Blood's Campaign by Angus Donald

Author:Angus Donald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

Chapter Sixteen

The same day: 10 a.m.

The horse fidgeted beneath Hogan at the sound of the cannon. The old bay mare had been in many a scrap and mêlée but she was not used, on a noisy and frightening battlefield, to the forced immobility demanded by strict regimental discipline. With each thunderous crack and boom of the English guns she gave a little twitch, and occasionally she took a few dancing side-steps. Hogan checked her, soothed her, stroking her withers with his hand and murmuring soft endearments to let her hear his familiar voice in her constantly flicking ears.

Fortunately, the Duke of Tyrconnell’s Regiment of Horse, to which Hogan’s company was now informally attached, was formed up on the lower slopes of the Hill of Donore a good half a mile behind Oldbridge, where the majority of the enemy Ordnance was falling. For nearly an hour, the tiny hamlet by the river had endured a pounding from the big guns on the ridge above the Boyne and a fog of dust and smoke clouded the air. It was clear to Hogan what the enemy had in mind. They were softening up the defences in Oldbridge – knocking the houses into rubble, destroying the flint walls of the big garden, tearing through the hedges and woodland copses and battering the terrified men who crouched there – in preparation for a massed infantry assault.

What Hogan did not understand, and what nobody could explain to him, was why almost two thirds of the Irish Army had departed earlier that morning and was now marching west. This is where the attack would fall – here: why were they sending the troops away? Looking over his left shoulder, he could see the last units of the French Brigade, a little train of six cannon, accompanied by thirty mounted artillerymen, marching south-west, along the line of the river.

Looking to his front, he could count only six battalions of infantry between himself and the Boyne. Perhaps three thousand men. However, the Irish were much stronger in the mounted arm, which was a blessing. Apart from Tyrconnell’s Regiment lined up beside his own irregular company there were the horse regiments of Colonel Sutherland and Colonel Parker, two squadrons of King James’s Life Guards and one troop of horse grenadiers, and behind him and slightly to his right there were a couple of full-strength regiments of dragoons.

However, horse alone could not win a full pitched battle and now that the guns of the French Brigade, commanded by that sly bastard Henri d’Erloncourt, were gone west, there was no artillery left to answer the battering being laid down by the English on the ridge. As he soothed the fidgeting bay, he did the number calculations in his head: he reckoned at best they might have eight or nine thousand Irishmen between Oldbridge and the Hill of Donore. Far too few to face the might of William’s army. How many did the Dutchman have: twenty thousand? Thirty? Whatever the exact number it was still terrible odds.

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