Meanwhile, the English column, marching and firing steadily—that “infernal, rolling fire,” so characteristic of the British mode of fighting—kept on its terrible course, and crushed every French organization that stood in its path. Had the Dutch and Austrians succeeded in carrying Antoine at this moment, Cumberland must have been victorious and the French army could not have escaped. Already the column, still bleeding at every stride, was within sight of the royal tent. The English officers actually laid their canes along the barrels of the muskets to make the men fire low. Suddenly, the fire from the four reserve French cannon opened on the head of the column, and the foremost files went down. The English guns replied stoutly and the march was renewed. But now there came an ominous sound from the side of De Barri’s wood that made Lord Hay, brave and bold as he was, start, pause, and listen. It swelled above the crash of artillery and the continuous rattle of musketry. “Nearer, clearer, deadlier than before,” that fierce hurrah bursts upon the ear of battle! The English have heard that shout before and remember it to their cost. The crisis of the conflict has come, and the command, by voice and bugle, “Halt! halt!” rang from front to rear of the bleeding column. The ranks were dressed hastily, and the English prepared to meet the advancing enemy with a deadly volley from their front and long right flank. They looked anxiously in the direction of the wood and beheld long lines and bristling columns of men in blue and red—the uniform of the Irish Brigade—coming on at the charging step, with colors flying and “the generals and colonels on horseback among the glittering bayonets.” They did not fire a single shot as they came on. Behind them were masses of men in blue and white. These were the French supports. Again the British officers laid their canes across the barrels of the muskets, and, as the Brigade came within close range, a murderous volley rolled out. Hundreds of the Irish fell, but the survivors, leaping over the dead, dying, and wounded, never paused for a moment. They closed the wide gaps in their ranks and advanced at a run until they came within bayonet thrust or butt-stroke of the front and right of the English column, which they immediately crushed out of military shape; while their fierce war-shout, uttered in the Irish tongue—“Revenge! Remember Limerick and English treachery!” sounded the death-knell of Cumberland’s heroic soldiers. While the clubbed muskets of the Brigade beat down the English ranks, that furious war-cry rang even unto the walls of old Tournay. The French regiments of Normandie and Vassieux bravely seconded the Irish charge, and they and other Gallic troops disposed of the Hanoverians. Within ten minutes from the time when the Brigade came in contact with the English column, no British soldiers, except the dead, wounded, and captured, remained on the slope of Fontenoy. Bulkeley’s Irish regiment nearly annihilated the Coldstream Guards and captured their colors.
This victory saved France from invasion, but it cost the Irish dear. Count Dillon was slain, Lord Clare disabled, while one-third of the officers and one-fourth of the men were killed or wounded. King Louis, next morning, publicly thanked the Irish, made Lally a general, and Lord Clare was, soon afterward, created a marshal of France. England met retribution for her cruelty and faithlessness to Ireland, and King George vehemently cursed the laws which drove the Irish exiles to win glory and vengeance on that bloody day.
The losses in the battle were nearly equal—the French, Swiss, and Irish losing altogether 7,139 men killed, wounded, and missing; while the English, Hanoverians, Dutch, and Austrians acknowledged a total loss of 7,767 men, said by O’Callaghan to be an underestimate. Fontenoy was one of the greatest of French victories, and led, in the same campaign, to numerous other successes. Among the latter may be enumerated the triumph at Melle, the surprise of Ghent, the occupation of Bruges, and the capture of Oudenarde, Dendermonde, Ostend, Nieuport, and Ath.
Several officers of the Irish Brigade went with Prince Charles Edward Stuart to Scotland, when he made his gallant but ill-fated attempt to restore the fallen fortunes of his luckless father, called by the Jacobites James VIII of Scotland and James III of England and Ireland, in 1745-46. The Hanoverian interest called James the “Old” and Charles Edward the “Young” Pretender. The Irish officers formed “Prince Charles’s” chosen bodyguard when he was a fugitive amid the Highlands and Western Isles after Culloden. One of the last great field exploits of the Irish Brigade was its victorious charge at Laffeldt, in Flanders, in 1747, when, for the second time, it humiliated Cumberland, and, in a measure, avenged his base massacre of the gallant Scottish Highland clans, in 1746. The victory of Laffeldt led to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which was favorable to France, in 1748. The Brigade took part in each succeeding war in which France was involved down to the period of the Revolution. Some of its regiments served also in India and America. Under Count Dillon, several Irish battalions distinguished themselves in the dashing, but unsuccessful, attack on the British at Savannah, Ga., in 1779, when the brave Count Pulaski, who led the assault, was killed on the ramparts. By that time, however, the volume of recruits from Ireland had greatly diminished, owing to the gradual relaxation of the penal code, and a majority of the officers and soldiers of the Brigade were, although of Irish blood, French by birth. Some of the officers were French by both birth and blood, and, among them, in 1791, was the great-grandson of St. Ruth. The Brigade, as became it, remained faithful to the last to the Bourbon dynasty. Unfortunately this fidelity led the feeble remnant, under Colonel O’Connell, to take service in the West Indies, beneath the British flag, after the Revolution. In extenuation of their fault, it must be remembered that they were, to a man, monarchists; that the Stuart cause was hopelessly lost, and that both tradition and education made them the inevitable enemies of the new order of things in France. Still, an Irish historian may be pardoned for remarking that it were much better for the fame of the Brigade of Cremona and Fontenoy if its senile heir-at-law had refrained from accepting the pay of the country whose tyranny had driven the original organization into hopeless exile.
But the active career of the bold Brigade terminated in a blaze of glory. The hand of a prince, destined to be a monarch, inscribed its proud epitaph when, in 1792, the Comte de Provence, afterward Louis XVIII, presented to the surviving officers a drapeau d’adieu, or flag of farewell—a gold harp wreathed with shamrocks and fleur-de-lis, on a white ground, with the following touching words:
“Gentlemen: We acknowledge the inappreciable services that France has received from the Irish Brigade in the course of the last hundred years—services that we shall never forget, though under an impossibility of requiting them. Receive this standard as a pledge of our remembrance, a monument of our admiration and our respect, and, in future, generous Irishmen, this shall be the motto of your stainless flag—
“‘1692-1792.’
“Semper et Ubique Fidelis!
(“Ever, and everywhere, faithful.”)
Never did military body receive a nobler discharge from service.