Blood's Campaign Read online

  Henri started out at it uncomprehendingly. His first thought was that one of the open barrels of gunpowder had exploded, perhaps by a carelessly dropped glowing match. But his eye alighted on a curl of orange iron hissing in a pool of gore and one terrible word slowly dawned on him: mortar. He felt a surge of rage – how dare they! How dare they attack him personally. He was no soldier. He was not supposed to be a target for the God-damned English artillery. It was a crime of war! Then the pain in his arm hit him like a surge of wildfire and he began to mew like an animal through his teeth.

  ‘Monsieur, you are hurt!’ Guillaume was at his side in the gloom of the tunnel. ‘We must get you away from this place immediately, monsieur le comte. We must leave now. They have our range. They have it to the yard.’

  Major du Clos tried to drag his master away from the entrance to the western roof. But Henri refused to be moved. He glared furiously at the scene of carnage outside: some of the unhurt Irish gunners were wandering around as if stupefied, calling out to each other piteously and asking for orders. A few others were crouched beneath the long barrels of the guns. Some cowered at the foot of the gabions. One or two bold souls had gathered up muskets and were firing them pointlessly in the direction of the enemy trenches.

  ‘Monsieur. It is no longer safe . . .’

  A second mortar bomb exploded with equally shocking force a few yards to the right of the first one, directly over the eastern roof. One man was cut completely in half by a spinning sliver of shell casing, his two parts flopping down some feet from each other. Another half dozen men were maimed, one losing his leg at the knee, four more were killed outright. Soldiers were vomiting, soiling their breeches with fear. One Irishman with half his face ripped away and hanging by a flap ran screaming over the side of the roof, falling three storeys to his certain death. The lead of the roof was slick with blood. The howling of wounded men cut into his head like a knife.

  ‘Now, monsieur, right now!’ Major du Clos seized d’Erloncourt by the shoulders, then began wrestling him towards the stairs that led to the ground.

  ‘No, Guillaume. Unhand me. I must save the painting. It is my best . . .’

  *

  ‘One more, Enoch, just one more shot and then we must depart!’ Holcroft could hardly hide his elation. Two direct hits on Joymount House and he had seen Narrey up there not ten minutes ago with his own eyes. Unless God was making a cruel jest, he must now be dead or at least badly wounded. He tamped down the wadding over the propellent charge. ‘Advance the bomb,’ he said loudly and two matrosses came forward with the iron pole and its burden.

  Musket balls were cracking into the brick works all around them but, in his savage joy, Holcroft was oblivious to them. One of the matrosses, a Welshman named Evans, had been struck by a ball in the eye as he had incautiously peered out from cover to look at the enemy firing from the walls a hundred yards away. It had been a preposterously lucky shot – or indeed, a preposterously unlucky one for poor Evans, who fell dead immediately with the back of his head a soggy mash of gore and brains.

  ‘Ready, Enoch,’ said Holcroft. ‘Advance the match. Fire the fuse . . . Quickly now, quick as lightning. Advance the match. Have a care. Give fire!’

  The mortar exploded and the bomb flew high into the air, rose, fell and detonated once more over the stricken, blood-washed roof. A few moments later there was a gargantuan crash and a ball of red flame twenty feet high. It was followed by another smaller explosion and the roof was engulfed in smoke.

  ‘That’ll be a powder keg, or maybe two of ’em,’ said Enoch, clapping Holcroft on the shoulder. ‘Job done, sir. A fine job of work done today.’

  Indeed the roof was now burning like an enormous torch. As Holcroft watched, a section of the brick work on the corner of the building peeled away and fell with a crash to the street below. Another smaller barrel of powder detonated shooting a plume of black smoke speckled with orange sparks, sixty feet into the sky. Nothing mortal on the roof could possibly live through that inferno.

  ‘Good enough!’ said Holcroft. ‘Leave the mortar, powder and shells. Get poor Evans into a wagon quick as you can and let us depart before the Irish come out for revenge. As you say, Enoch: good job. We did fine work this day.’

  *

  On the journey back to their lines, Holcroft walked his horse alongside the men in the wagons and searched his conscience. Once they were out of range of the crackling of the muskets from the walls, and his battle ardour had cooled sufficiently, he was engulfed by a great black wave of shame.

  There had been some twenty Irishmen on that roof who had, perhaps unwillingly, been forced to serve the two guns and who were now, presumably, twisted and charred beyond all recognition – and that image washed any taste of glorious victory from his mouth and left instead a bitter residue.

  His friend Jack Churchill, now risen to dizzying heights in the English Army as a Major-General and created the Earl of Marlborough, no less, before being dispatched to the Low Countries, would have been pragmatic: ‘This is war,’ he’d have said, ‘those incinerated Irishmen were our enemies. God willed they should die. You have absolutely no need to reproach yourself.’

  Holcroft could hear his friend saying it. Yet, while he was no battle novice, casualties always offended his sensibilities, and needless deaths made him particularly uncomfortable. The only comfort he could find was in the fact that at least the two Frenchmen – who to his certain knowledge had murdered, or been responsible for the deaths of several people Holcroft knew – were dead. A kind of justice had been served to them. May God have mercy on their souls.

  When the wagons were on the rumbling approach towards the No. 2 Battery, Holcroft lifted his head and felt a distinct chill in his belly at what he saw. General Schomberg was on the gun platform. And, worse, the old half-German warhorse had removed his fine blue velvet coat, which a nearby aide was now clutching, and seemed to be personally directing Lieutenant Barden and the team of gunners and matrosses.

  The encounter was not going to go well. But Holcroft resolved, this time, to tell the truth to his commanding officer. He could at least boast that he had destroyed a powerful battery that was menacing the English assault on the breach. He would also claim the scalps of two enemies of King William, two dangerous French spies. It had been, he would vehemently insist, a victory.

  He slid off his horse when Enoch drew the wagons to a halt, and strode over to No. 2 Battery gun platform. As he approached, he caught Barden’s eye, and the lieutenant, who had his back to the General, made the comical face of a man experiencing appalling terror. Then he grinned at Holcroft and winked.

  ‘Your Grace,’ began Holcroft, ‘you honour us with your . . .’

  His words were drowned out by the roar of the twelve-pounder and he fell silent and watched the ball fly across the sky and land with a meaty slap, a gout of blood and fleshly matter – but little noticeable effect – on the fifteen-foot-high barricade of beef carcasses where the hard-won breach had been.

  ‘Carry on, Lieutenant,’ said General Schomberg. He turned his head and looked coldly at Holcroft. ‘I hold you personally responsible for that godless monstrosity,’ he said, jerking his head towards the reeking wall of cattle flesh.

  ‘Your Grace, if you will allow me to explain—’

  ‘Taken ill again, were you?’

  ‘No, sir, I came to the conclusion that it was crucial to our—’

  ‘I know what you’ve been up to,’ the General interrupted, ‘I might be a little long in the tooth but I’m not yet blind. I saw your little display with the Humpty yonder. I suppose you think I should be impressed with your skill.’

  ‘No, sir, not at all; but I deemed it absolutely necessary—’

  Schomberg rolled straight over Holcroft’s words. ‘You asked me yesterday to give you permission to attack the gun battery on top of that tall house there, the one that is now burning so merrily. I believe I gave you a perfectly clear answer. I said no. I instructed you
to concentrate your energies on the breach, did I not? Yet you took it upon yourself to disregard my command and gallivant around the field with a mortar picking targets more agreeable to your tastes.’

  ‘Sir, the guns atop Joymount House—’

  ‘Be quiet, sir. Hold your damned tongue. I gave you an order; you ignored it. As a result the breach was not made significantly wider, your battery ran out of munitions and you were unable to make it practicable – as I had asked you to. Because of your failings, the enemy were able to block the breach in that barbaric manner and we are set back, perhaps several days, in our designs.’

  ‘Sir, I will have that breach cleared in a matter of a few hours.’

  ‘No, sir, you will not. I am removing you from your command. You henceforth have no authority over even the smallest piece of my artillery. Frankly, I would not now trust you to command a blunderbuss. I was warned about you, sir, when I was forming the Train in the Tower; I was told that you were dangerously independent minded; that you felt yourself above the normal strictures of military duty. A loose cannon – that was one of the more jocular expressions used. But I ignored those warnings, sir; I decided that you could be trusted to do your duty, that you were a professional artilleryman. I cannot tell you how bitterly I now regret that decision.’

  ‘Your Grace, if you’ll allow me to redeem myself, I’ll have the breach—’

  ‘No, sir! You may not redeem yourself. You will take yourself off to your quarters and remain there until I decide what is to be done with you. You may consider yourself under arrest until further notice. Now – get out of my sight.’

  Feeling like a whipped schoolboy, a red-faced Holcroft made his bow and retreated to his horse. He could feel the gaze of every man in the battery boring into his back. As he walked his horse up the hill, back to his tent in the artillery park, far behind the fighting trenches, he looked over his actions of the past twenty-four hours. He had disobeyed orders, he had deserted his post, he had been responsible for the death of Evans . . . but on the other hand he had destroyed an enemy battery that was threatening the breach. And he had almost certainly killed Narrey and du Clos.

  If he had the opportunity over again, he decided, he’d have acted in exactly the same way. Schomberg was a fool if he did not recognise his achievements.

  In his small A-shaped tent in the centre of the artillery park, he drank down a glass of brandy, took off his filthy coat and stinking shirt, washed briefly and collecting his spare writing materials and sitting on a canvas stool at an empty, upturned box of ships’ biscuits began to recreate the letter he had been writing to his wife Elizabeth before Richards was wounded.

  In the relative cool of his tent, he could hear the guns of the No. 2 Battery distantly pounding away at the breach, and at the further reaches of his hearing the guns of the Royal Navy were assisting the No. 1 Battery by pounding the castle from the black waters of the Lough. Nearer by, Quartermaster Vallance was wheedling with a Danish officer, angling to get a fat bribe. He wanted ten shillings in exchange for six barrels of salted beef that had been allocated to the Dane’s heavy cavalrymen.

  Holcroft blocked all these distracting sounds out of his head and wrote:

  My dear Elizabeth,

  I received with joy your letter of the 17th Inst. And I wish you to know that you are in my heart every single day that I am away from you. I am very sorry to hear that your distinguished Dutch gentleman friend disparaged our cutlery during his visit to Mincing Lane and I beg you to feel free to buy as many spoons, knives, forks and so on as you deem necessary. I shall write to my bankers, Hoare’s in Cheapside, and tell them to expect you to call upon them.

  I believe I may tell you that the siege of Carrickfergus will shortly be concluded satisfactorily and I believe I may also inform you that the Frenchman Henri d’Erloncourt who, as you know, was responsible for the murderous attack on our house last summer, has been killed in the fighting . . .

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday, August 27, 1689

  Holcroft slept deeply for an age, awoke refreshed at a little before eleven, ate a large breakfast of fried bacon, eggs and toasted barley bread in the artillery officers’ mess and wondered what to do with himself that day. He oiled his brass telescope. He carefully washed the mud and blood from his coat – tending the garment lovingly. He polished the brass buttons until they shone like gold. Then he brushed every inch of the blue wool with long, caressing strokes until it appeared almost pristine. The Ordnance coat, for Holcroft, was much more than a common or garden item of clothing. It was a symbol of his status, his identity, his achievements in life. He wore it every day, at work in the trenches or on the gun platforms, in the proving halls in the Tower of London, at parties and to dinner at friends’ houses. He would have slept in that coat had he been allowed to by his wife Elizabeth, and when he was away from her, he was often tempted to curl up in its warm folds at night and remain there.

  He felt, almost, as if the coat was his soul. As if the coat was, in fact, him.

  When there was no more he could do to prettify his Ordnance coat, he put it on, did up the buttons, sat down and wrote to his bankers. He wrote to his friend Jack. He played a game of Solitaire with a greasy old pack of cards. He leafed through a book of John Dryden’s poetry that his wife had given him – and found it incomprehensible. After a certain amount of internal debate, he decided that he should not take Schomberg’s order – to remain in his tent – completely literally. So, in the late afternoon, he put on his hat, slung his sword, and wandered downhill towards the No. 2 Battery to see what had been happening while he had been at his leisure.

  Lieutenant Barden had been diligent. As Holcroft approached the No. 2 Battery he could see with the naked eye that the breach had been cleared of almost all the dead cattle and widened considerably. The guns were still firing but at a slower, more relaxed rate, and it seemed their task was to prevent the Irish defenders from blocking the long hole in the walls.

  Barden was busy with the western-most of the twenty-four-pounders on the extreme right of the battery and so, feeling nervous that he might be contravening some rule, Holcroft wandered over to the six-pound Saker called Roaring Meg, which was once more tended by his friend Enoch Jackson.

  Jackson was busy with a large bucket of water and a long-handled sponge, his bald brown head shiny with sweat. He was cleaning out Roaring Meg’s powder residue-clogged barrel. He dipped the heavy sponge in the water and forced it into the cannon’s mouth, ramming it as deep as he could, and out came a constant trickle of thick liquid as black, viscous and evil-smelling as coal tar.

  ‘Breach is made,’ said Enoch, nodding towards the town. ‘Young Barden has done a fine job, under the General’s direction. We are just keeping it open.’

  ‘Is Uncle Frederick about today?’

  ‘Not seen him since early this morning. He’s busy getting the troops into the attack trenches.’

  It was true. Holcroft could see files of redcoats, muskets at port, advancing through the system of ditches and earthworks to the trenches nearest the walls.

  ‘That’s Sir Henry Wharton’s regiment in front. They’re the Forlorn Hope.’

  Holcroft shivered – the Forlorn Hope always bore the heaviest casualties. They were the men who were first into the breach and who would face the full fury of the defenders’ musketry. Few would survive – but those who did were guaranteed promotion. There was never a shortage of officers who volunteered for this duty, knowing they’d be dead, wounded or heroes by sunset.

  ‘When is the assault to go in?’

  Jackson shrugged. ‘Soon as the men are in place, I expect. You know the general is in a hurry. They sent out another petition for a parlay this morning – now that the breach is practicable. Schomberg sent the envoy away with a flea in his ear, that’s what Lieutenant Barden said anyway. “Surrender right now,” the general told him, “and you can march out unmolested, your arms and honour intact. Or I’ll massacre the whole bloody lot
of you, man, woman and child.” He’s a spirited old devil, isn’t he?’

  ‘Did you catch any grief for our business yesterday with the Humpty?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, I was simply following orders.’ Enoch made his face appear slack and yokel-stupid. ‘My captain told me to do it, sir. I dursn’t disobey.’

  Holcroft smiled at him. ‘Good man! And the others are all right too?’

  ‘All save poor Evans.’

  Holcroft’s smile disappeared.

  He stood next to Enoch in a slightly awkward silence, as the master gunner began once again to clean out the barrel of the ancient Saker. The sun was low in the sky off to Holcroft’s right, the light transforming the waters of the Lough beyond the castle into a sea of shimmering gold. The Navy ships were still firing, bombarding the castle, sometimes overshooting to send their missiles skipping through the town. Even their fire seemed less urgent.

  ‘I should go and pay a visit to Major Richards in Belfast Castle,’ Holcroft said. ‘Just to see they’re caring for him properly.’ He had no desire to witness the assault on the walls of Carrickfergus. He knew what would happen, and what the result would be. The town would fall but first there would be a terrible slaughter in the breach, many hundreds, perhaps thousands of English troops would die. Then there’d be the sack of the town and massacre of its inhabitants.

  ‘Good idea, sir. You’ll give him my regards, sir, and from all of us.’

  ‘I will.’

  There was a sound of a far-away trumpet. A strangely joyful sound.

  ‘Look, Enoch, look. At the castle.’