Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes

His heavy guns battered two breaches into its walls, and on the night of 19 January his infantry carried the town by storm at dreadful cost. For a description of experienced infantry preparing for battle Grattan’s account can scarcely be bettered:

      …each man began to arrange himself for the combat in such a manner as the fancy of the moment would admit of – some by lowering their cartridge-boxes, others by turning theirs to the front in order that they might more conveniently make use of them; others unclasping their stocks or opening their shirt collars, and others oiling their bayonets, and more taking leave of their wives and children…⁷⁴

      Before going forward the regiment was addressed by Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, its divisional commander.

      ‘Rangers of Connaught, it is not my intention to expend any powder this evening. We’ll do this business with the cold iron.’ I said before [writes Grattan] the soldiers were silent – so they were, but the man who could be silent after such an address, made in such a way, and in such a place, had better have stayed at home. It may be asked what did they do? Why what would they do, or what would any one do, but give the loudest hurrah he was able.⁷⁵

      On another occasion Grattan turned round to look at the men of his company as they advanced on a French regiment, drawn up ready to receive them, and ‘they gave me a cheer that a lapse of many years has not made me forget, and I thought that that moment was the proudest of my life.’⁷⁶

      Grattan was full of praise for the Irish soldier. ‘He can live on as little nourishment as a Frenchman,’ he wrote; ‘give him a pipe of tobacco and he will march for two days without food and without grumbling; give him, in addition, a little spirits and a biscuit, and he will work for a week.’⁷⁷ There lay the rub, for give him more than a little and he could become beastly drunk. But even then, suggests Grattan, he had his advantages: ‘The English soldier is to the full as drunken as the Irish, and not half so pleasant in his liquor.’⁷⁸ Captain George Napier of the 52nd was an Englishman, with none of Grattan’s family connections with Ireland, but he still found the Irish irresistible. A drunken rogue in his company, Private John Dunn, walked seven miles to see Napier and his brother in his field hospital in Spain.

      I’m come to see how you and your brother is after the wounds…And sure I thought you was kilt. But myself knew you wouldn’t be plaised if I didn’t folly on after the villains, so I was afeard to go pick you up when ye was kilt, long life to you!

      Napier noticed that Dunn’s arm was bandaged.

      Why sure it’s nothing, only me arrum was cut off a few hours ago below the elbow joint, and I couldn’t come till the anguish was over a bit. But now I’m here, and thank God your honour’s arrum is not cut off, for it’s mighty cruel work; by Jasus, I’d rather be shot twinty times.

      Napier then asked after Dunn’s brother, a soldier in the same company.

      I seed him shot through the heart alongside wid me just as I got shot myself…but, captain, he died like a soldier, as your honour would wish him to die, and sure that’s enough. He had your favour whilst he lived, God be with him, and he’s gone now.

      The incident made a lasting impression on Napier, who told his sons: ‘whenever you see a poor lame soldier, recollect John Dunn, and never pass him coldly by.’⁷⁹

      A common thread of nationality linked Irish soldiers, and Irish regiments greeted one another with enormous and characteristic enthusiasm. Fanny Duberly was married to the paymaster of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, and accompanied him to the Crimean War. During operations around Varna on the Black Sea, before the army reached the Crimea, she watched a British division on the march.

      The Rifles marched first, next followed the 33rd, playing ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’ and cheerily enough the music sounded across our silent valley. The 88th Connaught Rangers gave a wild Irish screech (I know no better word) when they saw their fellow countrymen in the 8th Royal Irish Hussars and they played ‘Garry Owen’ with all their might…⁸⁰

      Sarah Anne Terrot, a nurse in the same campaign, paid tribute to Irish humour. ‘I began operations on the filthy and shattered leg of an Alma Irishman,’ she wrote, ‘who shouted out “Och!” the blessing of the touch of a woman’s hand; she touches my poor leg so tinder and gentle.’⁸¹ Tom Burns, another Irishman, answered a doctor’s enquiry as to whether he could feel a splinter of bone being probed for in his leg with: ‘Not a bit.’ After the doctor had walked off glumly, fearing the worst, he told the nurse: ‘If the doctor asks me a fool’s question, I am determined to give a rogue’s answer, as if he could dig away in my leg, to try to tear out my bones, and I not feel it.’⁸² Nurse Terrot compared her patients in national categories:

      There was a great variety of characters among the patients – the heavy clumsy English ploughboy, the sharp street-bred London boy, the canny cautious Scot, the irresistibly amusing Irishman with his brogue and bulls. Certainly estimable as they were the Scotch were in general the least attractive patients – silent, grave, cold and cautious, there were none so winning as the Irish, with their quick feeling and ready wit.⁸³

      Yet the uncomfortable fact remained that Ireland was a country under occupation by the very army in which Irishmen – officers and soldiers alike – played such an important role. In the last analysis the Irish state rested upon British military power.⁸⁴ Prime Minister Lord North wrote in 1775 that the authorities there ‘depend so much on the protection and assistance of the military force, who are in constant employment under the command of the civil magistrate for the carrying on of every part of the police of the kingdom, which could not be carried on without it.’⁸⁵ We must retain a sense of perspective, because the civil authorities across the whole of the United Kingdom frequently had recourse to military support in an era when violent unrest was frequent. And until the terrifying outbreak of 1798, eighteenth century Ireland was remarkably quiet. In the summer of 1745, when the army was at full stretch, finding garrisons in the Mediterranean, campaigning in Flanders and about to campaign in Scotland, the garrison of Ireland was a mere four battalions of foot and six regiments of cavalry.

      Yet there was an added difficulty. Whenever Britain found herself at war with France or Spain, she faced the prospect of a descent on Ireland, in which French or Spanish troops would form the rallying-point for disaffected Irishmen. Regiments were sent to Ireland when the risk of invasion loomed: three regiments of foot went there in early 1727 when Spanish invasion seemed likely, and returned once the threat had passed. In November 1759 the Prime Minister warned the Marquis of Granby, commanding the British contingent in Germany, that the French fleet was at sea, ‘to invade this country or Ireland’. Accordingly, Prince Ferdinand, the allied commander was to ‘get any Troops he can – Swiss, German deserters or regular German troops – in order to increase and strengthen his Army…But English we have not to send.’⁸⁶

      The most dangerous potential invasion came in December 1796 when a substantial French fleet carrying 12,000 soldiers under General Lazare Hoche slipped past the British blockade, but was prevented by bad weather from disgorging its troops: as the nationalist leader Wolfe Tone put it, England had not had such an escape since the Armada. During the great rebellion of 1798 a much smaller force under the French General Joseph Humbert landed at Killala, on the Mayo coast, and beat Lieutenant General Gerard Lake in an episode which lived on in folklore as ‘the races of Castlebar’. But just as co-ordination of operations within Ireland was a major reason for the rebels’ failure,