'The door will not hold them much longer. She heard her father speak again, but this time his words were not for her. 'I am fine,' she said, even though 'fine' was hardly the word to describe how she was feeling.
She felt her father's arms around her, pulling her into the huddle of men.
Dirt and blood smeared their faces and showed as dark patches against the deep green of their jackets and the blue of their trousers. On her hands and knees she crawled to where her father and a small group of his men crouched. Josie had seen death before, more death than any young woman should see, but never death like this. Men that Josie had known in life lay still and grotesque in death-her father's men-the men of the Fifth Battalion of the British 60th Regiment of Foot. 'Papa?' Her eyes roved over the bloody ruins.īodies lay dead and dying throughout the hall. She uncurled her fingers from those of the dead soldier and, slipping the shawl from her shoulders, she draped it to cover his face. Her father's voice shook her from the daze, and she heard the thudding of the French axes as they struck again and again against the thick heavy wood of the monastery's front door. 'Josie! For God's sake, get over here, girl!' Josie looked down and saw that life had left him, and, for all the surrounding chaos, the horror of it so shocked her that for a moment she could not shift her stare from his lifeless eyes. The rifleman's hand within hers jerked and then went limp.
Most of her father's men were dead, Sarah and Mary too. Stones that had for three hundred years sheltered monks and priests and holy Mass now witnessed carnage. 'En avant! En avant! Vive la République!' She heard their cries.Īll around was the acrid stench of gunpowder and of fresh spilt blood. The French hail of bullets through the holes where windows had once stood continued as the French dragoon troopers began to surge forwards in a great mass, the sound of their pas de charge loud even above the roar of gunpowder. She stayed where she was, kneeling by the soldier on the dusty stone floor of the old monastery in which her father and his men had taken refuge. High up in the deserted village of Telemos in the mountains north of Punhete, Josephine Mallington was desperately trying to staunch the young rifleman's bleeding when the French began their charge.
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