by Joe Murphy
With that he led the charge across the slope, unmindful of the whipping lead about his ears. Just behind him, Tom Banville led his Castletown men; even Jim Kehoe with his wounded arm, bellowing like a bullock as he ran.
Over the brow of the hill the main mass of Lake’s and General Dundas’s columns had concentrated their efforts in a determined assault upon the right flank of the insurgent line. Here Edward Fitzgerald and Anthony Perry had their hundreds of men lined up, ready to meet them. The two colonels were conspicuous as they marched up and down in front of their men, Fitzgerald in his bright green coat and Perry with his bandaged head, both exhorting their men to hold their ground and meet musket fire with heart and hand.
General Lake sat his horse in the midst of chaos and watched as men were torn apart all around him. He had known the rebels did not lack for heart but the desperation of their charges, the bravery of their efforts in the face of cannon and musket shot was a terrible and pathetic thing. On the jagged slopes of Vinegar Hill his artillery had wreaked a bloody harvest and churned earth blended with spilled blood, turning the ground into a bog of viscera.
General Dundas rode his horse beside him while in front, the Light Infantry, with its howitzer in tow like some ghoulish pet, hurried forward along a narrow laneway. Behind him Dundas’s brigades marched in deliberate parade-ground files. The noise was excruciating; the wild and savage battle-cries of the rebels almost indistinguishable from the screams of their dying. Bugles and drums rattled and blared and all was a confusion of smoke and clamour.
However, General Gerard Lake was a man of experience. He had seen battle before, although few had come close to this grotesque carnival. His troops were slowly advancing, throwing back desperate rebel assaults, bayoneting the traitors where they found them wounded and mewling in the fields and ditches. The croppies could not hope to stand against such concentrated fire and steel. Yet, here, and there where the peasants hit home, there was such a frenzy to their efforts, such a recklessness to their actions, that they carried all before them. Soldiers and militia were sent sprawling, fleeing or else transfixed by the rough, whetted steel of pike-heads and pitchforks. British screams commingled with Irish, their accents indistinguishable in torment, the gurgling slurp of dying breaths a universal and intimate language.
This was what caused Lake some measure of alarm and set the great, obsidian edifice of his conviction to totter. If the rebels could come to close quarters, if they broke through the ring of red surrounding them, if they should capture a park of artillery, then they had the numbers and audacity to confound his plans. Within himself, Lake felt his world balance on the edge of a cliff fathoms deep.
Beside him, Dundas turned in his saddle and yelled above the bark of musket and howitzer, above the clash of steel and wails of pain, ‘There is still no sign of General Needham, sir. The rebels may attempt to effect a retreat south towards Wexford Town!’
Lake lifted his hand to his jaw and trailed his fingers along its stubbled, horse-muzzle length. Needham’s continued absence was a bur beneath his skin. Inexplicably, he had failed to be in position at the commencement of the assault and now a gap yawned to the east and south through which a slim thread of hope might lead the rebels to safety. It was a gap that Lake was endeavouring to close before the traitors and Papist preachers who led this mass of peasants could discover it and escape.
Lake realised with a horrid start that he was not just irritated by Needham’s mistake, he was frightened by it.
The spectre of Yorktown seemed to suddenly float above Vinegar Hill on such vast skeins of batwing leather that it threatened to eclipse the world.
Lake swallowed thickly, his throat suddenly clogged, and made to answer Dundas.
And then the world turned upside down.
His horse’s scream cut through the surrounding din with such a piercing quality that it drove a spike into the ears of all those near it. Lake suddenly found himself lying flat on his back, his eyes staring vacantly at the grey clouds overhead. A lazy tissue of smoke trailed past his dumb gaze, languid and dislocated from the earthly chaos below.
As he lay there on the thin, damp soil of Vinegar Hill, General Gerard Lake could feel the unmistakable warmth of blood saturating his breeches. His thoughts came quickly, a skittering procession across the forefront of his mind, ohgodmylegstheyvetakenmylegsohgodmylegs.
As he lay there on the thin, damp soil of Vinegar Hill, General Gerard Lake was paralysed by terror, cold and breathless and primal.
Tom Banville and Miles Byrne brought their corps into position on the left side of the defensive line and were in time to join in the whoop of delight that fluttered across the hillside at the sight of General Lake tumbling from his horse. The cry of delight died as quickly as it had risen, however, for it was only the general’s poor horse that had been shot, its barrel belly opened by a cannonball. The man astride its back had been flung to the ground by the violence of the animal’s death and he lay there for long moments, stunned, drenched in his mount’s steaming gore. Nevertheless, even after the hours of death and destruction that had been visited upon them, a gust of laughter rushed through the rebel lines at the sight of Lake being hauled gracelessly to his feet and scurrying for safety behind the ranks of his infantry.
Fitzgerald then gave the order to charge and a thousand furious pikemen threw themselves down the slope only to be met by a firestorm of bullet and grape shot.
All around Tom, the Castletown Corps stumbled and fell. Men simply folded as they ran, crashing to the ground, boneless and spraying blood. And still the charge continued, even coming to blows with the redcoats at several points, but its momentum was stolen by the overwhelming ferocity of the soldiers’ gunfire. Reluctantly, the rebels first halted and then retreated back up the slope, dragging their wounded with them.
It was this that horrified Tom the most, the sheer amount of wounded. Men with limbs blown off, or ragged rents torn in stomach or chest, this face a disgusting swamp of gore, these eyes white and sightless.
How were they to get the wounded away? How could they prevent a massacre? Where were Edward Roche and his Shelmaliers? These thoughts jostled through Tom’s mind as he struggled back up the slope, supporting a grievously injured Castletown man on his left arm as he went.
Below, on the bridge arching over the Slaney, a stalemate had developed. Back and forth the battle ebbed, with the soldiers gradually gaining the upper hand. This was the case until Barker rushed forward to prevent a cannon from being positioned against his men and had his arm torn off for his trouble. Bearing their mutilated commander to the rear, the insurgents dug in and their tenacity, if anything, increased. With frenzied abandon they flung charge after charge back across the corpse-littered expanse of the bridge, howling defiance with every breath. Under the arches of the bridge the churning froth of the river began to run red.
For the moment the east bank held firm.
Unfortunately for the insurgent cause, the same was not true for the men on Vinegar Hill. Fitzgerald, Perry, Fr Murphy and Miles Byrne and Tom with them, were being pushed back across the summit. Gradually they retreated, blood-soaked field by blood-soaked field. Step by step, hauling wounded and dying with them, the rebel army made for the gap they knew existed in the circling mass of soldiers and artillery. Close by Beale’s barn and southward through Darby’s Gap, the insurgent troops broke and fled. Behind them, gaining rapidly, Lake’s troops raked the wounded with musket fire, and his cavalry rode down the women and children, who now scattered through the fields, as though they were hunting foxes.
In the middle of this retreat Tom Banville stooped and hoisted a bloodied Monaseed man to his feet and wondered where in Christ’s name Edward Roche had gotten to.
The first booming of the dawn assault on Enniscorthy and Vinegar Hill sounded like thunder to the men camped with Edward Roche at Garrylough. The house itself was reminiscent of the Banvilles’ former home, a large two-storey construction of brick and wood, its proportions gra
nd but not ostentatious. In its dooryard and stables, its parlours and kennels, Roche’s force of Shelmaliers now made it a military camp. He had nearly a thousand men assembled with him but it had taken the rebel commander far longer than he might have wished to get them all into the field. His men had marched for nearly two days gathering troops from around Shelmalier and South Ballaghkeen and they were exhausted. Most of the new men hailed from the coastal sloblands, sharpshooters, smugglers and poachers, their strand guns well-oiled and well-used.
Roche, lying in his own soft, four-poster bed for the first time in weeks, had stirred in his sleep at the first rumble of the storm to the north-west but had snapped wide awake, blinking and drawing a long shocked breath as Dan Banville barged into his room and snatched the sheets off him.
‘That’s cannon!’ Dan declared. ‘They are shelling the camp at Vinegar Hill as we rest here. Get on your feet, General!’
Roche shook his head and immediately began to fumble for his clothes. The night was a hollow of black. Exhaustion weighed upon him and every inch of his body seemed to ache from the exertions of the last few weeks of battle and hardship. Every year of his life now dragged at his limbs, his age finally taking its toll. Wearily, he pulled his shirt over his head and yanked on his breeches. Dan, an elemental thing dark as night itself, helped him by impatiently tossing him his boots and jacket.
In Roche’s eyes the young captain had changed immeasurably since they had parted company after the fall of Wexford Town. Something had frayed within him, some cord of sanity was close to breaking. There was an urgency about him, a frantic lust for activity that bordered on the surreal.
The loss of his young lady and the butchery he had borne witness to at Wexford bridge might provide an explanation, as might the news from Foulkesmills that they had garnered earlier that evening. After a closely fought battle only the personal intervention of Brigadier General Sir John Moore had swung the day in favour of the Crown. The Southern Division under Fr Philip Roche was in good order but in retreat towards Wexford Town. There was open talk amongst the leaders in the town of suing for terms from General Moore, who was, by all accounts, a humane and kind Scotsman.
For the Rising to have any last hope of succeeding, the battle looming at Vinegar Hill must be swung in favour of the United Irishmen. For the United men to have any bargaining position at all, they must throw Lake and his armies back into the midlands and back onto the quays of Dublin. To be caught between the forces of Lake and Moore was to be seized in a vice, one that would crush the life out of anything held in its cold jaws.
Dan, for his part, could not have known how accurately Edward Roche had gauged him. Elizabeth was an ever-present in his mind and the yearning for revenge flared and died, only to be reborn like an illness in his breast. The guilt he felt was a thing of constant, twisting agony. He had died that afternoon alongside Elizabeth as surely as if William Delaney’s blade had struck true and pierced his heart instead of hers.
There was another element, though, that Roche had overlooked. Tom was at Vinegar Hill. For Dan, all the war and sacrifice, the agony and upheaval since the yeos had come for him, simply could not end with the death of his brother as well. He had lost everything, and he would be damned before he added Tom to that list.
Now, with eyes glittering like pike-heads in the dim light drifting through Roche’s bedroom windows, he growled, ‘I’ll rouse the men, the sooner we march, the sooner we get there.’
That mad dash through the dark, rain-washed Wexford countryside remained with many of Roche’s men forever. The smells of damp clay and straining growth, the weeping drip-drip-drip of branches and leaves, beaded with water from the scudding showers that passed over, fleeting and chilling as apparitions. The moon, setting the edges of ragged clouds to glow as though coated with phosphorus, tumbled out of the rack only to hide itself again, cold and distant and bone-white. The men panted as they marched, Dan among them, their strides hurried and their faces set.
It was an hour from the moment Roche was disturbed in his slumber to when the column of Shelmaliers passed through the village of Ballymurn. The sun was rising by then and the world was cast in shades of steel and opal. Another hour from Ballymurn brought them to Oylegate, just south of Enniscorthy.
Long before that, however, they had come across the first refugees. Women and children, sick and wounded, all were bundled onto handcarts and stolen jaunting cars or piled in disorder onto wagons drawn by donkeys and slat-ribbed horses. All were in a panic, terror-struck and desperate to escape the onslaught of General Lake’s army. Just like at Wexford Bridge, the vulnerable were the first to feel the pain.
Roche and Dan spurred the men on, driving through the fugitive flood that slowed them infuriatingly, clutching at them and begging for protection. As though given new impetus by the human jetsam that swirled around them, as though the immediacy of their mission was newly reinforced by the sight of every crying child or wailing widow, the marksmen of Shelmalier and Ballaghkeen pressed on.
Then, as they drew closer to Vinegar Hill, the din of the battle grew loud in their ears and on the horizon a black veil of smoke drifted up, mingling with the tattered grey of the morning. Between Oylegate and Enniscorthy, just before Edermine, the first of the fighting men appeared, hastening away from the charnel house that was the valley under Vinegar Hill.
Dan stopped a bleeding figure, a lean man in his fifties, his face a sweat-slimed contortion of panic. Glancing over his shoulder, panting and frightened, the man told them that the town was lost and that the rebels were fighting a steady rearguard action along the quays to protect the men fleeing from the hill. The English had left a gap, he said, and thousands were streaming through it.
‘Save yourself,’ he finished. ‘The soldiers are shooting anything that moves.’
Dan looked from the terrified man to the smoke that bruised the sky to the north and replied stonily, ‘Do not concern yourself about me, sir. I have only one person more to lose in this life and I should sooner take my own than turn my back on him.’
The man blinked at him dumbly, then scurried off down the line of pike- and gunsmen, his actions frantic with terror. Dan watched coldly as he disappeared from view then pressed on, his eagerness seeming to drag Roche and the gasping column along in his wake.
A mile further on and casualties began to strew the road. The wounded, who could run no farther, lay in broken heaps, lining ditches and gullies. Horses lay also, their necks broken and their carts with women and children under them, either dead or dying in the road where the desperate haste of their flight had overturned the carts.
Still they marched until the sound of chattering muskets and ringing steel seemed to drown the world and more and more pike- and musketmen rushed past, their faces black with smoke or scabbed with wounds. Every figure was blood-stained and powder-scoured. The desperation in their movements was a terrifying thing to behold. Above and beyond this ragged flood of humanity, Vinegar Hill was swathed in tattered coils of gunsmoke. As Dan watched, a lazy shred of smoke withdrew from the hill’s summit and, tiny in the distance but clear as day, the green bough that had been lashed to the ruined windmill was torn down by red-coated forms.
All is lost, Dan thought. Lost utterly.
In the battered barrel of his chest he could feel what was left of his heart dissolve.
Then, without warning, the rearguard of the United Irish Army appeared on the rise just above the road. To Dan’s shock and to Roche and the Shelmalier’s delight, the men marched with grim discipline. They did not run. No panic fevered through their actions. Dan recognised Fr Murphy, mounted and haughty, at the head of this resolute little column and then, to a great cheer from the Shelmaliers, the men of the rearguard turned and fired in loose order on the red-coated infantry pursuing them. Ahead, on the road leading to the bridge, another group of insurgents retreated foot by foot, blazing away with their muskets, determined to keep the soldiers at bay.
Edward Roche spurred his horse
forward and wheeled it theatrically in front of his men.
‘This day,’ he bellowed above the gunfire and clash of steel, above the huzzahs and screams, ‘will live long in the annals of our poor country’s quest for liberty. And it is not done yet. The men of Shelmalier have still a part to play. Ready your muskets, my boys, for if the English have left this gap by which our brave fellows may escape, then we shall plug it against their pursuit.
‘Form ranks!’ he cried. ‘Cover the rearguard!’
The Shelmaliers immediately spread across the road and into the fields to their right, presenting a long line of crouching pikemen, behind which two rows of gunsmen stood and primed their long fowling pieces.
At this sight, both contingents of retreating rebels quickened their stride and were soon running at full tilt towards the newly-established defensive line. The soldiers sent up a great huzzah at this and began to pursue them pell-mell until they perceived the formidable hedge of pikes and guns that blocked the Wexford Road. Cheers dying in their throats, the soldiers halted.
As Fr Murphy trotted his horse past Edward Roche, he inclined his head slightly in a wordless expression of thanks.
Smiling grimly in the middle of the line of pikemen, Dan Banville did not notice the colours of the Castletown Corps come dashing down the hill to his right. He did not notice his old comrades as they slalomed between the guarding pikes and dashed down the road to safety. He did not notice the young man who stopped, stupefied, in front of the Shelmaliers with a look of the purest joy breaking across his features like dawn upon a golden shore.
‘Dan!’ Tom yelled, the syllable exploding from his throat like a sob.
The raw emotion in that voice brought Dan’s gaze up and he locked his eyes onto the beaming face of his brother.
‘Tom!’ he cried and then, heedless of the danger, he stepped forth into the no man’s land between the two armies and wrapped his arms around Tom’s shoulders.