The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  But the carriage remained, in which his father and himself had driven through Tobercurry, proud as peacocks, the master and the young master. It stood in the carriage house, cobwebbed, satinwood finish streaked with grime. He could stand before it and hear his father’s laughter, boisterous from the grave.

  When Ellen climbed the winding stairs to him an hour later, tray in hand, she found him standing transfixed, the spyglass lowered. She rested the tray upon the top of the low wall and took the glass from him.

  A long double column of men, some mounted but most on foot, was moving along the road. The head of the column had just passed the keep, and the rear stretched back towards Tobercurry. There were men in blue uniforms at the head and rear, but the men in the centre were clad in frieze which blended into the autumn fields on the far side of the road. Their pikes were sloped carelessly. Just as she lowered the glass to turn to Manning, a pipe began to play. She knew the tune well: O’Rorke’s march. It was a wisp of dream, moving across a familiar landscape, in plain daylight, beneath a copper sun.

  “They are passing us by, Ellen,” he said. “Thanks be to God, they are on their way to Collooney. That’s the way, lads, keep moving. There is a brisk tune for you. By God, would you listen to it? You’d think that fellow was gutting a sow.”

  The music floated towards them, encircled them.

  “There are two thousand of them if there is one. They would have ruined us utterly. Oh, by God, Ellen, have you ever seen so desperate a crew? They will eat their way through Sligo, famished Mayo men with no bottom to their bellies.”

  She held up the glass again, to see more clearly the green banner they were carrying, but the glass now was filmy with a mist of water. Only then did she know that she had begun to cry. Her tears, the music of the pipes, the faint beat of horses’ hooves, the forest of pikes, the long clump of moving frieze, blended together. She was filled with wonder and melancholy, and felt faint. She rested her hand on the battlement.

  Out from the plantation, across the meadow, two figures came running, scythes clutched in their hands. Manning tore the glass from her and pointed it towards them. “It’s the MacDermott boys,” he said. “Young Conor and what do they call the other one?”

  Brian, she wanted to say, but found that she could not speak.

  He leaned over the battlement and shouted. “Come back out of that. You MacDermotts! Are you mad, boys? You MacDermotts, come back out of that. Conor! Do you not hear me shouting to you! My God, is there no way to stop them?”

  The boys rested their scythes against the dressed stone of the demesne wall, scrambled over, then reached back and hauled over the scythes. A minute later they were indistinguishable in the sea of grey.

  “These bloody young fools,” he said, in a dull, even voice. “Poor MacDermott.”

  “Did you ever know,” she began, and then stopped, her voice shaking. Now he became aware of her tears, and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Young fellows like that,” he said, with rough confidence. “They drift into scrapes and drift out of them. Those two may be back in a few days.”

  “Did you ever know,” she said, “that in Tobercurry this place is never called Castle Harmony? MacDermott’s, they call it.”

  “I know that,” he said. “It is a sorry mess that history has made of the lot of us. Old wounds and old debts. God help us all.” He put the heel of his hand against the spyglass and pressed it shut.

  It was nightfall when they heard Crauford’s dragoons. A trumpet call, silver and abrupt, floated across the demesne wall, across the meadow, through the open windows of the drawing room. Manning, stockinged feet, waistcoat hanging loose, was sitting by the cold fireplace. Nubian slaves cut from onyx black as night supported the mantlepiece of white marble, pink-veined. Ranged on shelves behind him were tall volumes of Irish parliamentary papers, their pages uncut, leather bindings unoiled. A hasty cloth had wiped clean the room’s tables, but dust lay in corners, out of sight, beyond the candles’ glow.

  He sat upright when he heard the trumpet, and held his head cocked. It was not repeated. “What was it?” Ellen asked. He smiled without answering, and pulled on his mud-smeared boots.

  The evening was cool. The darkening sky was broken by the distant plantation, by the spindly, absurd gazebo, by the tower to his left across a courtyard strewn with hay and dung. The hole smashed into it by Ireton’s cannon was a black, yawning mouth. History clung to the tower, a disfigurement, like the ivy crawling along its flanks, the liverish splotches of lichen.

  The narrow stair twisted up the full height of the tower, from room to unused room, to the door which opened onto the battlement. The steps, wedge-shaped, had centuries before been worn smooth. Halfway up, he paused to look through the fletcher window. The demesne wall bisected the narrow aperture. Beyond it, a mass of scarlet in motion. He turned away and continued to climb. Whose feet? How many?

  Puffing, he rested his elbows on the wall and moved the spyglass towards the road. He had never before seen so many cavalry, the scarlet coats jogging, long sabres by horses’ flanks. Faces were indistinct. Heavy thighs. Stolid, secure in their purpose, they rode without haste. Scarlet and shining steel against the darkening green of summer’s long evening. A horse whinnied, a sergeant shouted. He put down the spyglass. Details vanished. Only grey wall, scarlet riders, green fields. A scarlet river flowed between wall and field.

  “Those are the English?” Her voice close behind him. He had not heard her climb the stair.

  “Some of them.”

  “Would they not be at the gallop, with the other ones hours and hours away?”

  “With the task they have in mind, there is no need for haste.”

  Beaters moving slowly across an autumn field, knee breeches starred by thistles; behind them came the hunters, weapons cradled in crooked arms.

  “There is a terrible fierce look to them,” she said.

  “Armies intend to be terrible,” Manning said. “It is their profession. Well, there you have the end of this lot. Tomorrow the infantry will be coming by, but they won’t stop, by the looks of things. Cavalry, infantry, artillery—for a proper army you need all three.”

  “Then the other poor fellows are no army at all,” she said at once. “Country lads on the hike is more like it. God spare them from all harm.”

  “He will not,” Manning said. He shot a sudden glance at her, understanding her emotion and yet puzzled by it. “He will not. Someday you can tell your grandnephews about this. History visits Tobercurry. Not for the first time, by God.”

  “There will be a terrible slaughter,” she said.

  “Someplace,” he said. “A terrible slaughter indeed. But not here. Let them find some Godforsaken bog to do their killing in. Let us go down now. It is turning chill.”

  As the last of the riders passed from view, their menace ended. They became phantasms, for all their heavy-muscled thighs, hoarse sergeant’s shouts. Jackets of blue or scarlet, clumsy peasants on the move— phantasms, all of them. Like this bloody tower with its open, deadly jaws. Reality was the house of choking dust, nagging account books, dunning letters from Dublin, her back curved towards him in sleep. The dust of their passing had resettled on the road. As if they had never been. A turbulence upon quiet roads, slaughter in a bog, in another man’s pasture. God’s curse upon them all.

  “What, Dick?”

  “It must be a profession free from care or strenuous labour—burning down a man’s crop, or hunting peasants with the King’s cavalry to serve as your beaters. They are welcome to their killings.”

  The air changed. Rooks cawed from the larch plantation. As a boy he had shot at them, using the special fowling piece his father had ordered from Nicholls of Exchequer Street, scrolls worked into the metal, a high polish on the dark stock. They stood side by side, the father stooping to guide his aim, steady his arm. “Pull!” his father shouted, always too soon, before he was ready. The gun exploded, pushing him back. Rooks fled from the trees
, screaming. Occasionally, he would bring one down, and his father would run to pick it up. Hump of black feathers, feebly stirring wing. That same plantation, darkening now. A father and a small boy, decades ago. He had never become a good shot. He had no one to teach. The sky was dark blue now, and the thick-leafed trees a heavy green turning black against it.

  The tower had been a Crusader’s castle to the small boy, to be held against Saracen and Turk, the fowling piece pointed towards the road. There had been no demesne wall then. Another of his father’s follies. The stone cut and dressed, set into place by masons from Sligo. His father supervised the work, leaning down from the glossy chestnut to give orders to the workmen. They would nod agreeably and then ignore him, dour and meticulous craftsmen, jaws hard as chisels. Manning, on his pony, trotted along beside his father, watching the strong, confident arm sweep arcs, settling the estate in time and order. He settled it, right enough.

  With a harvest like this one, he could hold on for another year, the cabins quiet, tucked safely away from history, pikeheads, trumpet calls. The stairs black as he climbed down, spiralling. He went slowly, the woman behind him, his hand held to the uneven stones, cold to the touch. Useless. A byre for cattle. Boys, the two of them. One playing at Crusaders and Turks, the other setting out his strident, useless wall. But the father had been so confident, bobbing his plump head to mason, architect, carriage-maker. In the courtyard, sunken flagstones held a shallow pool of stagnant water.

  FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,

  WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOTT

  IN OCTOBER, 1798

  From Tobercurry the Sligo road runs northeast, through the village of Collooney, towards which we now advanced at a good pace. It was most instructive to observe the effect of our progress upon the country people, for we had now entered a fairly populous region, hilly and yet with much good farmland. Cabins lay scattered before us as though a giant had flung them forth, low, mean dwellings, many of them, such as might be seen in Mayo, but many others were substantial and pleasing, their whitened walls reflecting the sun and their thatch in good repair.

  It was always known that we were approaching. Once I espied a young, bare-legged lad loping across fields to an outlying cabin: it was in some such manner, no doubt, that the news travelled before us. But perhaps the earth and the roots of trees know when an army is on the march. The people here, unlike those in Bellaghy, did not conceal themselves. They stood in the fields or beside their cabins, in a silence that could not be read. But a fair number cheered us, and shouted out greetings in hoarse Irish. And a few joined us—about fifty, I would judge—clambering down the slopes from hillside farms or walking heavily across pastures. Wordless, wonderstruck by their own foolhardiness or by the strangeness of the occasion, they fell in with the Irish troops. Several of them were among those who died a few miles farther on, at Collooney. Shaken loose from cabin and hearth fire, drawn to us by fathomless impulse, wonder or hatred or love of excitement, and then dead, after no more than stray converse with us. I hold in a more clear recollection those who stood watching us, silent, hands shielding eyes or hugging elbows.

  As they would know of our approach, so did we know that Crauford’s cavalry was in pursuit, a half-day’s ride behind us, never closing the distance, though ready to attack should we reverse our march. Our men, mounted or afoot, would turn their heads from time to time, as though expecting to see the first dragoons upon a rise of the road. But Humbert never turned his head, neither when a peasant slipped down to join us nor when the sergeants used the flats of their swords upon stragglers. He had a curious manner of summoning his subordinates—Sarrizen or Fontaine or Teeling—by holding out his arm and crooking his finger, as a man might summon hounds. And what were these two—Humbert and Crauford—but masters of hounds, and behind them all the Lakes and Cornwallises and Hoches and Buonapartes? At the time, we did not know the name of the cavalry commander who dogged our march. But I saw him later, after Ballinamuck, a tall, sandy-haired Scotsman with an abrupt, choleric manner. He had then the look of the successful huntsman, the quarry pulled down, the hounds with bloody muzzles. Yet Humbert’s expression, winning or losing, Castlebar or Ballinamuck, was stolid, large eyes stuck like raisins in his coarse, doughy face. Perhaps soldiering is merely a trade like any other, requiring only aptitude and opportunity, a calling which may provide equally for a laird’s son or a dealer in skins.

  We reached Collooney at eleven in the morning, and there we rested in the extensive orchards of the local landlord, who prudently kept himself barricaded within his fortified house, a sombre and bellicose building of the kind favoured by settler families in the early years of the century, when rapparee raids were still a danger. I felt a curious kinship for this man, whose face we never saw, although he most certainly was peering at us through the musket slits in the window guards. For his people and mine were one, settlers planted upon wide, hostile acres to protect as best they could the realm and their own lives. Generation by generation, that fear had receded, but it had never vanished. It lurked in phantasy and nightmare—an army of wild Papishes, cursing and plundering, waving barbaric weapons. Now this fellow was in there with his family and with domestic servants whom doubtless he mistrusted, and as he peered through the musket-slit the nightmare was made material. He could see the barnyards swept clean of every hen, goose, and turkey, cooking fires built in the pasture, could hear our men shouting to each other in their alien tongues, boisterous with the prospect of food and an hour’s rest. For all he knew, this was but preface to an attack upon the house, and he may well have been cursing himself that he had not abandoned his lands for the safety of Sligo.

  His people and mine. Our men. I look upon these quarrelling words as they are set down in the ledger which contains this narrative. It is within my mind that this quarrel rages, an untidy battle whose frontiers I cannot measure. For in the heel of the hunt, all plans, hopes, conspiracies, ideals blown sky-high, what have I become but a turncoat settler, in arms against my own people? The man in that house was no English general or statesman, no Cornwallis or Pitt. Neither was he a Dublin Castle hack, busy upon England’s work. He was, as I have since learned, a mere Mr. Oliver Adams, a simple man as blind and deaf to all politics as my father had been. At my trial I propose, if this is permitted, to make a simple and honest declaration of the principles which led me to join the Society of United Irishman and of the motives which prompted me to take up arms. Doubtless it will be accepted as either noble or impudent, in accordance with the sympathies of each auditor. But such a statement will have scant relation to my complexity of feelings that morning, on Mr. Adams’s land. May not political passion be a net which holds the heart distant from all that has nourished it?

  I do freely own, however, that my animal nature was happily nourished that morning by one of poor Mr. Adams’s hens, and for all that it was charred and undercooked, it was more delicious than any feast. Indeed, I drew a saturnine satisfaction from the reflexion that I had declined by insensible degrees from patriot to chicken thief. Not even my dear Judith’s romantic enthusiasm could touch with grandeur such a progress. I stood somewhat apart from the other officers, who were attended by two French privates, a consequence of revolution which Judith’s Rousseau had not anticipated, and at a considerable distance from the French and the Irish troops, who from the beginning of the campaign to its close remained separate from each other for reasons which extended well beyond language. Not that I attach blame to either party. Until a few years before, the Frenchmen had doubtless been peasants or artisans, but the machinery of warfare had transformed them into soldiers, and they wore their uniforms as though they had never had other garments upon their backs. The Irish seemed to them clumsy and ignorant barbarians, as indeed they were.

  It was while we were taking our ease at Mr. Adams’s expense that a small farmer rode into our encampment with word that a considerable body of British troops had advanced upon us from a northerly direction. His name, as he announced to us with
a flourish, was Michael Mor Gildea, but the epithet mor must have been given to him in jest, for he was a diminutive creature, bald now and of middle years. His horse was a sorry creature, fitted out, after the fashion of the peasantry, with a saddle of straw, although Gildea himself seemed a cut or two above the peasant, with a fair command of English. He was puffing with excitement, and spoke first to Randall MacDonnell, perhaps attracted by MacDonnell’s theatrical plume, but soon was led to Humbert and Teeling, and the rest of us drew close about them.

  From the slopes of his farm, he had watched troops moving from the direction of Sligo through Carriganat, which is a half-mile distant from Collooney. They were by now in possession of that town, which lay astride our march. He was a poor hand at estimating numbers, saying first that there were “thousands upon thousands,” and then “hundreds upon hundreds,” although he was most specific that they had dragged with them “a great, death-dealing cannon.” “Are these the soldiers who have been holding Sligo for the English King?” Teeling asked. He had to put the question a second time, for Gildea was staring with open amazement and curiosity at our encampment. And well he might, for our men had risen to their feet and were staring at him. They knew only that he had brought us information of some kind, but must have sensed from his manner that it was unpleasant. “ ’Tis from Sligo they are,” Gildea said; “I have told you that.” Teeling nodded, and said to Humbert, “From Sligo, through Ballisodare.” “Yes,” Sarrizen said, thin-lipped, addressing his words to Humbert, “from Sligo. And we are caught between the two of them now, like a walnut in a nutcracker.” “It is my impression, Colonel Sarrizen,” Teeling said, “that a French picket was posted on the Sligo road.” Humbert held out his arm, and then stood looking at Gildea without seeing him. “It is a fierce and savage army of heretics,” Gildea said. “In blood-red uniforms.” “Larger than this army?” Teeling asked. Gildea looked about him, baffled by the question. “He has moved out then from Sligo to meet us,” Humbert said. “He feels confident.” With Humbert, the enemy was always “he,” never, “they.” We imagined a dark mass of men, noise, violence, but he saw a commander, a man like himself but with luck less clever, less resourceful. “No doubt he has reason for confidence,” Sarrizen said.