They struck camp and withdrew from Limerick altogether during the next fortnight, and marched with the sun on their backs to Mullingar, in the center of the island, where all of King William's host was assembling. A few days after they arrived the trains of wagons began to come from Dublin in their clouds of dust and noise, bringing the great cannons and mortars that had been sent from the Tower of London.
On June 8th they marched west to Ballymore and easily took a little out-post there, and made prisoners of one of the best Irish regiments, which had been left exposed in the middle of nowhere for no reason.
On June 19th they reached Athlone, which bestrode the Shannon. It consisted of an English town on the Leinster side—which the Jacobites abandoned almost immediately—and an Irish city on the Connaught side—which they retreated into, and defended with unnerving ferocity for two weeks. Scouts were sent across the Shannon; most did not come back. The ones that did brought news that cascaded down the chain of command to Bob: General St. Ruth had brought his whole army to a camp west of the Irish town, just out of range of Ginkel's Dutch cannon.
The battle of Athlone was straightforward and bloody: Ginkel's artillerymen fired a cannonball a minute for ten days, and an avalanche of bombs and mortar-stones, across the river into the Irish town and completely destroyed it. Meanwhile his foot-soldiers tried again and again to force a crossing on the stone bridge joining the English to the Irish town. This was the only way of reaching the Connaught side of the Shannon, and everyone knew it. The Irish had destroyed one segment of the bridge. The gap would have to be closed with timbers. Under hellish covering fire of artillery, Ginkel's troops would go there at night and try to throw beams across the gap while Irish snipers hidden in the ruins of Athlone pierced them with musket-balls. Then Irish troops would show equal bravery in going down and setting the timbers afire, or casting them into the Shannon.
The Irish won the battle of the bridge, but lost that of Athlone when two thousand of Ginkel's troops forded the Shannon downstream on June 30th and forced their way into the Irish town.
St. Ruth thereby lost Athlone, and all of his troops who were trapped inside of its walls. The rules of Continental siege warfare were in effect, meaning that towns could hope for easy treatment if they surrendered but that resistance was to be punished by massacre. Bob's chief worry, then, was that he would be given a direct order to go into Athlone and massacre someone. The only thing that would be worse would be if the victims turned out to be Mr. McCarthy's company of foot-soldiers from Baron Youghal's regiment. Mr. McCarthy was a Dublin candle-maker who had spent all of his money to raise and outfit a company, and made himself its captain. Along the way he had recruited Teague Partry, who had in turn recruited several other of Bob's out-laws. Jack Shaftoe's sons—Bob's nephews—had gotten swept up in Regimental life, much as Jack and Bob had done at the same age. For all Bob knew, the boys might be carrying muskets now. So it was not out of all possibility that Bob might be obliged to swing a spadroon into the necks of his nephews during the mopping-up of Athlone. It was the sort of dilemma that might make a fellow anxious. Fortunately Bob had (as was his habit) imagined and anticipated the worst, and made up his mind in advance what he should do if it came to pass: He would excuse himself, declare himself Irish (easily enough done, as 'twas only a state of mind anyway), make the sign of the cross over his red-coated breast, and go running off into Connaught with the Partrys. He even had a sort of excuse worked out: He'd declare that the hag who'd brained him with the bottle in Limerick was his long-lost great-aunt. This scheme had the added advantage of getting him closer to Upnor. After the Jacobites had lost the war, he'd sign up with an Irish mercenary regiment and go campaigning on the Continent. If he picked the right time and place to desert, he could then simply walk to wherever Abigail was.
This plan actually seemed more attractive to him the more he considered it, and the more phantastickal refinements he added onto it. By the time he crossed that half-wrecked bridge into what had been the Irish side of Athlone, he was almost looking forward to finding whatever was left of Mr. McCarthy's company, and surrendering to it.
What he did not want was to find them dead, or to see them being hunted down in the streets by the Danish horsemen, who had reverted to the ways of the Vikings. So his fondest hope and worst nightmare were separated by an infinitesimally slender distance.
But he found nothing in Athlone save dead or dying Irishmen buried in settling piles of rubble. Fortunately a good part of the civilian population of Athlone had already fled into Connaught. A small Irish garrison was trapped near the bridge and enthusiastically butchered by the Danish cavalry. However, the great bulk of St. Ruth's force never even saw fighting, and remained safe in its camp. Ginkel spent several days getting his army across the river, which meant that St. Ruth could stage a leisurely and orderly retreat of his whole army toward the interior of Connaught, or indeed all the way to the port of Galway if he chose.
So Bob found himself in the fabled land of Connaught. No, it couldn't be; this part was connected to Leinster and the rest of the damned island by that bridge, it was an excrescence of the bad, ruined Ireland into the good. And fortunately it was surrounded by a wall to prevent the contagions of the world from spreading. Irish Athlone was just a buboe, holding the plague pent up inside.
When they got the order to march out of its western gate, then they would enter the true Connaught that Teague Partry had sung of during his long raw watches on the Develin Tower.
"IT IS SUNDAY, the twelfth of July, Anno Domini sixteen hundred and ninety-one," said Captain Barnes helpfully, shaking Bob's shoulder. "The train has arrived; we expect a long march."
Very faint pink light gleamed in jackets of dew that had formed on the cold pale stones all around. Bob exerted all his will not to close his eyes and go back to sleep.
They were still in Athlone, sleeping in a half-wrecked wool warehouse that stood on the road uphill from the bridge. Wheels were grinding on the ashlars of that road, drawn by hundreds of patient hooves that beat a lulling tattoo on the stones.
Ginkel's army had marched out a day ago and left them behind to await a train of wagons from Dublin, and to make sure it got across the bridge safely. Today they would have to catch up with the army and, if that army was on the move, accomplish a second march as well.
When someone was trying to kill him and his men (which was not really all that often), Bob's chief professional obligation was to think about that. At all other times he thought about food. Treading carefully among sleeping men, he came to a place where he could look out through a bomb-hole and see orange flames fondling the bum of Black Betty, the company's prize kettle, out in the court. There would be a sort of gruel boiling in it, with shreds of mutton flashing to the top occasionally, and an inch of grease floating on it. In other weathers a cloud of steam would be roiling from Black Betty's mouth, but today she was surrounded and hemmed in by æons of fog proceeding out of the west, seemingly drawn by the feeble promise of the pink gloaming over Leinster. If any steam was coming out of Black Betty, it was like a fart in a whirlwind.
By the time Bob had groped his way to the coffee-pot and burnt his hands and lips on a tin cup of Mocha's finest, the pink light that had greeted him earlier had been snuffed out by the progress of this fog. When he went about nudging men awake, they were all certain it must be midnight, and not dawn as Bob earnestly claimed.
Connaught would not let go of her mysteries easily, then. By the time they fell in with the regiment, chasing the customary, hideous screams of sergeants through the gloom, a kind of profound blue-gray light had begun to emanate from the fog: light without warmth or even the colors that made men remember warmth. There was a lot of bumping into other companies in rubble-congested streets, and standing still for no discernible reason, and then at last a gate materialized around them and they understood that the regiment was forcing its way through a bottleneck. They marched out of Athlone and left its unburied dead to the flies—for only flies could reach the ones who lay in the cellars of the fallen-in buildings.