The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Why do you think that Sarrizen is so anxious to engage the British?” he burst out passionately. “Because he loves battle? Not at all. It is because he is convinced, he and Fontaine, that it is hopeless. They want to see it all ended and make their surrender after a little flurry of arms for the sake of their reputations. Humbert is the only one of them who thinks that we have a chance.” His tone, flat and sardonic, as northern speech often seems, was withering.

  “And yourself?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and seemed to be looking through the darkness towards the men. “We have done well enough so far,” he said. “If we are reinforced in time. Or if the midlands rise. And if we can fight our way through to them.”

  “That is what Humbert believes?”

  He shrugged. “Do you think I know what he intends any more than Sarrizen does? Perhaps he is telling us the truth, perhaps he is trusting to luck and opportunity. That would be unfortunate. I have a suspicion that this is not a lucky campaign.” He could be brisk one minute, and the next set into a cold-clay melancholy.

  To lighten the mood, I said, “You have done a prodigious job of acquiring the style of these Frenchies. Did it take you long?”

  “About two years,” he said, taking the question seriously. “In taverns in Paris and encampments on the Rhine. Two wretched years. Humbert is a law of his own, though. He is playing his own game, and we are the pieces on his board. It seems to be our national fate.” He gave me a nod then, and walked away.

  It is most curious and disturbing to be moving with an army across one’s own countryside. Familiar names, Killala, Ballina, Castlebar, become targets to be shot at, walls to be knocked down. I found myself envying the French, for whom the names of our towns and mountains were barbarous, places to be taken to, to fight for, to stand guard over.

  The morning came clear and pale, the sky a most wonderful soft, light blue, across which stretched broken clouds, and the mountains, which had seemed so formidable behind rain or under darkness, now stretched away in their comfortable greens and browns, with dark patches of purple heather. It proved difficult to assemble the men in marching formation, for a number of bottles of whiskey had been carried out of Castlebar, and they had comforted themselves with these in the cold night. It was my task to assist Fontaine with the artillery pieces, and it was necessary to bully some of the men to their task. Add to this that they were wretchedly hungry, for they had few ready provisions save the potatoes which they had stuffed into their pockets before setting out. Whiskey and potatoes, the staples of Irish diet as depicted in hostile caricature.

  Humbert seemed everywhere at once. His anger when he heard of the drinking was inordinate, and he sent his sergeants on a sweep through the camp, seizing bottles and destroying them. Two men who were too far gone in drink to march were spread-eagled and whipped. I had never before seen men lashed, and it is a most dreadful spectacle, great gouts of blood leaping from their backs as though driven forth. They were then tied, bellies down, to one of the artillery horses and were taken off with us, and although their groans were most dreadful to hear, they had reason to be grateful, for had they been left behind to the mercy of Crauford’s dragoons, they would not have lasted out the day. Neither Crauford nor Lake was to show the least mercy towards any stragglers who fell into their hands, and I have heard it said that their line of march could be followed, a week later, by bodies hanging from trees or gables, which the villagers, whatever their sympathies, were too terrified to cut down. And yet we ourselves, as I have said, took no prisoners. I have become heartily cynical as to such phrases as honourable warfare and the rules of war. It is an ugly, cruel business.

  When we set off, however, we made a brave enough show, and I was once again moved to admiration of the French troops, in their compact lines of dark blue, moving across the face of Sligo like a sloop cutting its path across strange waters. They were less strange to me than my own countrymen, from whom I was also cut off by faith, language, traditions. Ulster or the midlands—whichever road we took, our destination was as remote to them as Tartary. Their lives had been lived in their own baronies, beneath familiar skies. An oath, administered at night in some dilapidated barn and dimly understood, had brought them here, upon this road. That they remained sufficiently in command of themselves I attribute to the spirit of their captains, and also, I am bound to admit, to the exhortations of Murphy, the Killala curate, a bloodthirsty bigot and yet most skilful as a stoker of martial fires. Owen MacCarthy, their bard and poet, was worse than useless in that task, for of those who had had recourse to whiskey courage, he was among the most assiduous, and I suspect that he escaped a lashing only because Humbert did not notice him. The peasants, of course, saw nothing wrong or harmful in his drunken condition: as a poet he was both above and below their respect. Faction fighter, jackpriest, poet and drunkard—such were their true leaders, for all that the rest of us bawled commands at them.

  At ten that morning we met and defeated a body of English troops, in what newspapers, I discover with amusement, have termed the battle of Tobercurry. It was in truth little more than a skirmish. General Taylor had sent forward from Sligo town to Tobercurry the Coolavin and the Leyney cavalries, under the command of a Major Knott. These seized the town and sallied forth, to encounter Randall MacDonnell and his horsemen. There was a brisk engagement, in which MacDonnell got the better of the day, and Knott and his men were sent clattering back to Sligo, leaving a handful of their dead upon the road. And yet in Tobercurry, as we discovered to our indignation, they had taken advantage of their few hours’ occupation to hang eleven of the townspeople, on the false grounds of their sympathy with the rebel cause. But in truth it was done to terrify all who might be tempted to join us or give us aid.

  Their bodies we cut down, and they were laid side by side. Murphy offered prayers for the repose of their souls, and Humbert stood hat in hand before them. By this time we had all of us seen men slain in battle, and a few hours earlier had been witness to bloody floggings, but this sombre spectacle was more dreadful, the fruits of a random and needless butchery. My mouth filled with the bitter taste of copper. The women of the village, their bare feet in the mud, pressed themselves against the dead, and gave voice to the fearful screams with which the dead are mourned in Ireland. Murphy began one of his atrocious harangues, holding aloft the heavy wooden crucifix which he carried with him, carved from bog oak by the piety of some peasant craftsman. His words poured out in a torrent of rude eloquence, and his listeners turned their faces towards him as though transfixed. Little knowledge of Irish was needed to follow his discourse. He saw our army, that improbable combination of bog-trotters and French conscripts, as God’s hammer, forged to batter down foreigners and heretics. It was to my eyes and ears a sacrilegious scene, this coarse-voiced hedge priest bellowing forth his imprecations and exhortations, with the stiffening bodies stretched before him as text, and the voices of the women providing him with a savage choir. Men leaning upon their pikes attended to his words as they might to a preacher enlarging upon a passage from Scripture, and indeed he put me in mind of a barefoot Israelite prophet breathing destruction upon his enemies. Between myself and Murphy’s makeshift congregation lay a gulf wide as the ocean.

  Tobercurry is a drab village, cabins and a few huckster’s shops facing each other, a small, tidy Protestant church at one end of the street (Protestant . . . Protestant . . . The word echoed through Murphy’s harangue, drawing to itself all of his venom) and at the other the gates of a derelict estate. There must be a hundred such villages in Ireland, and what have we ever known of their people? I had a fair knowledge of my own tenants and of the country people of Ballina. But Wolfe Tone, a Dublin barrister, knew nothing of such folk, nor Thomas Emmet, a university orator. How could we have supposed a connexion to exist between our ideas, city bred, and the passions of peasants? Theorems advanced in a Rathfarnham villa, beneath the cool, benign skies of a Dublin evening, are transformed by the airs of Connaught, country peopl
e hanged by indifferent dragoons, pikes piercing the horizon, an Irish-speaking priest bawling out his bloody sermons. I have sought to make this a narrative of events only, setting aside reflexions upon my own motives and state of mind. But I must add, for it has a bearing upon my understanding of these events, that here, in Tobercurry, I experienced a separation of being, a division between the man who acted and the man who observed. The church, its four spikes bright and sharp against the sky, the demesne gate hanging loose from its upper hinge, a cabin the colour of clotted cream, the dark green of a shop door, the pocked and rutted roadway, possessed for me at that moment a reality more vivid and more strenuous than the bedlam of surrounding voices. In a half hour’s time, at most, we would again be on the march, peasants inflamed by Murphy’s oratory and Frenchmen who had learned to take without question whatever order was given them. Somewhere, hidden by but a single range of blue, hazy hills, lay an army waiting for us to tire— colonels and equerries and secretaries. Beyond them in time lay, most probably, prison cells, courts-martial, gallows. And there I stood, dressed as for a morning’s business.

  As my mind filled with this sombre and troubling thought, which had somehow associated itself to the clarity with which I perceived the buildings about us, Humbert replaced his hat upon his head, and gave orders to his officers.

  Tobercurry, September 4

  The gates which Elliott took to be those of a derelict estate were the gates of Castle Harmony, lands which for the last fifteen years had lain beneath a winter’s snow of mortgages and legal papers. The main house, a simple, commodious building, had been erected by Josiah Manning, a Cromwellian settler, beside a Norman keep which now served as a byre. Richard Manning, the present proprietor, had that morning climbed the winding stair of the keep to its battlements, where he now stood with Ellen Kirwan, the countrywoman who cooked his meals and shared his bed.

  He had carried with him a brass spyglass which gave him a clear view of the road which ran from Tobercurry to Sligo, and brought to him, as a clump of dense grey, the village of Tobercurry itself. He had watched Knott move forward his cavalry along that road, and, hours later, had watched their retreat.

  “You had best come down and take something to eat,” Ellen said.

  He shook his head. “Bring up bread and meat to me here, Ellen, and a bowl of milk.”

  “Sure there is nothing for you to see but an old road that you know as well as you do the back of your hand.”

  “If you think that, you are as ignorant as you were the day God made you. There were British cavalry on that road this morning, and they went back to Sligo in great haste. If the rebels are anywhere at all in Ireland, they are in Tobercurry.” He rubbed his unshaven chin. “God’s curse upon them.”

  “God shield us from harm.”

  “He can if He wishes to, but I have never found Him very obliging.” He held the spyglass towards the village and then lowered it again. “Of all the hundreds of roads in Ireland, they had to choose the one that runs past Dick Manning’s lands.”

  “I will go down and get you your food. But I think you have little sense to be standing here all day. What good does it do?”

  “How could I not, woman?” He beat his fist against the battlement. “If one side of them doesn’t want our cows, the other will. They could end by fighting their damned battle on this farm and trampling flat the harvest. When your battles are written down in histories, devil the thought is paid to the poor bastard who provided a field for the occasion.”

  “Sure they will all be gone from here by evening, most likely.”

  “Is that your considered opinion, Miss Kirwan? Pray God it proves true.”

  “I wonder you are not out swaggering around with the yeoman cavalry, like the other gentry.”

  “I have all the battle I need keeping this estate out of the hands of the Dublin bankers, and keeping myself safe from your own saucy tongue. Much help was I ever given by the gentry of this country. The rebels can have it or the soldiers can have it, for all I care, provided they offer me a fair price.”

  “The rebels would pay naught,” Ellen said. “Wild murdering creatures from Mayo. ’Tis a shambles they will make of the poor village below.”

  Manning grunted. “Tobercurry, the Paris of the West. Mind you, my father had great hopes for it in his day. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to go bowling along in his carriage, with myself a little fellow beside him, past the shops and past the church and in through the gates. He was a man of great hopes and plans, my father.”

  “Usen’t I to see him myself?” Ellen asked. “I remember him atop that chestnut mare of his, with his topboots as shiny as the mare’s flank. He had the look of a lord to him, but a smile and a friendly word to every man or maid he met. Little thought had I then—” She broke off.

  “That you would be sharing a bed with the master’s son. No more had I, Ellen. No more had I. But here we are, the two of us, and we rattle along together well enough, the two of us.”

  “Dick, if there is a real danger to us from the rebels, should you not be mustering the tenants?”

  “Mustering the tenants, is it? And how the hell would I do that? To my knowledge there are no arms on this estate but some old fowling pieces, and two cases of pistols below in the hall. Let them all travel away out of Tobercurry, is all I ask. And I hope that there is no man on these lands fool enough to join with them.”

  “Last month there was great talk in the taverns about the rising, Pat Dogherty says.”

  “That is the time for such talk. Before it happens, when you have a bottle before you and four or five great dollops of whiskey inside your skin. It is sick with debt that we all are upon this estate, myself and every tenant. We will not be cured by rebels or British soldiers or yeoman cavalry.” He stood looking beyond the plantation of larches, across the meadow towards the road. She stood beside him, not moving from the battlement wall.

  “You are wondering, are you not, what would my father have done? I can tell you. He would be with the Coolavin Cavalry, and at the head of it most likely, on his mare, in a uniform of brilliant red, looking every inch the lord, with his loyal tenantry in shouting distance. Then let me tell you, Ellen, that I have not the few pounds it would take for that uniform, much less equip the tenants. Who was it, do you think, trussed us up with debts and mortgages? It is easy to live like a lord if you have an estate, and a son to stagger along under the burden of debts you have put upon him. When I sat beside him in the carriage, proud as a colt, it is little thought I had of his plans for me.”

  “Ach, sure, Dick, he must have meant everything for the best. You wanted for nothing.”

  “Indeed I did not. A gentleman scholar at Trinity, with a quarter’s allowance you could choke a horse with, and a card to Daly’s.” He laughed suddenly, a yelp of mirth. “By God, Ellen, do you know that I was a classmate of Wolfe Tone’s? I had forgotten that.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Who is he? Well may you ask. He is your saviour, and Ireland’s as well. It is Wolfe Tone who has sent an army of Frenchmen and a mob of Mayo peasants into Sligo. Little thought I had for him then, myself a landlord’s son, and him the son of a carriage-maker, shouting his head off in the debating society. An insignificant little scrawny fellow.”

  “A Catholic gentleman, was he?”

  “I think he was a Mohammedan, but he called himself a Protestant. But the wheels turn and turn, and there is now a rebel army in Tobercurry, and myself stuck up here like a gargoyle with a spyglass. It is an army on the run, Ellen, with British behind them and British before them. God’s curse upon the entire lot.”

  Mayo was red with rebellion, by all accounts, and perhaps the midlands as well. It was to the midlands that this lot should be marching, and not through Tobercurry to Sligo. Devil the Mayo harvest that would be saved this year. More Mayo gentlemen than one would have their estates go under the hammer, and off their tenants would go upon the cold winter roads of beggary. He would see them at h
is gates, if he survived himself, the shawled women asking for a sup for the little ones, and the men hanging back out of pride, gaunt men with cavernous cheeks. The pride would be buffeted out of them soon enough. And for what? In God’s name, for what? For the vanity of Wolfe Tone and the schoolmaster principles of Tom Emmet. The loss of this harvest would do him in, wipe him out completely. He would be a beggar himself, and with no practice at the trade.

  She put a hand on his arm. “Come on down out of this, Dick. Let you get a hot meal inside yourself.”

  He shook himself free. “I am all right where I am, Ellen. Get me the meat and bread if you’ve a mind to, and let me be.”

  He ran his hand along the stone. When was it this keep had been built? The fourteenth century or the fifteenth. The MacDermotts had held it in Cromwell’s day. There was still a MacDermott family in Tobercurry who claimed to be lords of the manor, so to speak. On the occasional Sunday, MacDermott father and MacDermott sons would walk up the avenue and stand before the keep, frieze-clad and bareheaded, like the shepherds placed before castles by engravers to show scale and proportion. History had brushed them aside. Masters one year and servants the next. Peasants forever. When the Cromwellian army moved west from Sligo, the MacDermotts had been blown out of their keep, quite literally. The yawning crater in the east wall was the work of Ireton’s artillery. Small wonder that Cromwell’s name still hung in the Irish air, an invincible giant clad in black armour, clanking in iron boots from county to county.

  And here stand I, Manning thought, inheritor of that conquest, sick at heart because other armies are moving along the same road. Faces flushed by candleflame in Daly’s gaming rooms, children, like himself, of Cromwell’s spawn, bank draughts written against the harvests of Munster and Connaught. Ellen Kirwan, taken by right of Cromwell’s conquest, peasant’s daughter brought gawky and long-legged into the big house, her legs spread to receive that ancient conquest, Ireton’s battering cannon. More wife than mistress now, fussing over him, reminding him to shave, knitting patiently by firelight as he worked and reworked the account books. Emblems of his father’s extravagance were spread before him—empty stables, their floors paved with flagstones from the cliffs of Moher, a summer house, a gazebo which the curious might climb and peer towards Sligo. What could be sold was long gone—the silver plate, the blue and white china with young lovers gazing over a wooden bridge at a limpid stream. All gone, knocked down by the auctioneer’s hammer to Baggot Street merchants and graziers from Roscommon.