354 Timehri. 
In all history so far as I have read it, I know of no sadder picture than this 
outpouring of the swordsmen of an ancient nation led by the chieftain families 
of an aristocracy prouder than that of Castile to perish unrecorded amid the 
welter of acontinentinarms. Someday a student of the new revival of intellec- 
tual studies in Ireland, some product of the new Universities or of the new spirit 
in dear old Trinity, working among the records of continental war-offices, may 
unearth the facts and relate what successors the Butler who defended Frank- 
fort against Gustavus, the Butler his brother who saved the Holy Roman 
Empire for two centuries by slaying Wallenstein, the O’Neill who defended Arras 
the Preston who defended Louvain and Genappe, what predecessors the 
O’Mahony who saved Cremona, the Lally who won Fontenoy, the Lacy who 
conquered the Crimea, the Fitzgerald lass who defended Gerona, the O'Higgins 
who liberated Chili and Peru, the O'Donoghue who was first President of 
Mexico, the Clarke who was Napoleon’s Minister of War, the Macmahon of 
Magenta and Solferino, found among the curishees of the Protectorate. 
With Black Hugh O’Neill and those Gaelic and Celto-Norman chiefs and 
nobles and their military families marched the survivors of those who had met 
the superior numbers and superior arms of Munroe’s dour Scots Covenanters 
at Benburb five years before, and broke them there, horse, foot and artillery, 
by the pleasant Northern Blackwater, leaving the Confederate cause dominant 
in old Ultonia. With him marched those who had outfaced the terrible Iron- 
sides in Clonmel breach and hurled them back time and again until the streets 
were filled with nearly 3,000 Parliamentarian dead, paying back the debt of 
Drogheda and answering the muttered thunder of the 68th Psalm with fierce 
Rosgq-catha and defiant Irish yell.* With him marched the haggard remnant of 
1,200 men who had fought by his side for six months of storm, starvation and 
plague against Ireton, Cromwell's ferocious and untiring son-in-law, on the 
crumbling bastions of Limerick, until Fennell’s treachery did what numbers, 
resources and valour could not do, and won St. John’s Gate and citadel for the 
Roundheads. They were looking, most of them, for the last time on the golden 
gorse and white-tufted cotton of the bogland, on the soft, grey, rounded hills, 
on the wide lakes lapping their low green shores with amber water. They were 
for Muscovy to fight the Golden Horde, for Poland to ride against the Turk with 
Patrick Gordon and Hetman Sobieski (not yet a king), for France to pass the 
Rhine with Condé and die at Salzbach with the brave and good Turenne. Is it 
likely that they belied their breed in the land of their adoption and that their 
wild slogan yell was not the herald of victory many a time and oft, by Danube, 
Rhine and Volga in the days that were to come ? 
“ Empty fame at the best, 
Glory half-dimmed with shame: 
* «The wall as well as the houses behind was manned by men who did not flinch in their 
death struggle with their hereditary foe. Caught in atrap the Cromwellian soldiers bore 
themselves bravely as was ever their wont, but the plunging shots tore their ranks and strewed 
the ground with slain. To break through that semi-circle of fire was beyond their power and 
when night fell the survivors staggered back to acknowledge that for once they had been 
foiled. Their loss had been enormous ; according to one account it was reckoned at not less 
than 2,500 men.”—Gardiner’s Commonwealth and Protectorate, 
