by Joe Murphy
‘The yeomanry and magistrates have brought this down on themselves,’ Tom interjected. ‘If you had seen the manner in which the instruments of law and order went about their bloody business you would see from what well of bitterness those country men draw.’
Dan withdrew from his thorn-fringed window and eased himself down beside Elizabeth, wrapping her in his arms, before saying, ‘Any man accused of harming the people should be tried then and reason should be provided for their detention. To do otherwise is simple brigandage.’
Still with his back to Dan, Tom said, ‘Well, however you want to put it, that makes about thirty fine figures of the establishment now locked Beale’s Barn down toward the town.’
‘That many?’ asked Elizabeth.
Tom turned and nodded. ‘That many. I went down there after our dinner and they have them packed into the place and guarded by pikemen. A more miserable bunch of captives you could never hope to see. To a man they are blubbering and squealing like newborn pups.’
‘I am sure I would as well should I be in their position,’ said Elizabeth.
Dan smiled and kissed her on the forehead, ‘That is precisely why you are to remain as my wife for the foreseeable future.’
Elizabeth smiled up at him and kissed him tenderly on the lips.
Tom rolled his eyes and went back to studying the slope below, his gaze taking in the long chains of men snaking in from the surrounding farmland. In his mind he was calculating numbers and capabilities, counting flintlocks, sturdy pikes and arms fit to wield both. His considerations turned to the lack of cavalry, the absence of artillery and the fact that when the counter-attack came six thousand could never be enough.
Night was falling and the three companions were cushioned in the swaddling arms of sleep when a huge guttural roar woke them. The two Banvilles were scrabbling for their weapons before the tenor of the noise fully penetrated the fog of exhaustion. It was a mass of cheering, a hurricane of joy and delight as thousands of voices were raised and sent clamouring into the deepening dark.
Tom and Dan moved to crawl out into the open with an offended Elizabeth left behind; told to ‘Stay here’ by Dan in a tone that brooked no argument.
They picked their way through the camp, a mass of blankets and makeshift tents, camp fires now cooling to embers and the air permeated with the smells of firewood and eaten meals. Ahead of them, halfway up the slope, a great crowd had gathered. As they watched, more men and their families hurried towards it, swelling its numbers moment by moment. It was from this throng of people that the surge of euphoria had originated. Even now the multitudes of people were hurrahing and flocks of hats and sun-bonnets were being flung up into the night sky.
As the brothers approached, it was clear that the greater mass of the crowd was converged about the ragged stump of the ruined windmill. Dan and Tom pushed their way forward as best they could and craned their necks to better see what was occurring.
As Dan tried to get a better view, a rough, thick-skinned hand was extended before his face. They had halted beside a lichen-speckled boulder on which some peasants had positioned themselves to gain a better view of the mysterious spectacle. It was one of these men that now extended a hand to Dan.
‘I recognise you two from Oulart and the fighting down below in Enniscorthy,’ the man said. ‘Jump up here and have a look at this. I don’t know whether I should be cheering or praying.’
Dan looked at Tom, who shrugged and gestured to his brother to lead the way.
The Banvilles scrambled up beside the man, a slim, raw-boned fellow about thirty years of age, and wriggled in amongst his comrades. Before them, over the heads of the crowd, could be seen one of the most pathetic things either young man had ever witnessed.
In front of the shattered windmill, a band of rebels, pikes in hand, faced the cowering form of a corpulent, middle-aged man. The man was dressed in a shirt and breeches but was without jacket, stockings or shoes. His feet were bleeding from where he had been marched through briar and field and his balding head was a slimy ball of sweat. The expression on his face was one of absolute horror, his features a grey tombstone in a forgotten graveyard. In the dusk he wrung his hands together, bound as they were at the wrist, and bleated in sobbing desperation, ‘Not that, good sir, my wife gave me that before she passed. Please.’
Standing over him, two narrow-faced rebels were admiring a gold watch which spun and swung on its chain, suspended from one of their knuckled fists.
‘Now what,’ one rebel was saying in a tone that crawled with menace, ‘would you be wanting with a clock like this when you’ve no time left yourself?’
Then a voice came heavy and authoritative above the murmuring of the crowd, ‘Luke Byrne? Captain Thomas Dixon?’
The rebel spun on his heel, the gold watch disappearing as if by magic into the pocket of his breeches. The other rebel, Luke Byrne, hurried to one side, mingling with the other pikemen. Facing Dixon and his men, Edward Roche and Fr John Murphy had pushed through the crowd and now regarded the tableau before them with expressions of suspicion and anger.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ asked Murphy at last.
Dixon spat into the grass at his feet and then answered with bitterness infusing every syllable of his words. ‘This man is a tithe collector. He went about the county like a king, frightening the old and helpless, lining the pockets of the Orangemen and the tyrants. I don’t see how any true United Irishman could stand to have Protestant shites the likes of him at large in the countryside and up to mischief.’
He jabbed his pike toward the quailing prisoner, who whimpered and jumped back a yard at the gesture.
‘I’d say the oul’ bastard bleeds orange as well.’
At this, the majority of the gathered insurgents guffawed in a rough outburst of laughter. Dan and Tom, however, exchanged uneasy looks and Dan saw a number of others in the crowd frown in discomfiture and shuffle their feet.
Fr Murphy regarded Dixon coolly before saying, ‘You haven’t answered me. What do you intend to do?’
‘Do?’ asked Dixon. ‘Why, Father, we intend to put him down like the dog he his.’
As these words slithered from Dixon’s lips the old tithe collector collapsed onto his knees whilst a braying acclamation issued from Dixon’s followers in the gathered ranks. Luke Byrne cheered and shook his pike like a man possessed. Dixon smiled like a lurking river pike and Fr Murphy raised one hand, fist clenched and finger extended in trembling fury.
Edward Roche’s hand on his shoulder, heavy and cautioning, made the priest pause for a moment as the former yeomanry sergeant looked pointedly at the avid faces leering from the crowd.
‘One cannot,’ Roche began, ‘simply execute a man on a whim.’
‘Really?’ asked Dixon. ‘Says who?’
Exasperated now, Roche snapped, ‘Says all goodness and human decency! To have a man put to death without trial is to make the United Irishmen no better than the yeos. You are a captain of the United Irishmen for God’s sake. Do you wish to blacken our name, Mr Dixon? Do you wish to turn a fellowship of all men, equal and free, into a cesspool of bigotry, to turn a war of liberation into a religious vendetta?’
Dixon stared at the burly general before him, eyes hot as fever, as conflicting murmurs rippled through the watching multitude.
‘Very well,’ Dixon conceded at last, ‘we shall have him and others like him tried and sentenced. We can’t let their crimes go unpunished.’
He hawked again and spat a viscous clot of clinging green onto the ground between where he and the two rebel leaders faced each other. ‘We’ll keep the Orangeman in the windmill overnight,’ he said. ‘We don’t want him conferring with his fellows down in the barn.’
Roche frowned at this but taking into account the swarm of people pressing in all about he nodded slowly, giving some ground. ‘If harm should come to this man before his trial, then I shall hold you personally accountable Mr Dixon,’ he said at last. ‘You yourself shall be
tried by court martial and be shot at dawn. We are an army and we shall have discipline. Do you have me, Mr Dixon?’
Dixon grinned then, his lips drawing back from his teeth in a snarl. Dan thought he saw the man’s tongue lick across those teeth once, purple and glistening in the burgeoning dark.
‘Have you me, Mr Dixon?’ Roche repeated, his voice insistent, almost desperate in the face of the man’s hateful insolence.
‘Oh, I have you General,’ sneered Dixon. ‘I have you well.’
Standing on the boulder, looking across the shaggy heads of the revolutionary multitude, both Dan and Tom felt the tight coils of something evil tighten inside them.
‘I think perhaps,’ breathed the rebel beside them, ‘that I should be praying.’
The evening light found Lieutenant-Colonel Foote of the North Cork Militia sitting in a well appointed room on the second floor of a market house overlooking the Corn Market and Bullring of Wexford Town. With him, sitting in various chairs about the room were Edward Turner, Captain Le Hunte, Captain Snowe, and an old man, dressed in the slightly worsted and moth-eaten regimental coat of a line colonel. The old officer sat, a little uncomfortably, in the spongy nest of a velvet-upholstered armchair and sipped the glass of brandy in his hand. Long white moustaches drooped on either side of his mouth but his blue eyes were still bright and thoughtful in the lamplight.
‘What do you propose we do, Colonel Watson?’ asked Edward Turner, still pale from his shock at Oulart the day before.
The old man pursed his lips for a moment and then, in a voice so full of vigour that it belied his geriatric appearance, he said, ‘You can first either call me Jonas or Mr Watson. I am retired from the service these past ten years.’
‘And we thank you for lending us your expertise, Mr Watson,’ said Le Hunte. ‘We are sorry that present circumstance has pressed you back into that red coat.’
‘I thought to live here peacefully,’ answered Watson, swirling his brandy in its glass. ‘I thought to leave all this nonsense behind me in America. And what do I find? My new home goes up in the same flames of revolution I saw over there.’
He chuckled then, ‘Maybe it has something to do with me.’
Turner and Le Hunte laughed politely at this, but Foote was silent. The events at Oulart had disturbed him more than he had shown. Uniformed troops should not be beaten in the field so easily and so completely. He had known to be cautious, known to give the rabble the respect that their numbers and position had warranted and yet he had allowed poor Lombard to lead the attack. His men had advanced into the steel maw of a trap and had been wiped out. Wiped out by peasants and farmers.
The bodies of the men who had died had been retrieved earlier in the day and the lamentation of their wives and children still echoed and chased in the corridors of Foote’s mind. The bodies, bloated and teeming with flies, their blood a sepia crust in the heat, had sparked a frenzy amongst the loyalist population. The women howled in grief, hands reaching in plaintive yearning for a last touch of pike-pierced flesh. Over a hundred widows keened in the afternoon sun and Foote had stood and offered them nothing but platitudes.
Then at four o’clock, like the first portend of a coming holocaust, a dark finger of smoke curled above the horizon to the north. Men and women, soldiers and yeomen all hurried down to the docks and to the high points of the town. There, with expressions of fear and wonder blanching their features, they stared out in the direction of Enniscorthy. Within minutes of the smoke being seen the first of the fugitives from the burning town arrived across Wexford Bridge, followed closely by others coming in from Ferrycarrig. Consternation and terror was the dreadful freight they carried with them and it spread through Wexford like a plague. People had boarded ships and set sail for Wales, others had fled the town, riding in carts toward the fort at Duncannon; but in John Street, among the tanners and blacksmiths, an awful calm had descended, a calm that felt like anticipation.
Snowe, who had also remained silent, his face wan and his jacket still reeking of smoke and stained with the dust of his rapid retreat, now spoke.
‘These rebels,’ he began, ‘are no mean gang of bandits. They have substantial numbers and fight with determination, bravery and, though I hesitate to say it, no little organisation. There are brains at work here, gentlemen, and the sooner we realise that, the better off we shall all be.’
‘How many casualties did you inflict?’ asked Le Hunte. ‘Did you manage to thin out their numbers any?’
‘It is impossible to say,’ answered Snowe. ‘The smoke obscured much. I would estimate well over a hundred, for our muskets wreaked a terrible toll on them as they advanced up to our barricades. Had we a field gun or two I am sure we would have thrown them back.’
Foote’s voice came then, level and with all the weight of a coffin lid, ‘How many did you lose?’
‘Dead?’ asked Snowe, procrastinating.
‘Dead,’ answered Foote.
‘Over a hundred.’
‘Ye Gods,’ breathed Turner.
Snowe looked mortified and he awkwardly studied the glass of brandy that he held carefully in both curled palms.
In the sudden silence of the lamp-lit room, its heavy curtains and thick wallpaper muffling the sounds from the street outside, Foote exhaled sharply. His fist clenched and released as though in spasm as he said, ‘Over two hundred of my North Corks lie stretched and rotting in two days of battle with these rebels. Countless hundreds of loyal citizens are witless with panic. Kildare and Meath are still in uproar. This “nonsense”, as you so put it Mr Watson, could very well go the way of your campaign in the Americas unless we put a stop to it soon.’
Watson stroked the white curve of his moustache. ‘I have fought irregulars, Colonel Foote, and you are correct in that the King’s armies were forced to capitulate at Yorktown. But you cannot infer from the events in the colonies that this rebellion will succeed here in Ireland. The Americans were ably led by General Washington, were well armed and were assisted by the French army and fleet.’
He sipped his drink before continuing, ‘The most telling detail of all, though, was the sheer vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The American rebels had limitless numbers at their doorstep whereas our reinforcements were weeks away. This is not America, my good colonel. The rebels are badly armed, the entire might of the British Empire is no more than a day away and there are no French off the coast.’
‘Yet,’ said Le Hunte flatly, half-heartedly swirling his brandy.
Both Watson and Foote lanced him vicious looks.
Edward Turner coughed pointedly and asked, ‘So what is to be done, here and now? How do we end this nightmare?’
Watson shifted in his chair, his joints creaking, and said, ‘The very fact of our defeat at Yorktown is what will win the war for us in Ireland. General Lake, who, as you know, commands all of His Majesty’s forces on this island, was also at Yorktown. He will not allow his reputation to be irrevocably tarnished by another loss to revolutionaries. He will crush every rebel underfoot as you would a worm.
‘He will need time to muster his forces, however, and to deal with the insurgency around Dublin. It is this time that the rebels could very well use to their advantage.’
He cast another withering glance toward Le Hunte, who was studiously avoiding his gaze, and continued, ‘And as Mr Le Hunte has intimated, the French, should they sail, are only a day or two away as well.’
‘Do you suggest we take the fight to them?’ asked Turner.
At this Snowe looked up from where he was staring in abstraction at the floorboards. His face was suddenly anxious, a hunted expression scuttling across his features. ‘We have not the numbers to meet them in the field,’ he said a little too urgently.
Watson nodded and then addressed Foote, ‘How many men do we have in Wexford Town? Is this place defensible?’
Foote pursed his lips thoughtfully and then answered, ‘Including militia, yeomanry and civilian supplementaries, I have about a thousand m
en at arms.’
‘So you have a good-sized force at your disposal,’ said Watson. ‘What we are lacking is artillery and cavalry in any numbers. Without them, Captain Snowe is correct in his assessment that we cannot meet them in open battle.’
‘So we wait?’
‘We keep the men at their posts all night and we fortify the town as best we can,’ explained Watson. ‘And yes, we wait for aid from Dublin.’
‘I have also sent word to Colonel Maxwell at Duncannon,’ said Foote. ‘He and his Donegals should be arriving tonight or early in the morning.’
‘That is good,’ commended Watson. ‘But for him to arrive and be welcomed by a town still in government hands, we must see to it that the defenses are properly constructed and ably manned.’
‘John Street shall be barricaded,’ said Foote. ‘The old town walls will have men placed upon them and what cannon we have will be brought to bear on the approaches from Enniscorthy. Captain Boyd and the Wexford Yeoman Cavalry will patrol the hinterland.’
Watson frowned then, and the wrinkles about his eyes and mouth grew deeper and more pronounced. His face became craggy and hard and he asked, ‘Is there likely to be any uprising from within the town? Are there any individuals who should be placed in irons for the common good?’
Turner, some colour returning to his face as the alcohol heated his innards, answered, ‘Perceval’s clapped Bagenal Harvey, Edward Fitzgerald and John Henry Colclough in gaol on the strength of Anthony Perry’s information. As to the general populace of the town I have not perceived the least indication that they would side with the rebels. I would rather be of the opinion that the atmosphere is one of terror that they may succeed. I do not feel the croppies will gain much support from the good people of Wexford Town.’
‘That is good to hear,’ said Watson, downing the last dregs of his brandy. ‘Captain Snowe has related how these revolutionaries were hard-pressed to take stone buildings, stoutly defended, of which we have a plethora here in Wexford. I would wager that a force, even of six thousand, would dash itself to pieces assaulting this place unless they were equipped with artillery.’