1798

by Joe Murphy

  Here he flung a dagger glance towards Harvey, ‘The unfortunate fact of the strong position in which the garrison now finds itself, is, however, worthy of debate.’

  Harvey’s face settled into a petulant scowl and he muttered, ‘What are we to do, then?’

  The captains around the table exchanged questioning glances and John Kelly sat down, shaking his head and casting an exasperated glance toward Dan Banville sitting toward the far end of the table. Dan, for his part, shrugged and nodded in understanding. To his mind Bagenal Harvey’s authority was unravelling like a beggar’s shawl.

  At length John Henry Colclough pointedly cleared his throat.

  ‘Perhaps we should ask for the garrison’s surrender? Perhaps an emissary of some sort should be sent?’ he suggested.

  Dan felt a wave of nauseating despair sweep over him at these words and John Kelly sneered, ‘We saw what sending messengers did at Wexford. You’re awful fond of messengers, Mr Colclough. You and Edward Fitzgerald both.’

  Colclough bridled at this and said, his voice harsh with indignation, ‘How dare you, sir! Explain yourself Mr Kelly.’

  All around the room voices rose, some in agreement with Kelly, others shouting, ‘You go too far, John.’

  Dan Banville sighed and placed his head in his hands, his eyes closed, the rancour of the room washing over him.

  Harvey’s voice crested above the din, ‘Gentlemen, please. There is no need for this. Remember who our enemies are.’

  Gradually a taut silence fell and Harvey continued, ‘We shall have no more of this. We are here to spread liberty across our poor country and to overturn tyranny. Whatever antipathy exists between us as individuals must be set aside for the sake of our enterprise.’

  A low grumble of assent trundled around the table.

  Harvey nodded, the rolls of flesh at his chin bulging, and said, ‘We must decide a plan of action. We cannot simply fling ourselves pell-mell against a fortified town.’

  He paused for a moment before continuing, ‘I was not at any of our great victories so far. I was not at Oulart Hill or Enniscorthy. I was a prisoner when Wexford fell. Some might suggest that I am a diplomat, not a warrior, but I assure you my breast is filled with as much passion for the cause as any man here.’

  ‘No man doubts that,’ said Cloney.

  Harvey’s eyes flicked reflexively to the Bantry man and his face radiated a fleeting gratitude before he went on.

  ‘I will not make any pretence to knowledge of stratagems or tactics. I will not play at soldiers. So I open it up to those here amongst you who have soldiered and fought for Ireland or for liberty beneath a foreign flag. How might we take the town?’

  ‘The gates,’ Dan heard himself say. He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

  He found himself the focus of every stare in the room and he felt his face flush. John Kelly grinned at him and nodded for him to continue. Harvey gestured urgently, prompting, ‘Go on, Mr Banville.’

  Dan coughed and spoke as clearly as he could manage. ‘The three gates are vulnerable. We should detail a portion of our force, divided into three, to take them. There are no physical gates to close against us, so those gateways are simply holes in the wall. Once we hold the gates, the advance forces must pause and wait for reinforcements. Once the three divisions are in position we then move into the town simultaneously. I am not familiar with New Ross but the streets look narrow and winding. I fear this may well be a long and bloody fight. We will not take the town as easily as Enniscorthy.’

  The men around him were nodding consideringly and an officer Dan did not know asked, ‘We only need them to cross the bridge. Even if we can put a bit of a fright into them so that they retreat across the water, the Kilkenny boys will have them on the far side.’

  ‘Will this work?’ asked Harvey.

  Another man, John Boxwell, to whom the rebel artillery had been entrusted, answered, ‘It should work. If our forces can drive them onto the quays, they may take the route across the water to regroup or rally. At that point the town will be ours. It’s getting them across the bridge that might prove to be butcher’s work. They have cannon in those streets and I’ve seen the havoc that grapeshot can wreak at close quarters.’

  Harvey pursed his lips in thought and said, ‘Perhaps Mr Colclough’s idea for an emissary might be worthwhile. Bloodshed should be avoided at all costs, particularly if it might spill in such torrents as you men have implied.’

  John Kelly’s snort of derision made Dan wince. ‘If you think that a British general is going to surrender a walled town because we appeal to his better nature, you are sorely mistaken. A more sanguinary class of blackguards is yet to walk the face of the earth,’ he growled.

  ‘We must at least make the attempt, Mr Kelly,’ replied Harvey.

  There was a subtle harmonic in his voice that Dan did not like, a note of despair, of anguish. Dan could appreciate his commander’s concern for the lives of his men but the yearning to avoid violence that seemed so desperate in Harvey struck him as being too raw, too overwhelming. It was excessive.

  How could anything, let alone a nation, be birthed without blood?

  Yet, a murmur of assent buzzed about the table. The image of cannon in the street, of pikemen blasted apart by shot and shell, the prospect of a battle more fierce than any before, seemed to affect the officers deeply. The reality of the coming violence had weighed suddenly down upon the room.

  And, all at once, Dan was aware of how many of the gathered officers were newly arrived at Wexford Town. How many had faced redcoats as they lifted their muskets to fire? How many had felt the hot whipping of lead a hair’s breadth from their face?

  Dan knew now why he had been asked to stay with the Southern Division, and the terrible realisation of the inexperience, the callowness, around this room horrified him. Such vacillation appalled and terrified him in equal measure.

  ‘What terms should we offer?’ asked Colclough.

  Harvey rubbed one hand along his stubbled jaw before replying, ‘Unconditional surrender, of course. We shall allow them to leave the town with colours flying as befits an army undefeated in the field but anything other than a total surrender of the town and all its arms might suggest that we are in some way lukewarm about our prospects of victory.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Colclough. ‘Very insightful of you Mr Harvey.’

  Across from Dan, John Kelly closed his eyes and suppressed the urge to curse.

  At four o’clock in the morning, just as dawn crept into the eastern sky, young Matthew Furlong of Templescoby rode down the steep slope of Corbet Hill towards New Ross Town. In his breeches’ pocket he carried a letter drafted by Bagenal Harvey requesting the immediate surrender of the town and all its stores. His right hand was bunched about the reins of his mount and in his left he carried a white flag. On the slopes above him, the ranks of the United Irish Army watched him wend his way around outcrops of rock and between clusters of gorse, charting a sinuous course to the first of the bracelet of defences thrown out around the Three Bullet Gate.

  At the head of his new corps, trained and drilled over the past four days so that they at least knew how to march in order and fall from line into square, Dan Banville leaned forward and squinted into the lifting night.

  Dan could not imagine the thoughts that crawled through Furlong’s mind as the young man approached the lines of soldiery arrayed before him. He had answered Harvey’s request for a volunteer almost immediately and had seemed happy to play such an important role in what might very well be a bloodless victory. He had smiled before riding away, and there was something awful about the vista that made Dan want to retch.

  As the boy drew near the scimitar arc of disturbed soil which the soldiers had flung across the approaches to New Ross, it was clear that a frantic commotion commenced around the yawning maw of the Three Bullet Gate. Scrambling red coats swarmed and over the earthwork’s brow the black flecks of bicorns and tricorns floated above the pale dots of wat
ching faces.

  Young Furlong was a hundred yards from the town walls, his white flag stirring in the first fumble of a drowsy breeze, when the foremost trench hawked forth a spray of blue smoke. Like something made of clay, Furlong teetered and tumbled from the saddle, boneless and robbed of life. His body struck the ground at the same moment as the crack and rattle of the muskets struck the ears of those on Corbet Hill.

  The effect was immediate.

  A vast roar emanated from the rebel ranks, like the dull rushing of a tempest somehow with an animal howl. It was a noise of outrage and anger and fear all balled together and flung across the mile of empty ground separating the hill and the town. Pikes began to sway and shudder, and like a slow avalanche the thousands of furious rebels began to slip gradually down the slope, the lust for vengeance blistering through their veins.

  Dan spun on his heel and faced his corps, his sword drawn and his face pale. ‘Hold!’ he bellowed. ‘Hold!’

  All about frantic officers desperately tried to restrain their outraged men. Gradually, the rebel line steadied.

  Dan faced his men, his breath coming hard through clenched teeth, and growled, ‘We shall be on them soon enough. Now, though, we hold here until the order is given.’

  The men before him were waxen faced, their eyes burning. Horror and anger seethed in every inch of their bodies.

  ‘They shot him, Mr Banville,’ Seán Rouse exploded in disbelief. ‘He had a white flag and all and that shower of bastards shot him. How are we supposed to stand still and watch that happen, sure?’

  Dan smiled grimly, ‘They want us to come down. They want us to come on without discipline or order so they can cut us down with fire. When we turn to run then they’ll set the cavalry on us. We won’t oblige them, gentlemen. We hold and we follow our orders.’

  Rouse breathed hard through his nose, like a bull about to charge. But he held his ground, the fury in his face a perfect replica of those thousands around him.

  At the door of Talbot Hall a frenetic conversation was taking place between the senior rebel leaders. All were on horseback and all seemed as furious as their men. Harvey sat in the middle and slumped in his saddle like a broken puppet. Eventually the leaders split apart, leaving Harvey to remain sitting his horse, alone before the empty house.

  John Kelly rode to the head of his battalion, his huge frame towering in the saddle. His men, along with the companies under Thomas Cloney, were to take the Three Bullet Gate. To him would fall the task of revenging Matthew Furlong.

  John Boxwell was given command of the force to attack the Priory Gate, the southernmost entrance to New Ross, and he jogged his mount off to the left flank of the army. Dan watched him go with a sort of regret; Boxwell was an experienced soldier and artillery man and Dan would have liked to have been following him or Kelly into battle. Without an Edward Roche or Fr Murphy, Dan was beginning to feel rudderless in the plunging stream of events.

  He looked up as the man detailed to lead his own division brought his mount to heel on the slope to Dan’s right. John Henry Colclough sat his saddle with palpable unease. His green coat was buttoned to the neck and belted with a wide yellow sash. In his white-knuckled right hand he held a cavalry sabre as though it were an animal that might at any moment squirm free and bite him.

  Then, just as the sun heaved above the horizon, the shrill blast of a hunting horn came high and long and the three advance divisions of rebels moved like a landslide towards New Ross.

  Boxwell’s division swung immediately to the left whilst Kelly and Cloney marched their men with lethal single-mindedness towards the Three Bullet Gate below them. Colclough walked his horse forward, bearing slightly to the right, leading his companies out in an arc around the town to fall on the Market Gate, a mile and a half distant.

  Dan marched at the head of his hundred and twenty men but his eyes were fixed on Colclough. The rebel colonel swayed elegantly in the saddle yet the set of his shoulders was stiff and his head swivelled constantly to the left, flinging apprehensive glances at the town below.

  At the base of the hill the countryside was a mesh of ditches and hedgerows, the characteristic bocage of County Wexford. Around the base of the town walls however, the ditches had been hacked down and levelled to open up a killing ground, a hundred yards across which the rebels would have to run before being able to use their pikes.

  Seeing this, the men with Dan began to mutter apprehensively.

  ‘Steady boys,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We’ll be on them before they can blink. Falter now and we’re lost.’

  The muttering fell into a tense silence as Colclough led them out into the countryside, making for the narrow tongue of dusty road that licked out from the Market Gate. Behind the column, from the direction of the Three Bullet Gate, the first brittle crackling of muskets could be heard.

  Kelly must have hit home, thought Dan. All around him, however, the men of Colclough’s division were turning their heads towards the sound of battle, each face pale and branded with fear.

  Frowning, he sought to focus their thoughts, to hone the edge of their anger. ‘Listen!’ he called, ‘The Bantry boys are setting-to. Kelly will have young Matthew Furlong avenged before long!’

  Dan knew that the Castletown Corps or the Monaseed or any of the Northern Division would have shaken the heavens with a cheer at these words. They would have roared in defiance and joy that the men who had murdered a teenager under a flag of truce were being made pay in blood. He knew that Roche would have raised a huzzah or Fr Murphy would have roused his own men in response, urging them to emulate the men at the Three Bullet Gate.

  Yet from around him no cheer arose, and no call to action came from the lump of tallow that Colclough had become. There was only terror.

  ‘Mr Colclough!’ called Dan, feeling the slippage of events within him, feeling their fixity of purpose liquefy and slide away like fat in a fire. ‘You must say something – your men look to you, sir!’

  Colclough, his eyes starting and his lips so white they seemed rimed with frost, merely sat his mount and said nothing.

  And in that moment of inertia, as the sounds of gunfire intensified behind them and the first screams climbed the morning, the rebel column under John Henry Colclough began to disintegrate. Slowly at first and then with a terrible, inexorable momentum, the insurgents dropped their pikes and muskets and began to slip away through the fields.

  A voice came from behind Dan, Seán Rouse’s choppy sea-birthed vowels. ‘What do we do, Mr Banville?’ he asked.

  Turning, he saw that his own company had remained together while all around them their comrades were flooding away from the assault. Every man regarded Dan with sad-eyed loyalty. Looking at them with a slimy, sickening clot of dismay lodged in his throat, he replied, ‘We take New Ross.’

  Turning again he made to address Colclough, only to have the older man lean down from his saddle and thrust the handle of his cavalry sabre towards him. Dan stared at Colclough in shock as he said dolefully, ‘Take my sword Mr Banville. I am not worthy of it.’

  ‘Mr Colclough—’ he began, but Colclough’s shaken head silenced him. There was a dread, leaden aspect to the colonel’s bearing, a grotesque absence of vitality and spirit. He was a broken man.

  ‘Take my sword,’ he sighed. ‘I shall have no further use for it.’

  Dan lifted his arm and closed numb fingers about the proffered hilt.

  ‘I am sorry Mr Banville,’ Colclough said with an abstract and awful simplicity. ‘I have to go.’

  With that, he wheeled his mount and made after his men, following them into the obscure fields and hedgerows between New Ross and Wexford Town, vanishing in the sunlight.

  Dan stood for a moment, stunned, before a harsh eruption of jubilation brought him back to his senses. From the Market Gate, only four hundred yards distant, a series of joyous hurrahs sallied forth. The garrison was celebrating, relieved that a column numbering in the thousands had broken and run without a shot being fired.


  Furious now, Dan dashed Colclough’s sword to the ground and spun to face his own small corps who stood huddled together, terrified and exposed, a long musket shot from New Ross’s eastern wall.

  ‘What were you told?’ he snapped. ‘Group together like that and you make a bullseye for any man with a cannon. Form line.’

  Wordlessly, his men began to spread out into a long ragged line, their movements automatic, their faces a series of pale leather masks.

  Dan watched them, his mind boiling but his voice possessed of an arctic calm, and said, ‘Now lads. We are not in force enough to take the Market Gate on our own, but we can lend a hand to Kelly and Cloney. We shall join with them as quick as we can. The British commander in New Ross is no fool and as soon as he sees that our right flank has collapsed he’ll send out cavalry to sweep round and cut off our forward elements. We have to get back to the main body or we shall all be cut to pieces. Does everyone understand?’

  To a man the company nodded, some muttering, ‘Yes, Mr Banville.’ Rouse, as self-appointed drill sergeant, puffed out his chest with pride.

  ‘Right,’ said Dan. ‘In good order, we hurry back to the Three Bullet Gate.’

  They skirted along ditches and filed through gaps and stiles, following the rumpled terracotta of cattle tracks and sheep walks. He marched at the head of his men with all the confidence he could project but his mind was a quagmire of doubt and misgiving. How could Colclough had left two-thirds of the army behind? How could he abandon a struggle in which men fought and died, slipping away like a common thief?