second piece of the battery – smashing the long bronze barrel off its carriage. The gun crew were scattered away, bleeding, staggering, some lying dead or stunned. The screaming started . . .

  As he climbed into the saddle, he reflected that the man Blood might be a heretic but by God he could shoot! That battery had been fired at only four times in the space of fifteen minutes and already it was destroyed. He kicked his horse into a canter. Enough.

  *

  Holcroft was pleased with his gun crews. In no more than twenty-five minutes of hot work by his watch, they had put the two nearest batteries out of action – one in which he was sure he had seen Major du Clos directing the fire.

  ‘Concentrate your fire on the French battalions now, Enoch,’ he said to the ancient captain of the equally ancient Roaring Meg. ‘You take the one on the extreme right, I’ll take the one inside that. Let’s see if we can’t knock some of the impudence out of them befo
re Wolseley sends in his horse.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Enoch Jackson. ‘As the Good Book says: “We shall execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people”.’

  Holcroft’s mind went blank. Was that Genesis? No, it was . . . I have no idea. God, was this small memory loss the first sign of age? He played for time: ‘I’m not sure the French count as heathens,’ he said. ‘But punish ’em anyway.’

  Jackson frowned at him. ‘You’ve forgotten it, sir?’

  And then it came back to him – and with it a huge flood of relief. ‘Of course not, Enoch, how could I forget: Psalms chapter 149, verse seven!’

  Jackson nodded and turned back to the crew. ‘You heard the Captain, get the piece shifted. Jones, bring up that barrel, lively now . . .’

  The two guns were nicely warmed by now and the crews served them with a brisk efficiency that came of months, indeed years, of practising together. With the closest enemy guns out of action, they no longer faced the hazard of enemy counter-battery fire. The furthest two guns were partly screened by the French infantry formations, which were standing, the men in white uniforms still as statues in their ranks and files under their flapping banners. This last battery was about eight hundred yards away, and while easily within range of Holcroft’s guns, they were a more difficult target. The Ordnance officer’s reasoning was that he would do Wolseley a greater service if he could smash the structure of the battalions in front of him, and in front of the bridge, and allow his cavalry to ride through their ranks, slaughtering at will.

  Skill, enthusiasm and long familiarity allowed Holcroft’s crews to fire their two light cannon every five minutes – an unusually swift rate of fire. The balls crashed into the standing lines of Frenchmen, ploughing through the ranks and doing the most appalling destruction. A single cannon ball bouncing through a formed battalion could kill three or four men and wound half a dozen others.