The advance party would turn the corner, meet the barricade, stop in some confusion, probably detach some men to try and shift it. The Irish would choose their moment to fire on them, perhaps only a third of them, to give the impression they were a smaller force. They would hope to knock out five or six men, no more at that range. The English would falter, then form up to return fire. A few Irish would show themselves, at extreme range, invite fire. The Irish would wait until the first volley, then their sword and spear men would rise up from the ditches in which they had been hiding, closer than the musketeers, hurl their darts and rush in while the men were fumbling with the clumsy muskets, reloading.
Fire. Ground the musket. Ram a charge of powder down the muzzle, hoping there was no smouldering powder left in the barrel, in which case the new charge would ignite and blow your face off. Ram a piece of wadding down on top of the powder. Take out the ball, ram that down hard. Raise the musket. Pour the priming charge, check the firing mechanism. Fire. It took an agonising time, with wild, mud-coated and half naked savages leaping down the hillside towards you.
With any luck, it would seem to the Irish as if they were about to overwhelm the advance guard. The rest of the English column would be drawn in, ordered on. The Pass was the only way forward. To encourage the English to advance into the Pass, men would suddenly appear from the rear of the column, and on either side, opening fire or hurling their darts before vanishing into the turf. There would be some panic and confusion, no room to spread out on the treacherous ground, the army being pushed forward into the defile, still blocked by the trees lain over it and cunningly tied together. It was a technique the Irish were very fond of using.
Well, thought Gresham grimly, let's see if we can rewrite the script.
His men were about to round the corner, where he had gambled they would meet the barricade of trees. There! Two pistol shots in quick succession, followed by two more. Blanks, double-loaded with powder but with no ball in the barrel. A louder noise than a simple pistol shot. Unmistakable. It was the pre-arranged signal. The barrier was there, as predicted.
A trumpet blared, and Gresham and his twenty-five horse rode out at the gallop, scattering stones and earth as they went. It was a warm, muggy day, a thin layer of cloud or mist over the sun, no wind to move anything. The clattering of the hooves seemed to hang in the air, motionless. Ahead of them rode six Irish horseboys, local recruits whose loyalty had been shown in previous encounters. Great, unwieldy bundles were strapped to their horses' sides; bundles of faggots. Like those used to burn heretics. Gresham, George, Mannion and his three sergeants held smaller bundles tied by a single rope to their saddles. And on the other side, smouldering slow fuses.
As if on cue, a number of Irish emerged from the edge of the wood, advanced a few paces and either knelt to rest their muskets on top of a convenient mound, or drove sticks into the soft earth with a Y-fork at the top on which to rest the heavy barrel. The trumpet blast caught them unawares, the sight of the horsemen giving most of them cause for pause. By the time the Irish realised that the ground was too rough for the cavalry to attack them, Gresham's foot soldiers had jumped into the ditches, largely dry now, that ran along each side of the road. Resting their muskets on the front edge of the ditch, twenty men lined each ditch.
The Irish muskets were confused. They had expected to see the advance party milling around in the middle of the roadway, firing off at a virtually unseen enemy almost at random. Forty men dropping in disciplined style into the ditch, half hidden with not a shot yet fired, was not part of the plan, any more than thirty swordsmen dropping in behind them. There were a few, desultory shots from the edge of the woodland, no more. The English were hardly visible. Puffs of smoke hung motionless for a moment on the edge of the woods.
Gresham and his horsemen had only their speed as their protection. They rode pell-mell at the barricade. Every shock as his horse's hooves hit the ground was transmitted into Gresham's body. A wild, heady excitement took him over, the cold of combat being replaced by a fierce fire that seemed to rise from his stomach. He had seen men hit who were in this state, men who had ridden on unaware of the blood streaming from them. He was yelling now, screaming, as were his other horsemen, the dust and the noise incredible. Some of the Irish chose them as the better target. Every time a plume of smoke showed the whereabouts of an Irish marksman, at least two of the English muskets would crack out, aiming at the source of the shot. One of the horses faltered, but picked up and rode on. It had been nicked, no more. At that range a serious hit, particularly when the ball was losing momentum, would be more luck than judgement. Gresham felt his own horse stagger, tensed himself for the fall, but it top picked up and drove on, every sinew and muscle straining. There were one, two shots from the English side.
The horseboys stuck their slow fuses into the heart of the pile of faggots roped to each horse, and with a wild cry stood up in their stirrups, cut through the rope with a wild slash of the knife and hurled the faggots over the heads of the men in the ditch into the woods. For a few seconds, the piles hung in the air, and then with a whoosh of flame they ignited. Oil-soaked in the middle, the outer layers were damp and thick smoke started to pour from them. One horseboy suddenly crumpled like a shot bird, caught by a lucky musket ball. His horse panicked, reared up, dragging the dead body of its rider along the ground, the man's head bouncing obscenely up and down on the stones, a mass of blood and torn skin. The horse crashed into the barrier of trees, swung round and galloped back up the pass, leaving its rider draped across the dead branches like an offering at a sylvan altar. A thick pall of smoke hung now over the barricade, robbing Irish and English alike of their targets. There was just enough visibility to see the English horsemen arrive at the barricade, two or three tree trunks lashed together and laid right across the road. It was too high to leap, the great branches sticking up like the masts of a ship; the greenery of the leaves telling how recently the trees had been felled.
Gresham and five others reached the barricade, took their packages and jammed them hard under one of the tree trunks. As they did so, the other horsemen flung the heavy canvas coverings off the grappling hooks they had been carrying, threw them over the bulk of the same tree, yanked them tight and then rode back paying out long lengths of rope as they did so. The twelve charges of powder Gresham and the others had laid under the great trunk went off almost together; the fuses had been kept deliberately short. The force of the explosion lifted the great lump of wood several feet into the air. When the smoke and dust settled, it had been split in two. The horses had reared and bucked savagely at the explosions, but the hours spent training them to cope with noise paid off and none bolted. Their riders took the strain on the ropes, and dug in their spurs. With a great, grinding roar the two pieces of the once-great tree separated even further, leaving a clear gap in the road. There was a two-foot crater where the powder had bitten most hard.
Forty or fifty Irish on either side of the road, confused by the roar of twelve almost simultaneous explosions, rose from the rough ground in front of the woodland where they had lain hidden armed with swords or short spears, one or two with bows. The wisdom of where the English had gone to ground now became clear. Far enough away from the explosions to be unharmed by them, they had also for the most part held their fire. A rattling volley crashed out from the men on either side. Five, six of the Irish were flung back by the impact of a musket ball on their bodies, human flesh punched into rag doll. Seemingly uncertain, the Irish began to edge forward to muster a charge when, in what seemed an incredibly short space of time, a second, ragged volley came from the English, equally accurate.
A trumpet blared from back up the road, and the English column started to advance on the now cleared road. The remaining Irish hesitated for a moment, then with more and more flitting round the edge of the woodland they began to fall back. It was clear that, though they knew the terrain, they were finding the boggy ground on either side of the road difficult. More and more left it to join the hard surface of the road fifty or so yards beyond the broken barricade. The advancing English army were round the corner now. The cheer that went up at the sight of the opened pass was replaced by a more bloody roar, as the men saw the Irish scuttling back along the road in retreat. Uncontrollably, a mass of horses leapt forward from the column, swept down the road in pursuit of the Irish. Many of them were the young bloods Essex had recruited, wearing outrageously plumed hats that were no match for a full gallop, and which caught the wind like sails. Gresham and his troops had reined in, were standing by the side of the road. They let the horsemen thunder by in their vain pursuit — the Irish would melt back into the surrounding terrain and leave the road the minute they realised they were being pursued, and the ground was too treacherous for the horses to follow. As the dust of their passage settled, and before the main body of foot drew up, Gresham looked down and saw three or four fine hats lying in the dust, their high plumes sadly bent and broken.
'The Pass of Plumes,' he muttered and felt the stinging pain behind his eyes that always came after action. Essex rode up to him, hard. Clearly he had wanted to ride off with his young men, chase and cut the Irish down. A lone musket shot from down the road and the agonised whinny of a horse showed the folly of what the young men had done. They would turn about soon enough, when the initial excitement wore off and they realised they could be
