The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (185 page)

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 company; 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.

“You want a brute for a sergeant, so that he can go do the mopping-up while you wring your hands and disavow his unchivalrous
deeds,” Bob said. “For that type of sergeant you must look in a common regiment. But we were organized by Churchill—”

“The Earl of Marlborough, to you!”

“In truth, to me he is
John.
But whatever he is called, he has odd tastes in sergeants, and though
he
has been replaced by de Zwolle,
you
are stuck with
me
—unless you would care to promote another from the ranks.”

“You’ll do, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

Finally the fog had lifted so that they could see as far as they pleased, though things more distant were wrapped in shimmering auras, bristling with iridescent needles. All was more or less as Bob had seen it with his ears. Across a bog they faced a hill whose near slope was exceeding well trenched, the trenches filled with Irish musketeers in gray coats. They would be armed with good new French muskets, not the trash that had served as firewood after the Battle of the Boyne. Far to the south the Jacobite line curved around the flank of the hill into some trees, and thus out of Bob’s view. Directly in front lay what appeared to be the worst part of the bog, where three water-filled ruts twined together in the heart of a morass. The main Athlone-Galway road was no more than a few hundred paces off to the right. It sported first a bridge and then a long, strait causeway over the boggy ground.

A mass of English and Huguenot cavalry were deployed in a clump around the road. Bob could see several regimental standards at a glance, meaning that this was probably styled a division, thus probably commanded by a major-general. Most likely the Huguenot Henri de Massue, who, though he’d never see France again, still went by his French title, the marquis de Ruvigny. Ruvigny was one of three generals King William had sent out to Ireland in the spring to replace ones who had exasperated him with their slowness. Another was a Scotsman, Hugh MacKay, who was commanding the division of infantry—Bob’s division, for the nonce—that was now looking out over the bog.

The bridge and the causeway could be reached by a short advance, which raised the question of why this cavalry division had not already taken it. The answer lay half a mile farther down the road, where an old castle rose up above the western end of the causeway. It was little more than a wreck: just four mossy stone walls, with mounds at the corners suggesting towers. But the tops of the walls were furry with musket-barrels, and the surrounding hamlet had been fortified with earth-works. Several roads then radiated westwards from the village. Various Jacobite regiments had positioned themselves short distances up those roads so that they could
converge on any force that made it over the causeway and into the killing-zone around the castle.

Bob spent more time than was good for him searching out the standards of the Irish foot regiments and trying to identify Baron Youghal’s colors. That would tell him approximately where Mr. McCarthy the candlemaker was situated with the Partrys’ company. But he was unable to see matters clearly, as most of these regiments were dug in on the hill farther south and across the bog, two miles or more away, and their colors had not been particularly large or glorious to begin with.

“This is an excellent position,” Bob said admiringly. “It could not be better—for the Irish.”

Captain Barnes gave him a sharp look, but softened when he understood that Bob was merely stating facts, and according a sort of gentlemanly respect to the foe. “Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise.”

“Where are our horses, then?”

“We must imagine them.”

“Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind.”

“We need never mount up. Dragoons are supposed to ride
into
battle, then
dismount
and fight as infantrymen,” Barnes reminded him. “We
walked
here, that much is true. But that’s in the past. Now it’s as if we have all just climbed out of our saddles.”

“That is why they have placed us here, hard up against the cavalry—we are to support them,” Bob supposed, looking into Barnes’s eyes. Barnes showed no sign of disagreement. Bob turned away from General MacKay’s part of the field—the bog in the center—and toward General Ruvigny’s—the road, the causeway, and the village. At first glance this latter seemed the harder assignment, but he felt unaccountably relieved that they would not have to harry thousands of Irishmen out of the maze of ditches that they had cut into the peat.

Bob continued, “We are meant to advance along the road, I take it.” He then turned his attention to the castle, and tried to count the colors on its walls and in the surrounding village.

“It is a better assignment than to advance across that bog,” Barnes observed.

“Anything would be better than that, Captain,” Bob said. “When I am hit I want to fall with sun in my eyes. Not mud in my lungs.”

B
OB, NORMALLY AN IN-THE-THICK-OF-THINGS
kind of soldier, now had the unfamiliar opportunity of sitting still and watching the battle unfold, just like a General. This came about because the cavalry to
which they were attached was not ordered to do anything for the first few hours; no General in his right mind would send his regiments across that causeway in the face of those defenses. In fact, very early on most of Ruvigny’s cavalry were detached and sent miles down the line toward the left wing, leaving only a regiment or so to guard the road. If the Black Torrent Guards had been real dragoons (with horses) they probably would have gone, too. As it was, they were stuck in the least active part of the battlefield.

But every other part of the line attacked. The only part Bob could see was the foot in the center, but from distant rumblings of thousands of hooves, and movements of reinforcing horse across the Irish rear, he could tell that a large cavalry engagement was under way at the opposite end.

MacKay’s infantry spent the first few hours of the battle failing against their Irish counterparts. Though ’twere more just to say that Ginkel had failed by ordering them even to try. The Irish had cut successive lines with protected passages from one to the next. The walls of the ditches were graded to afford protection against an attack from the east while leaving their occupants naked to fire from the west. So as soon as MacKay’s men fought their way across the sucking mud into
one
ditch, they would find that their foes had all vanished like wills-o’-the-wisp and reappeared in the
next
ditch uphill, whence they could fire musket-balls into the attackers at their pleasure. A small number of English actually managed to get through all of the ditches and hedgerows, but by the time they had done so, they were more a smattering of refugees than an army; and when they finally staggered out into open country along the base of the hill, they were confronted by an Irish battle-line that looked as if it had drawn itself up on a parade ground. The Irish charged with a roar that reached Bob’s ears a few seconds after he saw them leap forward, and the surviving English fell back all the way to where they had started an hour before. By the time any semblance of order had been reëstablished among MacKay’s battalions, the Irish had re-occupied the very same positions, in the forward-most ditch, as they’d been in when the fog had first lifted. The field looked the same as it had before, save that dead Englishmen were strewn all over it. Farther south it was the same except that the dead were Danish, Dutch, Hessians, and Huguenots.

While respecting Irishmen as individuals, Bob had always viewed their regiments primarily as a source of comic relief. He was fascinated to see them chasing Hessian storm-troopers across a bog. It was the first time in his knowledge that their ferocity and love of
country had come into alignment with military competence. At the same time he was apprehensive, for the Partrys’ sake, of what might happen next, because the cavalry fight at the far end sounded more ferocious than any he had ever heard. He could not believe that the French and Irish could withstand such an assault for long. But nothing happened; the Protestant cavalry never broke through. The battle was a stalemate.

Bob watched two more attacks across the bog. Both failed in the same way as the first; the Irish not only stopped them cold, but threw them back, and not only threw them back but overran some of their positions and spiked some of their field-pieces. Captain Barnes: “’Tis worse even than a Pyrrhic victory; ’tis a Pyrrhic defeat.”

General MacKay was as wet, cold, and furious as a cat in a rain-barrel. He had led the failed attacks personally. As the afternoon turned into evening he had worked his way north up the line. It was plain that the center could not be forced, and he had no real choice but to probe that part of the bog around the piles of the causeway. For the fourth attack, therefore, he got permission from Ginkel to lead the Black Torrent Guards—who had done nothing so far—on a thrust parallel to and just a bit south of the road.

This attack failed like the others. Bob and his men had learned from the mistakes of the fellows they had been watching, and so they took fewer casualties. But it failed nonetheless, partly because of the ditches, and partly because of the plunging musket-fire that came down from the parapets of the ruined castle when they advanced within range. It was demoralizing to see a large building such as Aughrim Castle vanish behind a cloud of gray smoke as hundreds of muskets were discharged at once.