. Exertion had become more
dreadful to them than death. It was not to be expected that men who
would not help themselves should help each other. Nobody asked and
nobody showed compassion. Familiarity with ghastly spectacles produced
a hardheartedness and a desperate impiety, of which an example will not
easily be found even in the history of infectious diseases. The moans of
the sick were drowned by the blasphemy and ribaldry of their comrades.
Sometimes, seated on the body of a wretch who had died in the morning,
might be seen a wretch destined to die before night, cursing, singing
loose songs, and swallowing usquebaugh to the health of the devil. When
the corpses were taken away to be buried the survivors grumbled. A dead
man, they said, was a good screen and a good stool. Why, when there was
so abundant a supply of such useful articles of furniture, were
people to be exposed to the cold air and forced to crouch on the moist
ground? [445]

Many of the sick were sent by the English vessels which lay off the
coast to Belfast, where a great hospital had been prepared. But scarce
half of them lived to the end of the voyage. More than one ship lay
long in the bay of Carrickfergus heaped with carcasses, and exhaling the
stench of death, without a living man on board, [446]

The Irish army suffered much less. The kerne of Munster or Connaught
was dune as well off in the camp as if he had been in his own mud cabin
inhaling the vapours of his own quagmire. He naturally exulted in the
distress of the Saxon heretics, and flattered himself that they would be
destroyed without a blow. He heard with delight the guns pealing all
day over the graves of the English officers, till at length the funerals
became too numerous to be celebrated with military pomp, and the
mournful sounds were succeeded by a silence more mournful still.

The superiority of force was now so decidedly on the side of James that
he could safely venture to detach five regiments from his army, and to
send them into Connaught. Sarsfield commanded them. He did not, indeed,
stand so high as he deserved in the royal estimation. The King, with
an air of intellectual superiority which must have made Avaux and
Rosen bite their lips, pronounced him a brave fellow, but very scantily
supplied with brains. It was not without great difficulty that the
Ambassador prevailed on His Majesty to raise the best officer in the
Irish army to the rank of Brigadier. Sarsfield now full