by Angus Donald
When he was not harassing the enemy at their digging, and when the siege guns were playing on his stretch of wall, he spent much of the time cowering on the shuddering walkway, hugging the wall – even doing a bit of praying from time to time – as the enemy’s bombardment crashed again and again into the crumbling east wall. Three of his comrades had been wounded by flying shards of rock. One man had gone mad and, frothing at the mouth and stripping off all his clothing, had run back into the city never to be seen again.
More than half of the French troops – some three thousand men – had gone north to Galway to prepare for their departure, but two thousand of King Louis’ troops under the Marquis de Boisseleau, a veteran of the wars against the Dutch and an expert in all manner of siegecraft, remained behind in Limerick. General Alexandre de Boisseleau was one of the few brave souls in the Jacobite army – along with the irrepressible Patrick Sarsfield – who believed that the old city could be successfully defended, and the energetic Frenchman’s reward for arguing this point insistently with his superior officers was to be left behind and personally charged with Limerick’s defence. He had also been granted the title of Governor by the Duke of Tyrconnell, King James’s official representative in Ireland, just before that doddery old fool fled the city with General Lauzun and the slippery worm Henri, Comte d’Erloncourt.
Mercifully, the city of Limerick had not been stripped of all its fighting men by the departure of the three senior commanders. A total of fourteen thousand Irish and French infantry remained behind its battered walls, under the command of Boisseleau; and across the River Shannon in County Clare, General Sarsfield had command of some two thousand five hundred cavalry.
Limerick was not yet lost. And though they were badly outnumbered by their enemies – there were twenty-five thousand of King Billy’s men in a semi-circular sweep of trenches, redoubts and fortification to the east and south – they were still not fully surrounded. Nor were they cut off from supplies from the rest of Ireland, which came in thorough County Clare. And, best of all, it seemed the rains were coming, heralding the end of the campaign season.
*
The squall passed, and Hogan could feel the warmth of the returning sun on his wet shoulders. Mortars from one of the enemy batteries on Singland Hill opened up again – a strange distant coughing sound – and bombs arced up in the clearing sky and sailed down to explode in the streets of Irish Town or crash through tile roofs and detonate inside the walls of houses and workshops. The brunt of the enemy fire over the past few days had been absorbed by this southern part of Limerick, an area filled with shops, warehouses, manufactories, slaughter yards, taverns, pawn shops and the houses of the poorer citizens, which were connected by networks of narrow, filthy lanes.
In a while, the big siege guns would resume their work on widening the breach. They had already cracked open the ancient wall about seventy yards to Hogan’s right, a V-shaped hole had been blown in the mossy medieval stones, revealing a glimpse of the town inside to the enemy in their trenches, and tumbling down a rough staircase of rubble on the outside.
As Hogan watched, a pair of siege guns in Singland Hill gave a double bark, one gun firing an instant before the other, and the two sixteen-pound iron balls screamed through the air and cracked into Limerick’s wall a few feet apart on the northern side of the breach. There was a rumbling shower of stones and detritus, a thin plume of dust rising like smoke, and then a large section of the wall slowly peeled away and crashed into the outer ditch. From where Hogan was watching, the dust-wreathed breach seemed infinitely wider, like an invitingly open door. Welcome to Limerick, please do come in. A few more like that last and there’d be a gap you could drive a carriage though.
The English knew this as well as Hogan did. Even now, the raparee could see files of men coming forward, tall, blue-coated Dutchmen, the elite guards, he thought, as well as big-framed redcoats from the English regiments. These would be their grenadiers, he supposed, selected from the besieging battalions to make a Forlorn Hope. When the breach was deemed practicable, the great guns would cease again, and these veterans would surge forward in attack.
Another pair of enemy guns fired from Singland Hill; another double impact crack against the walls and a crumbling tumble of ancient stones.
The enemy were filing forward into the attack trenches, great snakes of men winding on through the trenches in red or blue coats, muskets slung over their shoulders, hats pulled over their eyes. It would certainly be today; he knew it. Today was the day they would make their grand attack.
He wondered if he should seek out an officer, maybe Paddy Sarsfield or someone else he knew well, and share this insight. But he decided against it. Alexandre de Boisseleau was no novice when it came to siege warfare. He knew where the breach was and probably to the very minute when it would be practicable. He was doubtless already anticipating a massed assault on this day and had made appropriate preparations. Besides, Hogan was no longer an officer. His task was to stand on the parapet, do his sworn duty and shoot straight when the attack came. Nothing more.
Another cannon ball – just one this time – cracked into the eastern wall, on the far side of the breach, another dusty shower of rock and grit cascaded into the ditch below. Not long, thought Hogan. Not long till the true contest begins.
*
Hogan heard the bells of St Mary’s Cathedral toll the hour. It was three o’clock, and he felt a great weight of relief float off his still-damp shoulders. This was the hour when his company – the second company of the Limerick Volunteers – was due to be relieved by a regular company of Irish Foot Guards on this section of the wall for the evening watch. He looked over his shoulder down at the narrow streets of Irish Town below him – there was no sign of the relieving company of redcoats, just the usual packs of scurrying civilians, haggard men, women and children who were trying to go about their daily business in the city amid the irregularly falling mortar bombs. One young woman was trying to sell mussels from a tray around her neck to a pair of slovenly, drunken dragoons, who were more interested in the charms of her person than her wares.
The Foot Guards would be along shortly, no doubt. But Hogan wished they would hurry. Looking out at the enemy trenches, he could see that the nearest ones were almost completely filled with men, Dutchmen in blue and Danes in yellow, English, too, in the red coats so similar to the Irish troops. He saw that the redcoats wore a sprig of green in their black hats to identify them to friend and foe alike. The cannon fire had grown in volume and regularity; and Hogan could feel every pounding strike against the wall through the soles of his boots.
There was a call from below, an Irish officer, and a company of His Majesty’s King James’s Foot Guards all around him. They were a smart lot, Hogan admitted, their redcoats brushed, their buttons shined, their blue breeches and stockings untarnished by mud and filth. Each man carried a long and heavy matchlock musket – there were no pikemen on wall duty – and a curved sword, and they looked as fierce a crew as any Hogan had seen.
As he and his colleagues filed meekly down the stone steps and into the street, Hogan nodded to the guards officer in a friendly way, but the man stared back coldly and turned away to urge his men briskly up on to the parapet.
The Volunteers’ company officer, Captain Paul Johns, a scarlet-cheeked drunk who had been a successful grain merchant in another life, muttered for them to hurry along the narrow street. He no doubt wished to get back to his bottles – and Hogan himself was thinking in terms of a swig or two of brandy, and something hot to eat, when he arrived back at his mean lodgings by the cathedral on the King’s Island. He suddenly realised that the English guns had stopped. The silence was oddly loud and eerie. He tried to think when he had last heard a cannon’s report. On the wall, he was sure of it, but not since.
‘Wait up, captain.’ Hogan seized Johns’ sleeve. ‘Just halt for a wee minute.’
The officer looked at him angrily. Hogan released the officer and lifted a hand for silence.
The men around him – apprentices, dockworkers, labourers, shopmen, civilians all – glared at him impatiently but they held their tongues.
‘We need to be getting along,’ said Johns.
‘Wait,’ said Hogan. Was he being foolish? No, all the signs were there.
He heard a gun, a small one, a Falcon or Saker, the kind used for giving signals. It fired once, then another fired a moment later, and then a third. Then all quiet. Then a sound of distant cheering, hundreds of men all shouting at once.
‘They are coming,’ Hogan said. ‘We must get back to the walls.’
‘The walls?’ said the captain. ‘No, our watch is over. We’re due a rest.’
‘Hear that?’ said Hogan. There was the distant popping of muskets, and the shouts and calls of many men. ‘The English are making their attack . . .’
‘You men!’ A man in blue and gold, with long black moustaches, was calling to them from the corner of the street ahead. ‘You men come with me. We must man the barricades with every musket. Look alive. Quickly!’
Hogan recognised Lieutenant-Colonel de Beaupré of the French Brigade, one of Governor Boisseleau’s arrogant young officers, a notorious fire-eater.
‘We’d best do what the colonel orders,’ said Hogan to Johns. The captain nodded sadly. He and the rest of the company began to jog after the Frenchman.
*
Governor Boisseleau had been most industrious over the past few days since the first serious cracks appeared in the crumbling east wall. He had ordered his men to clear the street behind that section, knocking down obstacles, pulling apart several sagging timber-and-turf hovels, demolishing a blacksmith’s forge and carting away the debris. He removed anything that might provide cover to the enemy and then sealed off the side streets with barricades of upturned wagons and carts, reinforcing the spaces between them with sacks filled with earth and baulks of timbers. The main route into Limerick he blocked with bricks and paving slabs and broken masonry from the wall, stacked chest high, along with heavy items of furniture and huge wine barrels filled with water. He placed cannon on the various barricades and manned them with Irish sailors from the port of Limerick who were used to working the guns at sea. Then he filled the barricades between the cannon with hundreds of musket men.
He had created a coupure – a secondary wall inside the section of the ancient city wall that was steadily being blasted apart. And between the breach and the new barricades, he cleared a broad expanse of ground inside the tumbled rubble of the wall, fifty yards deep and thirty wide – a killing zone.
King William’s Forlorn Hope – five hundred of his finest grenadiers from a dozen regiments and almost as many nations, roaring their challenges, shouting away their fears – came spilling out of their damp trenches, and began to run at the breach. They suffered a galling fire from the walls, where the musketeers of the Irish Foot Guards plied their lethal trade, shooting down from both sides into the charging grenadiers as fast as they could fire. Dozens of men dropped as bullets from above smashed into their blue and red and yellow bodies, falling and being trampled by their comrades’ boots as they rushed for the breach. But the grenadiers were brave men, they soaked up their punishment and surged forward, scrambling up the tumbled rubble outside the breach, some with flintlocks slung, using their bare hands to tear their way upwards, jostling each other, panting, a swarming tide of men, desperate to make it to the summit and through the twelve-yard-wide gap at the top and into the city.
Hogan, his body jammed against the wooden bed of an upturned hay wagon, his cheek against the iron rim of one of its wheels, looked on with awe as the wave of grenadiers crested the breach fifty yards away, a jumble of men in different uniforms, some blood streaked or bleeding, all looking as fearsome as devils. They brushed away the thin line of Irish redcoats behind the breach, shooting down their foes, slashing at them with swords, or merely batting the men aside with their musket butts. They began to spill down the inside of the rubble staircase, forty, sixty, now a hundred big men inside the bounds of Limerick. They roared like beasts as they came on, scenting victory, knowing they had done the hard, bloody part and made it through the city walls. Now came the slaughter and sack; now the people of Limerick and all their goods were at their mercy.
The first cannon belched flame a dozen yards to Hogan’s right. Loaded with ‘partridge’, the cannon sprayed the rubble slope with bullets in a wide cone like a giant fowling piece, cutting down swathes of grenadiers, smashing them back against the rocky staircase, severing limbs, crushing skulls, flensing the flesh from bones. Blood sprayed, the shrieks echoed round the killing zone.
‘Kill them! Kill them all!’ Colonel de Beaupré was shouting. Hogan put his carbine to his shoulder, then resting the barrel on a wheel spoke, he pulled back the cock, aimed briefly at the mass of staggering, slipping, blood-painted men on the slope and fired. His bullet cracked into the head of a Dutch blue-coat, blowing the skull apart and splashing the man next to him with his matter.
A hundred other muskets fired from the barricade at the same time, pelting the grenadiers with a lethal rain of lead. The enemy bodies danced and jerked like puppets under the onslaught. It was a miracle, to Hogan’s eyes, that any were left standing. But one man, a redcoat, stood tall at the bottom of the rubble slope, pulled a round black object from a bag at his side, touched it to a burning fuse and bowled it hard underarm towards the barricades. The grenade bounced once, bounced again, trailing smoke and exploded.
There was a flash of white and red and Hogan felt a hot wind knock him staggering back. A great section of the wagon bed was blown out, a jagged hole the size of a bucket remaining; two spokes from the wheel had disappeared, too. But Hogan was miraculously whole but for a tear in his coat at the shoulder. He stepped forward again and began unthinkingly to reload his carbine. He glanced up and saw the tall grenadier in the act of hurling another one of his grenades, when a pair of musket balls slammed into his chest and dropped him like a sack full of sand. The numbers of the enemy in the breach and on the slope seemed, bizarrely, to have swelled. And Hogan, as he snatched rapid glances between his carbine-loading actions, saw that many more men were surging up and over the breach, hundreds more enemies were appearing. It occurred to Hogan that the enemy could not see the carnage that was taking place inside the killing zone and was feeding more and more men into the meat-grinder inside the coupure.
Cannon and muskets were firing from both sides now as the barricades on the side streets joined in the slaughter. The noise was deafening. A cannon to Hogan’s left detonated massively, and wiped a dozen red-coated men from the face of the Earth. But more were spilling down the slope, now strewn with bodies and slick with blood. Hogan put the carbine to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. He did not wait to see if he had killed – he immediately set about reloading, biting the cartridge, priming the pan, pouring the powder down the barrel, spitting in the musket ball, ramming down the paper of the cartridge, aiming and firing. And again, not bothering to peer through the eggy-smelling smoke of his own firing and the men next to him. Reloading, aiming, firing. Repeat once more. The man to his left – one of the Volunteers – gave out a huge cry and fell back, half of his face missing. Hogan fired and began to reload.
When he paused to catch his breath, a gust of wind swept clear the smoke bank before him. He saw to his horror that the enemy had advanced into the killing zone, and were only twenty yards away. And still more were coming over the top of the breach. The enemy was committing all his strength to this little patch of blood-splashed Hell. Hogan shot a man in the chest and knocked him down but when he tried to reload he found that his carbine was now fouled, his wooden rammer would not penetrate more than halfway down the barrel.
There were enemy redcoats at his barricade, green sprigs in their hats marking them out – not that that was necessary; their enmity was plain from the ferocity with which they slashed and hacked at the wooden barrier with their swords, or pounded it with musket butts or tore gr
eedily with their bare hands, ripping out chairs, pulling away tables. Hogan felt the urge to run deep in his belly. These people were maniacs. Devils. He drew his cutlass and shoved the blade through the hole in the wagon and into a snarling redcoat’s stomach.
‘At them, push them back.’ Somewhere to Hogan’s right, Colonel de Beaupré was screaming: ‘Come on, you Irish, show yourselves to be men. Kill the English! Kill the bastards. Come with me!’
The cannon roared again and cleared a space in front of the barricade. Hogan saw Colonel de Beaupré clamber on to the top of the makeshift wall, his blue and gold uniform now powder-grimed and splashed with blood. He stood upright with the sword in his hand. ‘Come with me now, men of Limerick. Let us end this. Who is with me? For your faith. For your country! For Ireland!’ And the Frenchman punched his small-sword into the air and leapt down on to the far side, as the surge of enemies swept forwards to meet him.