CHAPTER VI
Battle of Aughrim Continued—Its Crisis—The English Turn Irish Left—St. Ruth Killed by Cannon Ball—Confusion and Final Defeat of Irish Army
THE lodgment made by the English, or, rather, Ulster regiment of Gustavus Hamilton in the dry ditch, as described by Chaplain Story, together with another lodgment made in front of the Irish left centre by some of the infantry who escaped the slaughter when they were so gallantly repulsed at that point shortly before, however effected, threw the chances of victory, for the first time that day, heavily on the side of De Ginkel. St. Ruth, whose sharp attention was, doubtless, mainly drawn off toward his centre and right, where the battle had raged fiercely and continuously for nearly two hours, soon became aware of the movement inaugurated by the enemy’s cavalry at the castle pass. He seemed astonished, conceiving that the point was strongly garrisoned, and asked of his officers: “What do they mean?” The reply was: “They mean to pass there and flank our left!” St. Ruth observed them for a moment, laughed incredulously, having still “that fatal confidence in the strength of his left flank,” and exclaimed in his impetuous fashion: “Pardieu! but they are brave! What a pity they should be so exposed!” A few minutes previously, exhilarated by the splendid prowess of the Irish infantry, in the centre and at Urachree, he threw his plumed hat in the air and shouted: “Well done, my children! The day is ours! Now we will beat them back even to the gates of Dublin!”
The unlooked-for passage of the English horse on the Irish left has been variously explained, or, rather, sought to be explained. Almost every Irish writer, the careful O’Callaghan included, attributes the disaster to a lack of proper ammunition on the part of Colonel Walter Bourke’s regiment, to which was committed the defence of the castle. Having exhausted their original supply, the soldiers opened the barrels in reserve and found that the bullets were cast for the calibre of the English guns which they had used earlier in the war, and were too large for the bore of the French muskets, which they carried at Aughrim. Other authors aver that when the Irish left was weakened, to strengthen the right, the front instead of the rear line of the covering brigade (Henry Luttrell’s) was withdrawn, thus enabling the infantry that accompanied Sir Francis Compton’s horse—who were twice repulsed, but, being heavily reinforced, again advanced—to post themselves in “the dry ditch” referred to by Chaplain Story; while General Talmash made a corresponding lodgment, with his rallied foot, on the right centre. Gross carelessness, deliberate treason, or both combined, contributed to the Irish disaster. St. Ruth himself, however, would not seem to have been much concerned by the apparition of the English cavalry forming toward his left flank, in the small area of firm ground, just across from the old castle. On the contrary, like Napoleon before the final charge at Waterloo, “the flash of victory passed into his eyes,” and, as he observed the enemy forming with some difficulty in that narrow space, while the single infantry regiment in the dry ditch cowering under the rain of Irish bullets, cried out to his staff, “We have won the battle, gentlemen! They are beaten. Now let us beat them to the purpose!” His bodyguard was formed in rear of the staff and he had already ordered his cavalry reserve to report to him. Therefore, these formidable squadrons came up at a trot that shook the ground over the hill behind him. We are not informed of the name of the officer who led them—fortunately for his fame, for he must have been either a dastard or a traitor. Instead of committing the command to a subordinate general, as he should have done, St. Ruth prepared to lead the attack in person, and the mass of horsemen, proud and confident, began to move slowly down the slope in the direction of the disheartened but still determined enemy. The general, dismounting, halted for a brief space at the battery which defended that flank of the army, addressed some remarks to the officer in command, and, it is said, directed the fire of one of the cannon, with his own hand, toward a particular point of the causeway leading to the castle. Then he remounted his superb gray charger—the third he had ridden that fatal day—and, dressed as he was in full uniform, made a conspicuous mark for the English gunners. He drew his sword, his hard features, according to tradition, kindling with enthusiasm, and was about to utter the command to charge Compton’s and Levinson’s cavalry—a charge that must have given the victory to Ireland, because, according to Macaulay, De Ginkel already meditated a retreat—when, right before the eyes of his horrified followers, his head was dashed from his shoulders by a cannon shot, fired from the English battery at the other side of the bog! His sword remained firmly gripped in his right hand, but his affrighted horse galloped down the hill, the body of the rider remaining erect in the saddle, until it was knocked off by the overhanging branches of a tree whose remnants are still pointed out to the traveler. A general paralysis of the Irish left wing, chiefly among the horse, would seem to have immediately followed the sudden and ghastly death of St. Ruth. The French attendants at once threw a cloak over the headless trunk, with the well-meant, but, as it turned out, ill-considered object of concealing the general’s unlooked-for fall from the all but victorious Irish army.
St. Ruth’s bodyguard halted the moment he fell, and, when the servants bore the body over the hill toward the rear, they acted as escort. The Irish horse, through the timidity or treachery of their chief, halted also, and, unaccountably, followed the movement in retreat of the bodyguard. The single word “Charge!” uttered by any general officer, before the cavalry retired, would have saved the day; but it was never uttered. The stubborn Mackay and his lieutenants, from their position near the castle below, divined, from the confusion they observed on the near hillside, that something fatal had occurred. They took fresh heart. More of their cavalry, strongly supported by infantry, came up. All these reheartened troops began to push forward beyond the pass, and even on their beaten centre and left the long-baffled British and their allies again assumed the offensive. No orders reached the Irish troops—mainly foot—still in position on the right and centre and even on a portion of the left—for the order of battle had perished with St. Ruth. Was it possible that, impressed by repeated dissensions, he doubted the fidelity of his chiefs and feared to take any of them into his confidence? He must have misjudged most of them sorely if this was the case. Mere selfishness or vanity can not explain his fateful omission. The English cavalry, now practically unopposed, poured through the pass, penetrated to the firm ground on the north slope of the hill, and, finally, appeared in rear of the infantry of the Irish left wing. Their foot, too, had succeeded in making firm lodgment in the lowest ditches. The Irish still continued to fight bravely, “but without order or direction.” At the sight of the repeatedly routed British infantry crossing the bog in the centre, and the cavalry threatening their left and rear, it is averred by Boyle that a cry of “Treason!” rang through the ranks of the regiments so placed as to be able to observe the hostile movements.
The enemy now vigorously attacked the Irish right and centre, but were as vigorously met, and again and again repulsed. For a long time, on the right particularly, they were unable to advance, and it would appear that the Irish soldiers in their front were totally ignorant of what had occurred in other parts of the field. The Irish infantry on the left, destitute of ammunition and having expended even their buttons and ramrods for projectiles, retired within the castle, where nearly all of them were finally slaughtered; or else broke off to the left, toward Kilconnell, and made for the large, red bog, which almost surrounded that flank, where many of them found refuge from the sabres of the pursuing cavalry. But even still the devoted centre and right, although furiously assaulted, refused to give way. At last, the uproar toward Aughrim, and the bullets of the outflanking enemy in the left rear, taking them in reverse, warned these brave troops that their position had become desperate. Twilight had already set in—it was more than an hour after the fall of St. Ruth—when the English horse and foot appeared almost behind them, toward the northwest; while the Dutch, Danish, and Huguenot cavalry, so long repelled at Urachree, supported by the foot that had, at long run, crossed the morass, began to hem them in on all sides. Their bravest leaders had fallen, but this admirable infantry retired slowly from inclosure to inclosure, fighting the fight of despair, until they reached their camp, where the tents were still standing in the order in which they were pitched. Here they made their last heroic stand, but were, at length, broken and fled toward the red bog already mentioned. The English leveled the tents, so as to render pursuit more open, and then a dreadful slaughter of the broken Irish foot followed. Few of these brave men, worthy of a better fate, escaped the swords of the hostile horse. “Our foreigners, and especially the Danes, make excellent pursuers,” writes Chaplain Story grimly. Irish historians say that two of the Irish regiments, disdaining to fly, took position in a ravine, and there waited “till morning’s sun should rise and give them light to die.” They were discovered by the enemy next morning and perished to a man! The spot where they died is still pointed out and is called by the peasantry “the glen of slaughter.”
We have, unhappily, no better authority than tradition for stating that, toward the end of the battle, a part of the Irish cavalry, led by Sarsfield, covered the retreat of the survivors of the Irish foot on Loughrea and Limerick. In fact there seems to be a complete mystery about the action of the Irish cavalry after the death of the French general. Certain it is that this force did not act with the vigor it showed in the early part of the combat on the right or with the spirit it displayed at the Boyne; and this fact deepens the doubt as to whether Sarsfield was in the fight or not. Had it not been, as we are informed by the learned Abbé McGeoghegan, in his able “History of Ireland,” for one O’Reilly, the almoner of a regiment, who caused the charge to be sounded as the fugitives passed through a boggy defile on the line of retreat, the entire Irish infantry might have been destroyed. They were also aided by darkness, caused by “a thick misty rain,” brought on, no doubt, by the detonations of the firearms, acting on a humid atmosphere. Numbers of small arms and other munitions were abandoned in the flight; all the cannon, most of the colors, and the whole camp material fell into the hands of the enemy. Aughrim was to Ireland what Culloden was to Scotland and Waterloo to France—an irretrievable military disaster, redeemed only by the desperate valor of the defeated army. Even the most bitter and partisan of the English annalists admit, although with manifest reluctance, that the Irish army fought heroically in this murderous battle. Its losses are placed by Story, who witnessed the conflict throughout, at 7,000 killed on the spot and 500, including officers, made prisoners. This statement of his shows conclusively that almost all of the Irish wounded were put to the sword. Other writers, including King James himself, make the Irish loss somewhat less, but we are inclined to think that Story, in this case, came pretty near to the truth. He says in his interesting narrative, “looking amongst the dead three days after, when all of ours and some of theirs were buried, I reckoned in some small inclosures 150, in others 120, etc., lying most of them in the ditches where they were shot, and the rest from the top of the hill, where their camp had been, looked like a great flock of sheep, scattered up and down the country for almost four miles round.” The bodies had been stripped by the camp-followers, which accounts for the white appearance to which Story makes allusion. Most of these corpses were inhumanly left above ground, to be the prey of birds and beasts, by the conquerors, and thus Aughrim is known to the Irish people as the “Field of our Unburied Dead.” It was customary a generation ago, and may be so in our day, for the Catholic peasantry passing along the roads that wind around Kilcommodan, to uncover their heads reverently and offer up prayers for the souls of the heroes of their race who died there for faith, land, and liberty.
Story says he never could find out what became of St. Ruth’s corpse, “some say that it was left stripped amongst the other dead when our men pursued beyond the hill, and others that it was thrown into a bog.” In the neighborhood of Aughrim it was long believed that while still the left of the Irish army remained in position, the French staff officers laid the remains to rest under the chancel floor of the adjacent Abbey of Kilconnell. Other traditions are to the effect that they were buried in Loughrea Abbey, or beside those of Lord Galway, who fell in the same battle, in the ruined church of Athenry. Boyle, after mentioning the two last-named probabilities, says: “There is, however, reason to doubt both, and the writer is aware that the people of the locality where the battle was fought, directed by tradition, point to a few stunted white thorns, to the west of the hill toward Loughrea, beneath which, they say, rest the ashes of that great but unfortunate general.”