LIVING HISTORY
The Last Invasion of Ireland... By. Richard- Haves. .(iiU :
t5s.) -
HISTORY is rarely capable of being written from oral tradition. This record of the invasion of Ireland by a small-French fleet in 1798 is not wholly pieced together from popular. -memory, but it does achieve "veracity of an 1 unusual kind from the vitality of popular memory about that invasion. Dr. Hayes has done all that the scholarly historian could do in the way of collecting data ..from the libraries of Paris, London, and Dublin ; nothing- has been neglected on- that side ; but one can- see that these records suddenly took on -flesh and blood when he tramped over the hills of Erris -and Tirawley and listened to the words of the peasants, marked the names of the places through which the French passed on..their ;march through Cas_debar where they . routed General Lake, to _ Ballinamuck where they were routed in turn, and stood, in a due spirit of reverence, on every spot .halloviecl by the blood t. of French, -English and Itish dead. He has, in that way, created an •Irish "Forty-Five "—not romantic, not _over-,- idealised, not . exaggerated,. but spiritedly alive and Just to every,. side.
The Franco-Irish forces never had a chance _of victory like. the chance Hoche and Wolfe Tone' had two years before, when the French fleet was tearing its cables off Bantry and the " English wind " kept blowing the . danger of invasion from the Irish shore. Then Floche and Grouchy had about 15,000 men and Cork was a, near objective which they would, had they landed, have taken with any normal degree_of fortune. Humbert led an .;r4enttme„ not an army ; he had t,000 men, three small guns and 3,000 muskets to arm his Irish sup- porters he had no immediate objective and he marched thrOugh' a_ country' .already discouraged by the collapse of the Rebedlion., That does, n,ot in the least r_liminish the interest of his expedition, and it augments its gallantry, _though it does .chasten and *press the romantic imagination to think of tlie fate„in store ,for the people, when the foray has run its Rurs.e.• : All this atmosphere of gallantry in the incursion, and misery in the ddnouement, is evoked in this book by the combination of research among State papers and research among those only State records that native Ireland possesses—the memory of the folk. Those naive records have never been drawn on hitherto by historians, and the happy result makes one think what a different kind of history we might have of many great events had such a method been applied elsewhere. I had been reading just before I took up this veracious and living book the history of the Egyptian Sudan in the Cam- bridge Modern History (it is now more than a quarter of a century old). As I recall it, I can recall only an incredibly one-sided narrative in which the Mihdi leads an army of " fanatics " and Gordon is "the hero of heroes " ; and one must think, with regret for the truth, how the Abyssinian war will likewise be recorded from the point of view of the conqueror, with no patient and reverent historian to annotate from the lips of the defeated their equal gallantry and their (at least) equally valid ideals.
Dr. Hayes has written a book not only of the most living and spirited interest, but of a type that might serve as a model to any historian. To say that it reads like fiction is merely a left-handed way of saying that it has achieved all the per- suasive immediacy of a contemporary record.
SEIN OPAOLAIN.
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