Rules of War. Iain Gale
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on the field. How far they had come since then, he thought. And what quirk of fate, he wondered, had brought Clare to face him here.
At forty yards out from the Irishmen, Steel halted the Grenadiers. There were around thirty up with him now. It was hardly a fair fight. Thirty against nigh on a hundred men. Perhaps it might be more prudent to wait for assistance. But then, Steel was not noted for his caution.
‘Grenadiers, uncap your fuses.’ They would do it the hard way.
Slaughter looked at him quizzically. ‘Do we attack, sir?’
‘What else can we do? Have the men light their bombs.’
Slaughter had barely opened his mouth to deliver the command when with a great shout, from a small street to the right, Argyll and the best part of two companies of his vengeful Scots infantry burst out and crashed into the flank of the Irishmen.
‘Bugger the grenades, Sarn’t.’ He raised his voice. ‘Unsling your fusils. Company, fix bayonets.’
The Grenadiers carefully replaced their bombs in the leather pouches and with a swift motion twisted the new-fangled socket bayonets on to the muzzles of their fusils.
‘With me. Charge!’
With his own gun still slung across his back and his great sword raised high above his head, Steel began to run towards the mêlée at the end of the street. Argyll’s men had come round the side and front of the Irish line and partly blocked their view of Steel, who seized the chance. Reaching the line he threw himself into the crush and connected with an ensign of Irish dragoons who extended his sword-arm and lunged at Steel’s chest. He parried away the cut with ease and dealt the boy a blow with the hilt of his sword which knocked him out cold and sent him to the ground.
Steel hissed at Slaughter: ‘By God, Jacob. I wouldn’t like to be one of Clare’s men. You know Argyll believes them to be the devil’s soldiers.’
He saw the duke wielding a Highland broadsword almost as heavy as his own. His face was frozen in a rictus of fury and he was chopping his way through a forest of Irishmen, severing limbs and heads as he went.
Argyll caught sight of Steel: ‘Steel, by God. What luck this? A whole regiment of heathens. Papists. Heretics!’ Possessed by his fervour, he ran headlong into a group of three Irish dragoons spitting one on his sword and punching another full in the face with his gloved fist before slitting his throat.
Steel looked at Slaughter and knew what was required. Both men ran to help Argyll who was now locked in a duel with the remaining dragoon and had not seen a fourth come round behind him. Steel fell upon the man and with a savage uppercut of his blade, sliced the back of his head. To his left four more dragoons appeared, intent apparently on saving their comrade engaged with Argyll. Steel could see now that the man was an officer and then recognized him as O’Brien himself. He had been a noted swordsman when they had fought under the same colours and Steel could see that he had not lost his touch. Every blow that Argyll aimed towards him, O’Brien met with an expert parry. As the dragoons hurried to rescue their commander, Steel and Slaughter turned to face them and he noticed that they had been joined by a half-dozen of the Grenadiers.
Slaughter hissed at them. ‘You took your bloody time. Corporal Taylor, Mulligan, you others there, with me. The rest of you, with Captain Steel.’
Steel squared up to one of the dragoons and feinting to the left with a blow of his sword dealt him a tremendous kick in the groin which felled him to the ground. As each Grenadier found a man in turn, Steel noticed that Argyll had been joined by more of his own men, including one of his sergeants, a huge, barrel-chested brute armed with what looked like a captured cavalry sabre. He and the duke were fighting O’Brien together now yet still it seemed as if the Irishman was more than capable of beating them off. Steel cut to the right to parry a thrust from a dragoon’s bayonet and on the return stroke pierced the man through the stomach. Slaughter had dispatched another of the enemy and for an instant the two men stood uncertain of who to take on next. At that moment a clatter of hooves on cobbles announced the arrival of a party of redcoated English dragoons.
At their head rode a young cornet of horse wearing a broad grin. He was shouting like an excited schoolboy. ‘The field is ours. The field is ours. The French are retreating, the day is ours, my boys.’
A single shot broke against the noise of steel on steel as Slaughter, who had unslung his fusil from his back, fired into the air. With the cornet’s words, it was enough. Grenadiers and Irishmen alike broke apart in their individual combats and stood at the en-garde, uncertain of what to do.
O’Brien disengaged from Argyll who, along with the big redcoat sergeant slowly backed away. Taking care still not to quite drop his guard, the Irishman gently raised the tip of his sword until it was pointing skywards and as the general stood motionless, his own blade still held out before him, the young Jacobite reversed his hand so that the blade now pointed directly towards the ground. Argyll watched for a moment and then, as Steel looked on, gave a barely perceptible nod towards the sergeant who, with a great lunge of the sort one might execute in a fencing salle, sprang towards O’Brien and buried his blade deep in his heart. The Irishman’s soft, green eyes expressed his utter surprise, then as they glazed over, he dropped his sword, grasped at the blade in his chest and fell to the ground. Steel was lost for words. The sergeant straightened up, withdrew the long blade and turned to Argyll.
‘Good work, McKellar. That’s a sovereign for you.’ He turned to address his regiment: ‘Each one of you men shall have a sovereign for every Papist officer slain today.’
The sergeant saluted his commander with his bloody blade and walked away to discuss the good news with the men and tally their scores.
Steel turned on Argyll: ‘You murdered him. Your Grace, Clare was surrendering. He was offering you his sword.’
‘That man was a Papist and a traitor and he suffered for it. I told you, Steel. I fight not only for my queen and my country. I fight for a greater Britain, for a nation free from such perverse unbelievers. I fight for truth, Steel. For truth. For freedom and against superstition. If you would care to discuss the matter further, I await your pleasure.’
Turning, Argyll walked away from Steel and the others, pausing only to clean his sword blade on the white coat of a dead French soldier.
Steel watched him go in silence and looked down at the body of the Irishman. Around him the Grenadiers were taking the surrender of Clare’s dragoons and he realized that the cannon seemed to have stopped firing. From beyond the town came the rolling noise of musketry and a confused cacophony which he recognized as the sound of one army in full flight and another in pursuit. It seemed that the cornet had been right. The battle was won. He shook his head, and said to no one in particular, ‘If that’s freedom and truth, then I want no part of it.’
He thought of his younger brother, Alexander, a Jacobite who had left the family five years back. His whereabouts were currently unknown although Steel presumed that his allegiance, like that of poor, dead Clare, lay still with the old king and the old monarchy. He thought how easily it might have been Alexander rather than O’Brien who had met his end on the sergeant’s blade. He shivered and realized that one day he might meet him himself on a field of battle. He prayed that it would not be and called down a silent blessing on his brother, wherever he now was. Was it too much to hope that perhaps one day they would be reunited in a Scotland where all might be treated equally and where principle and religious bigotry did not divide families?
Slaughter was at his side. ‘You’re right there, sir. Though I know there’s some among our own lads that’d agree with the duke.’
‘I dare say there are. We’re all fighting for different things, Jacob; praying to different gods. But from what I can see, sometimes there’s no difference between Argyll’s idea of a new world and the blind bloody hatred I thought we might have left behind when Her Majesty came to the throne.’ He looked across to where the body of van Cutzem lay, among those of his men, face down in the bloody dirt. ‘I met a man on this field today who believed that war could be civilized with artificial rules and politeness. I