"You want a brute for a sergeant, so that he can go do the mopping-up while you wring your hands and disavow his unchivalrous deeds," Bob said. "For that type of sergeant you must look in a common regiment. But we were organized by Churchill—"
"The Earl of Marlborough, to you!"
"In truth, to me he is John. But whatever he is called, he has odd tastes in sergeants, and though he has been replaced by de Zwolle, you are stuck with me—unless you would care to promote another from the ranks."
"You'll do, Sergeant Shaftoe."
Finally the fog had lifted so that they could see as far as they pleased, though things more distant were wrapped in shimmering auras, bristling with iridescent needles. All was more or less as Bob had seen it with his ears. Across a bog they faced a hill whose near slope was exceeding well trenched, the trenches filled with Irish musketeers in gray coats. They would be armed with good new French muskets, not the trash that had served as firewood after the Battle of the Boyne. Far to the south the Jacobite line curved around the flank of the hill into some trees, and thus out of Bob's view. Directly in front lay what appeared to be the worst part of the bog, where three water-filled ruts twined together in the heart of a morass. The main Athlone-Galway road was no more than a few hundred paces off to the right. It sported first a bridge and then a long, strait causeway over the boggy ground.
A mass of English and Huguenot cavalry were deployed in a clump around the road. Bob could see several regimental standards at a glance, meaning that this was probably styled a division, thus probably commanded by a major-general. Most likely the Huguenot Henri de Massue, who, though he'd never see France again, still went by his French title, the marquis de Ruvigny. Ruvigny was one of three generals King William had sent out to Ireland in the spring to replace ones who had exasperated him with their slowness. Another was a Scotsman, Hugh MacKay, who was commanding the division of infantry—Bob's division, for the nonce—that was now looking out over the bog.
The bridge and the causeway could be reached by a short advance, which raised the question of why this cavalry division had not already taken it. The answer lay half a mile farther down the road, where an old castle rose up above the western end of the causeway. It was little more than a wreck: just four mossy stone walls, with mounds at the corners suggesting towers. But the tops of the walls were furry with musket-barrels, and the surrounding hamlet had been fortified with earth-works. Several roads then radiated westwards from the village. Various Jacobite regiments had positioned themselves short distances up those roads so that they could converge on any force that made it over the causeway and into the killing-zone around the castle.
Bob spent more time than was good for him searching out the standards of the Irish foot regiments and trying to identify Baron Youghal's colors. That would tell him approximately where Mr. McCarthy the candlemaker was situated with the Partrys' company. But he was unable to see matters clearly, as most of these regiments were dug in on the hill farther south and across the bog, two miles or more away, and their colors had not been particularly large or glorious to begin with.
"This is an excellent position," Bob said admiringly. "It could not be better—for the Irish."
Captain Barnes gave him a sharp look, but softened when he understood that Bob was merely stating facts, and according a sort of gentlemanly respect to the foe. "Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise."
"Where are our horses, then?"
"We must imagine them."
"Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind."
"We need never mount up. Dragoons are supposed to ride into battle, then dismount and fight as infantrymen," Barnes reminded him. "We walked here, that much is true. But that's in the past. Now it's as if we have all just climbed out of our saddles."
"That is why they have placed us here, hard up against the cavalry—we are to support them," Bob supposed, looking into Barnes's eyes. Barnes showed no sign of disagreement. Bob turned away from General MacKay's part of the field—the bog in the center—and toward General Ruvigny's—the road, the causeway, and the village. At first glance this latter seemed the harder assignment, but he felt unaccountably relieved that they would not have to harry thousands of Irishmen out of the maze of ditches that they had cut into the peat.
Bob continued, "We are meant to advance along the road, I take it." He then turned his attention to the castle, and tried to count the colors on its walls and in the surrounding village.
"It is a better assignment than to advance across that bog," Barnes observed.
"Anything would be better than that, Captain," Bob said. "When I am hit I want to fall with sun in my eyes. Not mud in my lungs."
BOB, NORMALLY AN IN-THE-THICK-OF-THINGS kind of soldier, now had the unfamiliar opportunity of sitting still and watching the battle unfold, just like a General. This came about because the cavalry to which they were attached was not ordered to do anything for the first few hours; no General in his right mind would send his regiments across that causeway in the face of those defenses. In fact, very early on most of Ruvigny's cavalry were detached and sent miles down the line toward the left wing, leaving only a regiment or so to guard the road. If the Black Torrent Guards had been real dragoons (with horses) they probably would have gone, too. As it was, they were stuck in the least active part of the battlefield.
But every other part of the line attacked. The only part Bob could see was the foot in the center, but from distant rumblings of thousands of hooves, and movements of reinforcing horse across the Irish rear, he could tell that a large cavalry engagement was under way at the opposite end.
MacKay's infantry spent the first few hours of the battle failing against their Irish counterparts. Though 'twere more just to say that Ginkel had failed by ordering them even to try. The Irish had cut successive lines with protected passages from one to the next. The walls of the ditches were graded to afford protection against an attack from the east while leaving their occupants naked to fire from the west. So as soon as MacKay's men fought their way across the sucking mud into one ditch, they would find that their foes had all vanished like wills-o'-the-wisp and reappeared in the next ditch uphill, whence they could fire musket-balls into the attackers at their pleasure. A small number of English actually managed to get through all of the ditches and hedgerows, but by the time they had done so, they were more a smattering of refugees than an army; and when they finally staggered out into open country along the base of the hill, they were confronted by an Irish battle-line that looked as if it had drawn itself up on a parade ground. The Irish charged with a roar that reached Bob's ears a few seconds after he saw them leap forward, and the surviving English fell back all the way to where they had started an hour before. By the time any semblance of order had been reëstablished among MacKay's battalions, the Irish had re-occupied the very same positions, in the forward-most ditch, as they'd been in when the fog had first lifted. The field looked the same as it had before, save that dead Englishmen were strewn all over it. Farther south it was the same except that the dead were Danish, Dutch, Hessians, and Huguenots.