Myles Away From Dublin Read Free Page A

dead loss, the answer was ‘Does the army itself pay?’ What army on earth does pay? If a country must have one (as apparently every country must) why not make it worth looking at on ceremonial occasions and get away from this awful monotony of nameless men in battle-dress and steel helmets marching endlessly away to God knows where?
    Suddenly the Blue Hussars were abolished. No official reason was given. Possibly some civil servant, suffering from his occupational disease of indigestion, found that their extinction would save the country £20 and that maybe another five could be made by flogging their uniforms to the Queen’s Theatre. That sort of reasoning is contemptible.
A Silly Remark
    A few weeks ago in a restaurant I heard a member of a group which I would describe as of the student class point scornfully to a paper and say: ‘They can’t even write or print correctly. They call the Costume Barracksat Athlone the Custume Barracks.’
    That rather shallow of military dress, between the garb of the Blue Hussars and the defenders at Athlone, is my excuse for referring here to the Custume Barracks at Athlone. When a student myself, I tried to write an extended essay on Sergeant Custume and remember being deeply shocked at the way any information about him was so diffused and scanty. I cannot reveal, even now, his Christian name. There is no consecutive account of him in existence in print and among the scattered data is the Memoirs of King James II ,to be seen in some libraries, and A Diary of the Siege of Athlone ,not to be seen in any library except the British Museum, where it is an unpublished manuscript, author described as ‘Engineer Officer’ but otherwise unidentified .
The Critical Bridge
    Some people insist on identifying an important stage in Irish history with the Battle of the Boyne; decisive as that was, the Battle of the Shannon should not be ignored. It was there that Sergeant Custume and ten unnamed comrades gave their lives in a vain but very courageous gesture.
    The year was 1691 and the Jacobite war here was coming to a climax. The Irish armies, under Maxwell, a Scot, had been driven across the Shannon at Athlone but were encamped in good order on the western bank of the river. The stout masonry bridge which they seemed to command consisted of nine arches plus, at the western side, a drawbridge with a tower or castle nearby, this bridge separating them from the Williamite armies under Ginkel. Clearly it was Ginkel’s job to take the bridge and cross the river.
    On this apparently simple situation, any records I looked up are surprisingly vague. The Irish on the Connacht side broke the bridge but it is not clearwhether they demolished part of the masonry structure or simply raised the drawbridge. The two forces were roughly equal except that the Williamites had great superiority in artillery and had probably attacked the tower housing the machinery operating the drawbridge and disabled it. In any event, Ginkel’s army had to cross the Shannon using a bridge, part of which was missing.
    After a bombardment lasting 98 hours, his men started across the existing part of the bridge in the middle of a June night, carrying massive beams and planks to span the broken part of the bridge. So skilful and stealthy were they that they had their timbers in position before the defenders knew exactly what was happening; the confusion was probably due to the nonstop exchange of gunfire across the river.
    It was here that Sergeant Custume came to notice. He went to his superior officer and volunteered, with ten men who accompanied him, to tear down the shaky structure of planks. He was given permission to attempt what seemed a quite impossible task, for the timbers were massive and gunfire at the spot was unrelenting. It may seem comic to add that Sergeant Custume and his little company wore armour but the detail is important inasmuch as the rifle, with its revolving missile of great penetration, had not yet been