BOB HAD SAT AND WATCHED marvels during his idle spring: a butterfly forcing its way out of a cocoon, and an apple-blossom burgeoning from a sticky green pod. Those two unfoldings had much in common with each other, and with something that happened in Bob’s soul during the next hours. The behavior of the Huguenot cavalrymen served as a model and source of inspiration. Not that Bob generally wanted such things, but his time in Ireland had left him pressed together and folded up inside a stiff dry husk that protected him but imprisoned him, too. The same was true of all the others. But the knowledge that St. Ruth was here had sent a dread-thrill running through the camp of the Huguenots and shocked them all alive. Bob had no idea who St. Ruth was or what he had done in Savoy, but it did not matter; the effect of it was that the Huguenots now suddenly perceived themselves as being in the thick of a story. It was not a King-story and might never be written down, but it was a good story to them.
Years ago Bob had gone deaf in one ear, and had put it down to standing close to guns. But then one day a barber had reached into that ear with a wee hook and wrenched out a bung of brown wax, hard as pine-wood, and just like that Bob could hear again—he could hear so well it almost hurt, and could sense things going on all round him with such definition that for the next day he had difficulty keeping his balance. On the 9th of May 1691, all of Bob’s senses came alive thusly, and his lungs filled with air for the first time since he had waded across the Boyne with Jacobite musket-balls taking bites out of his hat.
They struck camp and withdrew from Limerick altogether during the next fortnight, and marched with the sun on their backs to Mullingar, in the center of the island, where all of King William’s host was assembling. A few days after they arrived the trains of wagons began to come from Dublin in their clouds of dust and noise, bringing the great cannons and mortars that had been sent from the Tower of London.
On June 8th they marched west to Ballymore and easily took a little out-post there, and made prisoners of one of the best Irish regiments, which had been left exposed in the middle of nowhere for no reason.
On June 19th they reached Athlone, which bestrode the Shannon. It consisted of an English town on the Leinster side—which the Jacobites abandoned almost immediately—and an Irish city on the Connaught side—which they retreated into, and defended with unnerving ferocity for two weeks. Scouts were sent across the Shannon; most did not come back. The ones that did brought news that cascaded down the chain of command to Bob: General St. Ruth had brought his whole army to a camp west of the Irish town, just out of range of Ginkel’s Dutch cannon.
The battle of Athlone was straightforward and bloody: Ginkel’s artillerymen fired a cannonball a minute for ten days, and an avalanche of bombs and mortar-stones, across the river into the Irish town and completely destroyed it. Meanwhile his foot-soldiers tried again and again to force a crossing on the stone bridge joining the English to the Irish town. This was the only way of reaching the Connaught side of the Shannon, and everyone knew it. The Irish had destroyed one segment of the bridge. The gap would have to be closed with timbers. Under hellish covering fire of artillery, Ginkel’s troops would go there at night and try to throw beams across the gap while Irish snipers hidden in the ruins of Athlone pierced them with musket-balls. Then Irish troops would show equal bravery in going down and setting the timbers afire, or casting them into the Shannon.
The Irish won the battle of the bridge, but lost that of Athlone when two thousand of Ginkel’s troops forded the Shannon downstream on June 30th and forced their way into the Irish town.
St. Ruth thereby lost Athlone, and all of his troops who were trapped inside of its walls. The rules of Continental siege warfare were in effect, meaning that towns could hope for easy treatment if they surrendered but that resistance was to be punished by massacre. Bob’s chief worry, then, was that he would be given a direct order to go into Athlone and massacre someone. The only thing that would be worse would be if the victims turned out to be Mr. McCarthy’s company of foot-soldiers from Baron Youghal’s regiment. Mr. McCarthy was a Dublin candle-maker who had spent all of his money to raise and outfit a company, and made himself its captain. Along the way he had recruited Teague Partry, who had in turn recruited several other of Bob’s out-laws. Jack Shaftoe’s sons—Bob’s nephews—had gotten swept up in Regimental life, much as Jack and Bob had done at the same age. For all Bob knew, the boys might be carrying muskets now. So it was not out of all possibility that Bob might be obliged to swing a spadroon into the necks of his nephews during the mopping-up of Athlone. It was the sort of dilemma that might make a fellow anxious. Fortunately Bob had (as was his habit) imagined and anticipated the worst, and made up his mind in advance what he should do if it came to pass: He would excuse himself, declare himself Irish (easily enough done, as ’twas only a state of mind anyway), make the sign of the cross over his red-coated breast, and go running off into Connaught with the Partrys. He even had a sort of excuse worked out: He’d declare that the hag who’d brained him with the bottle in Limerick was his long-lost great-aunt. This scheme had the added advantage of getting him closer to Upnor. After the Jacobites had lost the war, he’d sign up with an Irish mercenary regiment and go campaigning on the Continent. If he picked the right time and place to desert, he could then simply walk to wherever Abigail was.
This plan actually seemed more attractive to him the more he considered it, and the more phantastickal refinements he added onto it. By the time he crossed that half-wrecked bridge into what had been the Irish side of Athlone, he was almost looking forward to finding whatever was left of Mr. McCarthy’s company, and surrendering to it.
What he did not want was to find them dead, or to see them being hunted down in the streets by the Danish horsemen, who had reverted to the ways of the Vikings. So his fondest hope and worst nightmare were separated by an infinitesimally slender distance.
But he found nothing in Athlone save dead or dying Irishmen buried in settling piles of rubble. Fortunately a good part of the civilian population of Athlone had already fled into Connaught. A small Irish garrison was trapped near the bridge and enthusiastically butchered by the Danish cavalry. However, the great bulk of St. Ruth’s force never even saw fighting, and remained safe in its camp. Ginkel spent several days getting his army across the river, which meant that St. Ruth could stage a leisurely and orderly retreat of his whole army toward the interior of Connaught, or indeed all the way to the port of Galway if he chose.
So Bob found himself in the fabled land of Connaught. No, it couldn’t be; this part was connected to Leinster and the rest of the damned island by that bridge, it was an excrescence of the bad, ruined Ireland into the good. And fortunately it was surrounded by a wall to prevent the contagions of the world from spreading. Irish Athlone was just a buboe, holding the plague pent up inside.
When they got the order to march out of its western gate, then they would enter the true Connaught that Teague Partry had sung of during his long raw watches on the Develin Tower.
“IT IS SUNDAY, the twelfth of July, Anno Domini sixteen hundred and ninety-one,” said Captain Barnes helpfully, shaking Bob’s shoulder. “The train has arrived; we expect a long march.”
Very faint pink light gleamed in jackets of dew that had formed on the cold pale stones all around. Bob exerted all his will not to close his eyes and go back to sleep.
They were still in Athlone, sleeping in a half-wrecked wool warehouse that stood on the road uphill from the bridge. Wheels were grinding on the ashlars of that road, drawn by hundreds of patient hooves that beat a lulling tattoo on the stones.
Ginkel’s army had marched out a day ago and left them behind to await a train of wagons from Dublin, and to make sure it got across the bridge safely. Today they would have to catch up with the army and, if that army was on the move, accomplish a second march as well.
When someone was trying to kill him and his men (which was not really all that often), Bob’s chief professional obligation was to think abou
t that. At all other times he thought about food. Treading carefully among sleeping men, he came to a place where he could look out through a bomb-hole and see orange flames fondling the bum of Black Betty, the company’s prize kettle, out in the court. There would be a sort of gruel boiling in it, with shreds of mutton flashing to the top occasionally, and an inch of grease floating on it. In other weathers a cloud of steam would be roiling from Black Betty’s mouth, but today she was surrounded and hemmed in by æons of fog proceeding out of the west, seemingly drawn by the feeble promise of the pink gloaming over Leinster. If any steam was coming out of Black Betty, it was like a fart in a whirlwind.
By the time Bob had groped his way to the coffee-pot and burnt his hands and lips on a tin cup of Mocha’s finest, the pink light that had greeted him earlier had been snuffed out by the progress of this fog. When he went about nudging men awake, they were all certain it must be midnight, and not dawn as Bob earnestly claimed.
Connaught would not let go of her mysteries easily, then. By the time they fell in with the regiment, chasing the customary, hideous screams of sergeants through the gloom, a kind of profound blue-gray light had begun to emanate from the fog: light without warmth or even the colors that made men remember warmth. There was a lot of bumping into other companies in rubble-congested streets, and standing still for no discernible reason, and then at last a gate materialized around them and they understood that the regiment was forcing its way through a bottleneck. They marched out of Athlone and left its unburied dead to the flies—for only flies could reach the ones who lay in the cellars of the fallen-in buildings.
Immediately the road began to fork and fork again, offering passages to Roscommon, Tuam, Athleag, or Killimor. Bob gazed down every one of those tracks with frank longing. But young officers on horseback were posted at every turning to ensure that the regiment, and the wagon-train, did not stray in the fog.
They marched on the high road, the road west toward Galway. Everything about the conduct of the operation said to Bob that it would be a long trudge with no objective other than to put distance behind them, and no prospect of actual fighting. But late in the morning—or so he guessed from the color of the fog, which had taken on a brassy shimmer, like a counterfeit guinea—he heard musket-fire far off.
It could not be his regiment. It must be some other battalion of Ginkel’s main army. So Ginkel had not marched on ahead of them at all. He had done a day’s march and then stopped. And from the sound of those muskets it was clear why: St. Ruth had only retreated a few miles down the road from Athlone.
They joined in with another column, marched for a mile, and crossed a river at a place called Ballinasloe. Immediately the rope of men and beasts raveled and frayed into a wide mess, each strand pursuing a different course. This would only occur if they had butted up against the army of St. Ruth, and were spreading out to form a battle-front.
Lone cavaliers dashed from left to right and right to left, wearing the colors of Brandenburgish, Danish, Huguenot, or Dutch cavalry regiments; these were engaged in the supremely important tasks of finding the ends of the line. The great bodies of soldiers were still proceeding towards the front, occasionally crossing over each other’s paths, but more and more often moving along parallel courses. The fog shone more brightly to their left, which suggested that they were going generally westwards. Bob’s left knee was hurting rather more than his right one—not only were they moving down-slope, but the ground on the right, toward the Ballinasloe road, was higher.
They’d seen no sign of the Jacobite army other than a few Irishmen hanged by the necks from tree-limbs along the road, presumably for desertion. But as they worked their way down from the road they did come upon a dead horse from Patrick Sarsfield’s Irish cavalry regiment, which was still warm and steaming. It was in a field, or rather, an expanse of disturbed soil. Every patch of dirt in Ireland bore the marks of desperate soldiers who had pawed through it in search of potatoes that might’ve been overlooked by other, slightly less desperate fellows. This horse had broken its leg stepping into a hole where some lucky man had struck a jackpot. Its rider had put it down with a pistol-ball to the brain and limped away on a pair of French-style boots in good repair. Bob followed the boot-prints, and his men followed him, until a mounted Dutch officer—one of de Zwolle’s aides—coalesced out of the fog, ordered them to abandon this pursuit, and signalled that they should form up into a line. And a good thing, too, as the ground had been getting soupier, and they were very nearly down in a bog by this point.
Now that all burdens had been thrown down and the commotion of the march had ceased, Bob found that he could hear for a great distance. In fact, he was convinced that they had mistakenly set up only a stone’s throw from the enemy. But the sound came and went with the sluggish convolutions of the fog, telling him that it was only a trick played on his ears by the queerness of the air, and further evidence that Connaught was a realm of mischievous færies.
Setting aside eldritch deceptions, and listening patiently whilst smoking his way through three pipe-bowls of tobacco, and (above all) thanking that barber for having drawn the wax out of his ear, Bob collected the following:
That there was a bog before them, much broader than he had supposed at first, perhaps half a mile from this side to the other. That water stood, rather than ran, at its bottom. That it was occupied by the enemy, but not heavily; it was not a position to be held, but an obstacle to slow down the onslaught of the Protestant legions. Beyond it, however, the ground rose up again, in some places to heights that would command the whole battlefield. The great bulk of the Jacobites were there, working with picks and shovels in reasonably dry ground (the implements bit rather than splashed). When a breeze finally came up, it became possible to hear canvas flapping. They had not taken their tents down yet; they had no thought of retreating. To the north and the south—that is to say, on the wings—were the cavalry. By process of elimination, infantry was in the center.
The Irish foot did not have the equipment or the training to form itself up into pike-squares and so were defenseless against horse. Therefore St. Ruth would only put them where cavalry could not go. It followed that the bog must be a formidable barrier, for St. Ruth was trusting it to preserve his infantry from a frontal charge. The Butcher of Savoy, as the Huguenots called him, had, however, felt obliged to put his cavalry at the ends, to prevent the infantry from being flanked and destroyed; so there must be easier ways of getting across the bog in those places.
In this section of the line—which seemed to be towards Ginkel’s right, or north flank—all was orderly and quiet. But at the left or southern flank, which might be as much as two miles away, they were having great difficulty forming up into line because of some skirmishes—most likely Sarsfield’s enterprising and high-spirited cavalry. Sporadic cackles of fire came from that direction and occasionally swelled into abrupt throat-clearings, but never developed into a proper engagement.
As this was Sunday, the French and Irish regiments were taking turns at Mass; Bob could track the gradual progress of two or perhaps three different priests along the Jacobite line of battle, stopping every so often to deliver a warlike homily and celebrate a truncated version of the sacrament. He only knew un peu de français and a wee bit o’ Gaelic, but after hearing several repetitions of these homilies, and the synchronized cheering of the congregants, he thought he had a clear enough notion of what was being said.
The breeze became dependable and the fog finally began to dissolve.
He strolled to the left and exchanged gossip with Greer, the sergeant of the fourteenth company. Then he strolled to the right and discovered an English cavalry regiment and chatted with one of its sergeants for a time. By now it was possible to understand where the Black Torrent Guards were situated. Ginkel’s army, like St. Ruth’s, had been arranged with infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings. Bob’s regiment was farther to the right than any of the other foot, and his company farther right than any other comp
any; from their location northwards to the road, it was nothing but horse all the way.
The fog had lifted to the point where he could see his own regimental colors, about a musket-shot away, slightly uphill of the line established by the soldiers. He walked toward them and arrived just in time to see a conference breaking up: Colonel de Zwolle had served brandy and given orders to all of his company commanders. Bob about-faced and fell into step beside Captain Barnes, who was returning to the company.
“Ne pas faire de quartier,” ’ Bob said. “That’s what the priests are saying across the bog.”
Captain Barnes had a degree from Oxford. “After what happened in Athlone, it is to be expected.”
“Is it the same for us, then? No quarter?”
“Sergeant, your aversion to killing Irishmen is the talk of the regiment. Do not embarrass me today by turning suddenly into a paragon of mercy.”
Captain Barnes was the fifth son of a modestly important Bristol family, and had a quick mind. It had been expected of him that he would become a vicar. Instead he had discomposed his family by deciding to become an infantry officer. He was not yet twenty-five and still seemed more the student of divinity. He liked commanding troops in battle, and did a surprisingly good job of it, as long as they hewed to the tactics and maneuvers of conventional warfare, against similar opponents. Which might sound like damning with faint praise, but very few men could actually do this. He grew uncertain, and began to make bad decisions, when asked to do anything that was not explicitly covered by the rules of war. At such moments other rules must of necessity come into play, and the rules he was wont to fall back on were the sort that were taught in church. And he was bright enough to see that this was, in a war, ridiculous.