by Joe Murphy
‘Hold!’ barked Roche as, behind him, the rebel troops began to move forward in response, eager to close the distance.
Dan grinned bloodlessly where he stood, tense, amidst the gunsmen. The prospect of the coming conflict was a cold barb inside of him. He watched the men around him strain with barely held enthusiasm, only anchored to their spot by Roche’s harsh tone. His chest ballooned with pride that this moment had come, that his fellow countrymen had risen against the barbarous usurper and now stood keenly awaiting the word to advance. When the French come, he thought, we will sweep all before us, the green flag shall float from shore to shore.
Tom, meanwhile, watched the same men and experienced the same eagerness for the fray as his brother. Yet his thoughts were different. He glanced at the ragged figures around him as they rocked on their heels, every fibre of their beings screaming for permission to charge forward, to remove themselves from under the grim threat of massed musketry. He glanced at them and thought that they were right and sensible. To close the distance and bring the pikes to bear was much better than sitting in the open where musket and cavalry might tear them to shreds. If he were an untrained farm labourer, he would desire to be out of the way of musket balls with as much fervency as the men about him were demonstrating now.
‘Hold,’ Roche repeated. ‘They wish us to advance without heed to the cavalry that they hold in reserve. If we move and become exposed, if we do not hold our discipline, the horses will ride us down. We hold and we wait. They will not intimidate us with their red coats and fools’ hats.’
For long minutes the two sides faced each other across three hundred yards of earth and wavering heat. In the air, butterflies whirled and waltzed like torn lace in the breeze.
It was the soldiers who faltered first.
Solomon Richards, his red cavalry coat blazing in the afternoon sunshine, its gold braiding a scintillating splash across its front, moved his men beyond the lines of Pounden’s infantry and drew them up in a broad front across the road. To a man, each cavalry trooper held his sabre in a gauntleted fist and each horse snorted and danced in the dust. Richards twisted the ends of his perfectly waxed moustache so that they curled like the blue-black wings of an insect, then raised his sword high above his head.
‘Ready?’ asked Dan
‘As I am ever likely to be,’ replied Tom.
The cavalry commenced a slow trot directly toward the rebel centre. The yeomen were unhurried, confident that the very sight of their horses and uniforms would be enough to make the insurgent rabble turn and flee in panic. When it was obvious that the herd of peasants was intent on standing its ground, at a word from Richards, the cavalry began to canter and then to gallop. Across the final hundred yards the cavalry thundered, the ground vibrating beneath the heavy hooves of a hundred snorting foxhunters. In their saddles the yeomen leaned forward, sabres outstretched, polished steel already questing for the soft flesh of neck or shoulder, the satisfying scrape of blade on bone.
For their part, the rebels stood, fear as much as duty keeping them in their ranks. If they ran now they would be hunted down and butchered like all those at Kilthomas, like the North Corks at Oulart, like so many innocent victims who had been chewed up and spat out by the conflict so far. They held their ground not through duty or loyalty but through chilling necessity.
Roche had dismounted and, accompanied by Fr John and Miles Byrne, had positioned himself to one side of the gunsmen. As the soldiers’ horses ploughed ever closer, the burly former yeo called out, his voice belling above the terrifying hammering of the hooves, ‘Hold, men of Wexford! Stand together!’
Then, as the horses came within half a musket shot, he roared, ‘Now boys! Let them have it!’
From the rebel ranks a disordered, loose volley chattered into the air, spitting forth a hundred individual splashes of flame and smoke. The insurgents had never before fired in a single concentrated mass; they had never before been asked to let off a volley in the manner of a real army. For them there was no disciplined single discharge, no one explosion of lead and smoke along the whole of their line. Instead each man picked a target and fired in his own time. The impression was one of ragged amateurism. Without the single intimidating boom of a trained regiment firing as one, the rebel volley seemed almost pathetic, as each musket yapped in isolated defiance and the cavalry bore down in a tidal rush of muscle and steel.
Yet, in spite of the tattered nature of their firing, some musket balls found their mark. Men were flung from their saddles and horses reared screaming in agony, pitching their riders to the ground. In spite of their discipline, in spite of their uniforms and fine horses, yeomen were lying dead in the dirt. And still the insurgent gunsmen kept up their rattling spray of ball and fire. More yeomen slumped in their saddles or clung, desperately wounded, onto their mounts’ necks.
After what seemed an age, the cavalry charge broke up, lost all momentum and, to the disbelief of rebel and soldier alike, stopped cold in its tracks. Solomon Richards, his face a gore-streaked mask where a ball had dug a furrow along one cheekbone, wheeled his men about and led them hurriedly back to the lines of infantry standing dumbfounded by the Duffry Gate. Here they regrouped and set themselves for another charge, striving terribly to ignore the jeers and whoops of the rebel column as its members celebrated their little victory, striving terribly to ignore the eight dead yeomen who lay sprawled and unmoving like clots of blood on the roadway.
Dan and Tom, in the midst of the mass of cheering rebels, breathed deeply and clapped each other on the back. The muskets in their hand were exhaling blue powder smoke from their bores, sending a thick stream into the brighter blue of the sky. All about them, their comrades’ faces were made indistinct by the reeking pall that had vomited from the column’s weapons. The stench of powder was thick in every breath and their ears still rang to the lethal percussion of their firing.
Edward Roche’s voice came through the fog of smoke with all the clarity of a hunting horn.
‘Look to the hedgerows!’ He shouted. ‘They are not beaten yet. Let us all push on and drive them into the town!’
At this, the rebel pikemen and musketeers leapt over or barged through the ditches to either side of the road, using them as a natural screen to prevent the cavalry charging again. As they drew closer to the infantry and the abruptly stymied cavalry, a Shelmalier man who had already managed to reload his long-barrelled strand gun took aim and blew one of Pounden’s foot troops into oblivion.
At the Duffry Gate, Captain Pounden was arguing with Richards, ‘What do you intend to do then? Sit here whilst they creep ever closer? You spend all year chasing foxes through heavier cover than that!’
The cavalry man was sitting his horse, stiff-backed and holding a handkerchief to his lacerated cheek. ‘We cannot charge men armed with pikes and guns when they are massed behind a wall of briar, Captain Pounden. It would be tantamount to suicide,’ retorted Richards.
Pounden was about to respond when the Shelmalier man’s bullet took one of his sergeants square between the eyes, punching into his brains with the sound of a spade biting into wet soil. The Enniscorthy Infantry stood in line, resolute and unflinching, but Pounden noticed that a few of his men were calico pale and that their eyes could not be drawn away from the sergeant’s corpse where it twitched grotesquely.
Pounden turned his back disdainfully on the battered cavalry corps and instead addressed his foot officers, ‘Gentlemen, have the men form two ranks and prepare to defend the passage into the town.’ Then he spoke to Richards once more, saying, ‘You can at least tell Cornock to come up with the Scarawalsh and cover our right.’
Richards saluted sullenly and sent one of his men galloping down the hill into the town.
Dan and Tom meanwhile had advanced with a large group of gunsmen to within musket shot of the infantry. Dan’s blood felt like ice in his veins as he raised his weapon and sighted along the barrel. This was the moment he had been waiting for all his life. As a boy, sittin
g at the fire listening to the old people tell stories of Cromwell’s massacres and the influx of his lackeys to take the land, he had fancied himself at the head of a victorious army of green. Now, here he was, kneeling in a ditch choked with nettles, feeling their needles sting him through shirt and stockings, a stolen musket braced against his shoulder. It was not quite how he had imagined it, but at its most fundamental, its most visceral, this moment felt right to him.
Tom crouched just behind his brother, his face intense and his eyes ablaze. He watched the line of infantry move forward and form two ranks facing the steadily approaching rebels. He would not die in this ditch, he vowed, face-down in nettles and tangled in briars. What was more, he would not allow Dan to die here either.
The steady lines of infantry now commenced a musketry duel, with the rebels hiding in the hedgerows and lying in the ditches across the dry swathe of open ground before the Duffry Gate. Within minutes, men were falling on both sides and Isaac Cornock’s detachment filed up the hill from the town and anchored Pounden’s right, their withering musketry adding to the hail of blistering lead.
Tom and Dan found themselves under a concerted barrage of musket balls. Men in front and behind them gasped and fell or screamed in agony as bones broke and flesh was punctured. Dan, to his consternation, actually felt a bullet fizz past his nose like some hideous droning wasp. Tom gripped him by the shoulder, yelling above the sound of gunfire, ‘We have to pull back from here. We can’t advance across that killing ground when their position is so advantageous.’
Dan nodded, his face wan and drained, ‘We may tell Fr Murphy or Roche. While the other detachments make their way around to the flanks we are being shot full of holes trying to get in the front door.’
Running in a low crouch, both brothers darted along the ditch and scrambled up into the road beside where Roche, Fr John and Byrne were huddled in conversation. About them was gathered a group of around ten or twelve pikemen, most of them Oulart men.
‘Miles!’ called Dan, unmindful of protocol or good manners. ‘We must break through those lines quickly or else go around them. The soldiers are winning this duel.’
The leaders all regarded the two Banvilles with momentary surprise before Fr Murphy smiled roguishly. ‘Have no fear, my son,’ he said. ‘The Lord provides for all things.’
With that he set off hurriedly into the mass of camp followers, closely followed by the group of pikemen.
‘If he expects to find a park of artillery in the middle of all those women and children, he will be sorely disappointed,’ grumbled Tom.
When Fr Murphy returned though, it was at the head of a much stranger sight than a row of cannon.
Tom stared on, astounded, whilst Dan felt a broad grin stretch his lips.
The women and children had parted as Fr Murphy strode through them and at his back, coaxed on by the small band of pikemen, thirty or forty of the youngest and wildest cattle lowed and bellowed in aggravation. When the priest drew level with the two Banvilles, he stepped to one side and let the pikemen goad their bovine charges forward along the road directly toward the lines of yeomanry. Bounded on both sides by thick hedgerows, the animals trotted in a great river of muscle and sinew as pikes prodded and slapped at them, urging them on.
Dan and Tom were regarding Fr Murphy with open and unabashed awe.
‘How did you ever dream of such a thing?’ Tom asked.
‘I am a student of history, my son,’ replied the priest. ‘It constantly surprises me the uses to which it can be put.’ He tapped his doming forehead with one index finger, ‘No knowledge is ever wasted, lads.’
Along the road toward the Duffry Gate, the rebel gunsmen who had remained in the open had moved aside in bafflement at the approach of the herd of cattle. The drovers behind now jabbed at the poor beasts with genuine force, the steel of the pikes darting into rumps and haunches and trickles of blood matting the hair of the slowest animals. The cows and bullocks were now roaring in genuine anger and their forward momentum was gaining the force of a stampede.
In front of them, the terrified yeomanry were directing all their fire at the looming wave of heavy, horned heads that bobbed and weaved in their frenzy to escape the sharp tormenting of their herders. The shot merely served to rankle the beasts further and only increased their panic and fear. On the cattle came, now running at full tilt, their massive weight an avalanche smashing into the infantry lines.
Captain John Pounden rose from where he knelt, distraught and cradling the mortally wounded body of his younger brother Joshua, shot through the chest by a rebel musket ball. He stood and faced the onslaught of the stampede as though he meant to absorb all of its violence into himself. Over the wide backs of the cattle he could see a mass of pikemen pressing forward, ready to sweep his men from the face of the earth. Pounden felt his mouth go dry as the first of the lowing animals barrelled into his carefully arranged defensive line. The yeoman infantry scattered to let the beast through but immediately another slab of meat and fury hammered home, this time flinging a soldier aside with a toss of its massive head. Like a river of boulders the herd of cattle swept through the redcoats and in its wake came the steel-edged flood of the pikemen. Behind his men the yeoman cavalry had dispersed, floundering in terror. Pounden stood for a moment as his men were seized by the same dread alarm, scattered and helpless as the rebels closed on them, screaming garbled battle cries, eyes wide with bloodlust.
Drawing his pistol, Captain John Pounden of the Enniscorthy Yeoman Infantry stood and prepared to sell his life dearly.
From a few hundred yards away Dan and Tom Banville watched the cattle stampede crash into the yeoman line. They watched the infantry hold for a moment in the face of the pikemen’s charge and then they watched the red-coated line collapse and break, the soldiers sprinting and tumbling down the hill as the wave of steel broke over them. As if the taking of the Duffry Gate had been some premeditated signal, the sound of fresh gunfire came crackling through the air and a cheer like a mounting gale carried over the thatched roofs on the western side of the town.
Dan nodded in satisfaction, ‘The flanking parties have hit home.’
Tom, however, was uneasy. ‘They are meeting with resistance by the sounds of it. I don’t doubt that there are reserves of men and supplies down in the town. I only hope that they don’t have cannon.’
Captain William Snowe of the North Corks sat his horse behind the bulwark of his men and surveyed the market square with an appalled air of wounded self-regard. If only he had cannon. He could not fathom how the rebels had driven in the defenders at the Duffry Gate and had, simultaneously, so easily outflanked the town. The stray cattle thundering through Enniscorthy’s narrow streets might explain how the infantry were overrun but nothing yet presented itself to explain the sheer gall and effrontery being offered by the insurgents. They were fighting as though possessed and, although hopelessly out-gunned and dying in droves, they would not concede defeat.
When news of the collapse of the defences at the Duffry Gate reached Snowe on the bridge he immediately marched the North Corks up into the market square to provide both a reserve for the men posted there and a counter to the rebels that he expected to see flooding down the main street. What he was not prepared for was that the western approaches to the town had also been overrun. Vicious and desperate assaults were being launched by the rebels against the barricades on his left as the smell of burning and a thin haze of smoke began to drift up into the square from the junction with Irish Street.
In front of him a vast band of insurgents had indeed stormed through the Duffry Gate and were now the target of sustained and deadly fire from the sharpshooters positioned at various market house windows. Rebels fell and writhed in the gutter but still their comrades came on. Doors were smashed open and carts were upended and used as cover by the peasant musketeers as they attempted to return fire. As Snowe watched, a high, third-storey window set into the brick facade of a tall town house, coughed forth in a glitterin
g spray of splintered glass. He looked on horrified as a red-coated soldier followed, his arms wind-milling and his despairing scream silenced as he crunched into the street below.
Snowe’s lip curled as, from the vacant and jagged-edged hole that was the window, a pike shaft extended, a length of green fabric tied to it in the manner of a flag or banner.
All about him, pandemonium reigned. The incessant flare and boom of musketry was deafening and, mingled with the screams of the dying and the wails of civilians, it lent the entire scene a hellish quality. The stink of black powder and the stench of punctured innards was a grotesque blanket through which the acrid tang of burning thatch was laced. From the direction of Irish Street the sound of firing coincided with the darkening of the smoke that now billowed in great rolling sheets across the square. The cavorting orange of towering flames licked above the roofs to his right. From the alley leading down to Irish Street a handful of yeomen stumbled, coughing, scattering like leaves in the wind.
Snowe regarded the scene for a moment with the cool detachment of a career military man. He saw the wooden barricade to his left erupt in a cloud of splinters as a rebel volley hammered into it. He saw nine of his own North Corks, positioned to bolster its defences, fall as the yeomanry began to retreat back into the square. He saw the Duffry United men spill like a wave towards him, each house being cleared of snipers by the gore-streaked efforts of the pikemen. To his right, Irish Street was an inferno, nothing could approach along it but neither would it afford an escape route.
Cursing under his breath, Snowe at last addressed the men formed up about him, ‘Fall back to the bridge. Enniscorthy is lost but we must hold the crossing and the road to Wexford Town.’