cross, however;” he said.  “The more they are, the more we shall kill.”  But soon he saw them laying hurdles on the quagmire.  A broader and safer path was formed; squadron after squadron reached firm ground:  the flank of the Irish army was speedily turned.  The French general was hastening to the rescue when a cannon ball carried off his head.  Those who were about him thought that it would be dangerous to make his fate known.  His corpse was wrapped in a cloak, carried from the field, and laid, with all secresy, in the sacred ground among the ruins of the ancient monastery of Loughrea.  Till the fight was over neither army was aware that he was no more.  To conceal his death from the private soldiers might perhaps have been prudent.  To conceal it from his lieutenants was madness.  The crisis of the battle had arrived; and there was none to give direction.  Sarsfield was in command of the reserve.  But he had been strictly enjoined by Saint Ruth not to stir without orders; and no orders came.  Mackay and Ruvigny with their horse charged the Irish in flank.  Talmash and his foot returned to the attack in front with dogged determination.  The breastwork was carried.  The Irish, still fighting, retreated from inclosure to inclosure.  But, as inclosure after inclosure was forced, their efforts became fainter and fainter.  At length they broke and fled.  Then followed a horrible carnage.  The conquerors were in a savage mood.  For a report had been spread among them that, during the early part of the battle, some English captives who had been admitted to quarter had been put to the sword.  Only four hundred prisoners were taken.  The number of the slain was, in proportion to the number engaged, greater than in any other battle of that age.  But for the coming on of a moonless night, made darker by a misty rain, scarcely a man would have escaped.  The obscurity enabled Sarsfield, with a few squadrons which still remained unbroken, to cover the retreat.  Of the conquerors six hundred were killed, and about a thousand wounded.

The English slept that night on the field of battle.  On the following day they buried their companions in arms, and then marched westward.  The vanquished were left unburied, a strange and ghastly spectacle.  Four thousand Irish corpses were counted on the field of battle.  A hundred and fifty lay in one small inclosure, a hundred and twenty in another.  But the slaughter had not been confined to the field of battle.  One who was there tells us that, from the top of the hill on which the Celtic camp had been pitched, he saw the country, to the distance of near four miles, white with the naked bodies of the slain.  The plain looked, he said, like an immense pasture covered by flocks of sheep.  As usual, different estimates were formed even by eyewitnesses.  But it seems probable that the number of the Irish who fell was not less than seven thousand.  Soon a multitude of dogs came to feast on the carnage.  These beasts became so fierce, and acquired such a taste for human flesh, that it was long dangerous for men to travel this road otherwise than in companies.108