1798

by Joe Murphy

  Roche frowned and said, ‘I will have some of my corps see to the safety of any prisoners not yet put to death, but the real substance of things is to the north of here. Perry and Fitzgerald need men within a day.’

  He paused then, his broad frame dark against the pearl sweep of the sky and the ragged iron of the river. He paused and surveyed the blood-swamped timbers of the bridge, the sobbing line of prisoners, the dozens of lacerated bodies bobbing like wet sacking in the water. A grim realisation seemed to grow within him and with lead in his voice he said, ‘This was bad business done here today, Dan. Any chance we may have had of reaching a settlement with Lake has been torn asunder by Dixon’s madness. It is liberty or death for any United leader after this, Dan. Liberty or death.’

  CHAPTER 24

  United in Blood

  Tom Banville awoke with a start. Night had fallen on Vinegar Hill some hours before and now the summer sky was an open maw out of which the black wind sobbed. All across the hillside campfires burned low into flaring embers, their light pulsing with the vagaries of the air as though possessed of a febrile life. Every man able to bear arms within ten miles had congregated throughout the evening of the 20th of June, thronging the slopes and packing the gutted town below. Refugees, fugitives from the predations of Lake’s military, had followed suit and again the motley thousands of families and relatives, wives and loved ones, swelled the numbers of the rebel host.

  Across the Slaney valley, in a wide scimitar of flickering orange, the fires of General Lake’s army arced from south-west to north-east. Thousands upon thousands of fires dotted the fields and pastures around Enniscorthy; the landscape was aflame, the countryside infested.

  Tom had been woken by the hollow sound of calling voices drifting up from the sentries stationed at the base of the hill. Shivering, he wrapped his trusty around himself, buttoning it tightly under his chin like a cloak. Yawning, he set off to see what the disturbance might be, threading his way between the slumbering hummocks of exhausted rebels.

  With his mind still fuddled from sleep and his tired eyes focusing on the rutted sheep walk in front of him, he almost collided with Miles Byrne stalking up the hill in the opposite direction. Byrne and his men had been fighting a rearguard action all day, skirmishing and withdrawing through the dense hedgerows, frustrating Lake’s vanguard as it marched. His return, and that of his men, was the evident source of excitement among the sentries.

  Realising it was Tom who had nearly blundered into him, he said bitterly, ‘I see they have dragged you here as well.’

  Shaking the woolly feeling from his mind, Tom fell into step beside Byrne, asking, ‘Where else was there to go, Miles?’

  Byrne was cold and tired and his voice sounded far older than his eighteen years, ‘I don’t doubt that we have to make a stand somewhere, but there are no defenses prepared. Scarcely anything has been done to make this hill formidable against the enemy. What in God’s name were the Enniscorthy lads doing for the past three weeks, besides slaughtering prisoners? Now our little army must be drawn up en masse and await the arrival of the English with their vast parks of artillery whilst we have but two six-pounders, a howitzer and scarcely a round of ammunition between them.’

  Tom smiled and a bleak sort of laugh clattered from his lips, ‘I agree. The English are in a hopeless position. They must surely surrender.’

  Byrne grinned in the dark, ‘I am glad you are here, Tom. I am only sorry your unfortunate brother is not by your side.’

  Tom was silent then, the mention of Dan opening even wider a raw wound that still gaped, not yet beginning to knit or heal. Both men walked quietly, wet grass and weeds drenching their boots.

  Eventually Tom said, ‘You are tired, Miles. My camp fire still has heat in it and you may want some rest before tomorrow’s excitement.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Byrne replied. ‘I was dreading the notion of making a cold camp beneath some dripping gorse.’

  General Lake, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s forces in Ireland, stood at the open flap of his tent and stared south-east across the two miles dark countryside to where Vinegar Hill stood, a black stain against the night sky. On its slopes and in the town at its granite foot, fires flung glimmers of orange and red which were immediately swallowed by the hungry wind. As Lake watched, a distant camp fire guttered and winked out of existence. He smiled grimly.

  Behind him, his field tent was brimming with the saffron light of half a dozen oil lamps and a hubbub of voices spilled out into the rain-scented dark. Around Lake, the voices of his soldiers raised in song carried on the wind, growing and fading like the groans of ghosts, half-heard and bodiless. He drew a long breath, as though to inhale the essence of his men’s exuberance, and the smells of mess-tins and cooking pots and the stink of open latrines coated his nose and throat. This was his centre; his place in the world was here, surrounded by the squalor of soldiers and the reek of their lives.

  And soldiers they were, he thought as he surveyed the dove-grey tents that disappeared away into the night like irregular rows of teeth. Line regiments and Royal Artillery. But he had had enough of the bloody yeomanry with their arrogance and complacency. Their ineptitude and incompetence. All he required to bring this country to heel were regular regiments and since they began pouring in from England through the ports of Dublin and Kingstown, he knew that he had gained the advantage. Now that these Wexford croppies had failed to break out of their own county they were done for as surely as a man with his neck on the executioner’s block.

  Yet what a close-run thing it had been! This thought disturbed more than anything else. It had been a matter of days, hours perhaps. Had the Wexford peasants captured New Ross, the entire south of Ireland might be in flames at this very moment. Had they captured Arklow, then the horrible vista of a horde of rebels marching on Dublin, on the capital, presented itself to his appalled imagination.

  Lake narrowed his hazel eyes against the gust and considered the forces under his command, spreading in a vast arc across shadowy fields and blackened, weeping ditches. General Henry Dundas who had put down the Rising in Kildare, Johnson’s battered battalions who had fought so gallantly at New Ross, Loftus, reinforced and eager for revenge after his men’s thrashing at Tubberneering, Needham marching south from Arklow, out there in the gloom somewhere between Enniscorthy and the sea. All veterans of this war; for as much as it galled him to say it, this was a war, with all its attendant baseness and brutality.

  Lake had been at Yorktown when it surrendered to the French and Continentals and as he stood on this patch of muddy sloping ground in the heart of County Wexford he found himself borne back to that moment seventeen years previous. Seventeen years and still the shame of that surrender curdled something in the pit of his stomach. Now, on England’s very doorstep, he was threatened with the very same circumstances. If he failed to crush the rebellion here, if twenty thousand soldiers, artillery and cavalry were beaten by a rag-bag rabble of farmers and bogmen, then Ireland was lost. If the French were to arrive before the croppies were put down then that grossest of horrors, a French invasion of Britain, opened out before him.

  His hand slipped down his jaw and every rasp of bristle communicated itself to him through the pink tips of his fingers. He had grown yielding in those seventeen years, he thought. At Yorktown, his hands had been callused, roughened through a soldier’s tough existence, his pride and vanity equally rough-hewn. For all his Harrow education, he had always possessed a burred and ragged edge to his being. Now, as promotion followed promotion and his purse became fatter and fatter, he had come to lose that bitter edge.

  When, he wondered, had his hands become so soft?

  Standing in the weeping cold of this damp Irish night he vowed to himself, promised the man he had been at Yorktown, that Vinegar Hill would not be another surrender. He could not allow himself to hand over another colony to traitors and allies of the French. He would drown the land in blood before accepting that fate.

  A polit
e cough from behind him spun him on his heel, his boots gouging shallow grooves in the earth. Captain Dalhousie was leaning through the opening of the field tent. Over his shoulder the interior of the tent was an amber cavern of lamplight and several officers were visible leaning over a map.

  ‘It is time, sir,’ Dalhousie said simply.

  Lake nodded once, silently, his face like flint.

  Tom and Miles Byrne had hardly been asleep for an hour when a series of great booming coughs rumbled across the Slaney valley. They sat up immediately, their hands fumbling for their weapons while all about them men struggled from under damp blankets, lurching to their feet to turn pale faces out into the crowding dark.

  Like a wave, a ripple of massive detonations roared in the distance, impossibly loud in the silence of the early morning. Beginning in the dim countryside to the left of where Tom and Miles stood, to the south-west of Enniscorthy, a cannon belched its violence beneath the cloud-clotted sky. Then, in a wide arc following the sickle of camp fires, cannon after cannon exploded in the night.

  Men started and women cried out at each report. Dogs barked and yelped around rebel camp fires and howled hauntingly in the streets of the shattered town below.

  Tom and Miles listened to the cannon, faces grim with resigned comprehension.

  ‘Their corps are signalling their positions in preparation for the attack,’ stated Byrne.

  Tom nodded, ‘It will come with the day.’

  Then, as the two young captains listened, an odd thing occurred that made them exchange startled, incredulous looks.

  With numbing, inexorable uniformity, the cannon signals reverberated in a whumping chain from south of Enniscorthy towards the Blackstairs and then back around to the north and east. And here it stopped. No guns sounded from the east or south-east of the rebel position. Only hollow silence came from over the ragged spine of Vinegar Hill, and in that silence there was a cause for hope.

  In the swamping dark, as men comforted their wives and children, as dogs howled and bayed, Miles Byrne smiled wolfishly.

  ‘They’ve left a gap,’ he said.

  The assault came as dawn broke on the longest day of the year 1798. The serried ranks of the rebel army were waiting for it, while the women and children, the aged and infirm, retreated across the southern slopes. Fr Murphy, Edward Fitzgerald and Anthony Perry held command of the various corps stationed on the hill itself, while down in the valley, William Barker and Fr Mogue Kearns led the defence of the blackened shell that was Enniscorthy Town.

  On the slopes of the grim eminence, louring blackly in the dawning, row upon row of pikemen moved in blocks of bristling weaponry. In spite of the numbers facing them, in spite of the guns that ringed them, the insurgents were in boisterous form. For all the days since Arklow, the Northern Division had failed to bait the redcoats and their officers into open battle. Now they had the chance to meet their foes once more in the field and not one believed that they could not best them as they had done so many times before. If the battle of Vinegar Hill was won, the back of the military in Ireland would be broken. The chains that bound for so many generations would burst. And so the pikemen waited with eager anticipation, willing the troops on while rebel musketeers positioned themselves behind ditches and husbanded their meagre stores of ammunition.

  Standing side by side on the north-western slope of the hill, Tom Banville and Miles Byrne watched the slow tide of soldiers seep through the fields and ditches. It was as though the countryside were bleeding, staining the ripening barley, the deep green of the meadows, with a creeping wash of red.

  Fr Murphy’s great voice bellowed in the morning light, ‘Steady, lads, this is the moment we fight or die!’

  Miles Byrne turned to Tom and asked, ‘Where are Roche and his Shelmaliers? We have a forest of pikes but very few guns. Where are his marksmen?’

  Tom’s gaze remained fixed on the advancing columns darkening the fields below as he replied, ‘He went south for reinforcements. I had assumed he had returned. If he doesn’t hurry, he will miss our great victory.’

  Byrne smiled wryly, his eyes now flashing from one detachment of redcoats to the next. ‘If the soldiers came but a little closer,’ he mused, ‘we could fall on them and cut them apart.’

  Unfortunately for Miles Byrne, General Gerard Lake was no mere militia commander. The regular army, the world of line regiments and cold assessments, rang in his blood. He had no intention of allowing the rebel pikemen to crash into his men to gut and hack and slaughter. He had read the reports, he had heard the stories of Oulart and Enniscorthy, The Three Rocks and Tubberneering, the desperate valour of Arklow and New Ross. The rabble on the slope and in the town before him did not lack for heart or intrepidity, and so he would not best them with heart or intrepidity.

  He would best them with cannon.

  Almost simultaneously from the west of Enniscorthy and the north of Vinegar Hill a shattering bombardment commenced.

  Barker and Kearns had their men take cover from the storm of shot and shell around the Duffry Gate, but on Vinegar Hill a terrible new weapon announced itself in a hail of fire and death.

  The insurgents were drawn up in tight ranks and as the cannon balls came skidding through the dawn, churning the ground as they skimmed across the ditches and fields, the rebels simply moved aside to let them pass. Occasionally a ball would crash home and a screaming man might lose an arm or leg but at distance the cannon were easily enough avoided. The pikemen moved slowly forward, waiting for their opportunity to strike, while on the lower slopes a musketry duel suddenly sprang to spitting life.

  And then Lake’s howitzers barked and from out of the sky tumbled black balls the size of human heads. These rained down onto the insurgent ranks like meteors but where they dropped the rebels scattered so that they thudded harmlessly into the damp soil of the hill’s slopes. Puzzled, the rebels converged about these strange, black lumps of hissing cast-iron.

  Then the first of the explosions happened.

  The heavy metal hail that seemed to harmlessly thump earthwards, ponderous and clumsy, now erupted in a shredding blast of gunpowder and shrapnel. The rebels clustered around the first few were blown to pieces before they could even voice a cry. Their corpses were mangled, the wounded scorched and bleeding amid the gorse and briar on the hill. Smoke began to billow across the sodden hillside, and within its murky folds the sudden, rosy flower of detonation after detonation blossomed and withered and the dull crump of the cannonade drowned out all but the wails of the dying.

  The other companies saw the danger now and ran hectically to avoid the blasts, flinging themselves flat upon the wet bracken in the hope that the flame and shrapnel might pass over them.

  A despairing cry went up, ragged and panicked, ‘They spit fire at us!’

  Midway down the slope, Tom ducked involuntarily as a corps of fifty pikemen was entirely consumed by a series of lethal blasts. Beside him, Miles Byrne roared over the clamour of the detonations and the screams of the wounded, ‘We shall be cut to pieces before we have a chance to engage!’

  Tom was afraid the young captain was correct, for under cover of the artillery barrage battalion after battalion of infantry advanced in line through the mantle of scrub and undergrowth that furred the base of Vinegar Hill. Every so often these lines would halt, discharge a tight, disciplined volley and advance once more, all the while encircling the beleaguered rebels more and more tightly.

  Realising the danger, Fr Murphy rallied a contingent of pikemen and threw himself and his men against a wall of red. The soldiers had time to fire off a single volley before the rebels were upon them. In disorder they fled away through the fields, leaving Fr Murphy’s men exposed in front of a park of artillery. Grape shot and shell poured into them and they were forced to withdraw behind trenches hastily prepared the night before.

  In Enniscorthy Town a tumultuous battle raged. Barker and Kearns’s defensive line had been smashed by the brutal power of the artillery and now vicious
hand-to-hand fighting waged between the charred and smoke-stained walls of the town. General Johnson’s cannon were being hauled laboriously down the narrow length of Main Street and a six-pounder was already in position in the Market Square. Barker, assessing the danger with all of his experience in service to the French, immediately ordered a counter attack and suddenly the gun was in rebel hands, its crew lying dead around it. Every street was raked with grape shot and musketry, every lane and alley became a choking defile, swimming with powder smoke.

  And yet, little by little, the insurgents under Barker were driven back to the Slaney, running oily and dark under the pall of smoke. Street by street they fought and died, funnelling towards the bridge and the only escape route left, the Wexford Road.

  For Tom Banville, standing with his Castletown Corps alongside the Monaseed men, the longer the battle continued the more frustrated he became. The artillery barrage had pinned the entire insurgent army back into a steadily shrinking arena. The pikemen were next to useless and the musketeers lining the lower slopes had been badly mauled by cannon and muskets.

  Then, abruptly, the cannonade ceased and from the massed ranks of redcoat infantry came the sound of fifes and drums. Over the shoulder of the hill, from the north-east, a sea-surge of a roar lifted into the sky. A people’s defiance filled the space between heaven and earth with echoing noise.

  Tom yelled to Byrne, ‘They’re pressing from the north and east!’

  Byrne grinned savagely and spun to face his Monaseed Corps, who had remained steady and unscathed throughout the artillery barrage. ‘Men of Monaseed!’ he called. ‘Now’s the time for pike work!’