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  • The End of An Old Song
  • Russell Fraser (bio)

Not caring who heard them, the men grumbled good-humoredly, heaping abuse on the Prince's advisers. They talked a good fight, in particular O'Sullivan, the adjutant-general and a "styterin fule." What did such a one know about the bloody business of war? Hibernia's son, O'Sullivan sat highest of any in the councils of Prince Charlie. Bearing out the army's opinion of his soldiership, he had chosen the worst ground in the Highlands to fight on, flat as a billiard table, ground for horses and artillery, Englishmen's ground. Was he in King Geordie's pockets, they asked one another. "Withoot a doot."

Higher up the moor, officers on horseback were shouting commands. The men, extending their arms, measured distances between themselves, as if they were forming up on parade. As they fell into line they passed an angry sergeant, storming at men asleep beside the wall. "Do you want an English spontoon in your guts?" he cried, slicing the air with his sword. Not heeding him, they went right on sleeping.

Peering through the rain, young Charles of Inverallochy studied the lay of the land. A flat six hundred yards opened between him and Barrell's regiment of English, its flank resting on the Well of the Dead. This deep cistern, not visible to the eye until you were upon it, waited to swallow the unwary. To his eye Drumossie Moor looked like a killing ground. Could he and his men make it across, under fire of the enemy's guns?

His mind roved back to Annie McIver, near in person as the crow flies but, as he hoped to possess her, more remote than the antipodes. She seemed always on the verge of an astonishing discovery that might lift her as high as the heavens or dash her on the rocks below. Most men he knew wanted women who kneeled at their feet, but she wouldn't kneel to Pope or King, and this intrigued him. The poetry that came from her like water from the rock was her special way of seeing the world. How could such a woman live happily ever after? Was there enough in an ordinary mortal like him to content her? [End Page 524]

In the lee of the stone wall that angled across the moor, men smoked or wrote letters or caught forty winks. Many were homesick, missing wives and children, aware that their crofts needed tending. Patrick Grant shook a pocketwatch and held it up to his ear. He had taken it from the body of an English soldier at Falkirk, but no one told him to wind it and since then it had died. James Johnstone, aide-de-camp to General Murray, leaned his clutch of papers against his horse's pommel, scribbling an entry while there was time. Falkirk weighed on him heavily. Why hadn't Prince Charlie pushed on to Edinburgh after defeating the English? "We ought to have pursued them with the rapidity of a torrent," he wrote, "but with fatal blindness the Prince turned aside." What fate was in store for them now?

Colonel MacLachlan, long a widower and only recently remarried, pictured the young wife waiting for him in Kilbride. "I shall leave this," he wrote her, "with one who I know will send it to you if I die. Think well of the love of a man who, whatever his faults, gave his life for his king and for freedom." The colonel's second in command, Malcolm of Drimnin, lay wrapped in his plaid, not trying to sleep but letting his mind ramble, "throwing the reins on the horse's withers." The ground he lay on was in places ankle deep in mud. Water soaked his cartridges and musket, the flints and priming pan, even the touchhole. Taking out his pipe, he chewed on the mouthpiece and thought of battles past and the days in between. "We build our fires," he said to himself, "cook our meals, listen to the priest, talk to our fellows, all in all the most humdrum life a man could imagine." About himself he was...

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