Page 255 - Demo

Chapter Seven 255
Glory half-dimmed with shame. War-battered dogs are we, Fighters in every clime,
Fillers of trench and of grave, Mockers, bemocked by time. War-dogs, hungry and grey, Gnawing a naked bone, Fighters in every clime,
Every cause but their own.
The Wild Geese
Of the Irish who led abroad to escape English persecution, the greatest body became known as the Wild Geese-those exiles who constituted the Irish Brigade in the service of France.
The “Wild Geese”- Na Géadhna Fiadhaine , was the romantic and sorrowful name given by the Irish to their exiled brothers who, like the wild birds with their lamenting cries migrated to the Continent before and after the Battle of Aughrim and the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.
In fact, it’s probably true to say that the irst “oicial” light of the “Wild Geese” took place at midnight on 14 September, 1607, when Hugh O’Neill and Rory O Donnell, the respective earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, set sail from Rathmullan, in Lough Swilly, county Donegal-never to return. As previously referenced, this incident is usually known in history as Imeacht na nIarlaí-‘the Flight of the Earls.’ The earls were the forerunner of a huge exodus of Irishmen lying from their homeland, an exodus which lasted for more than a hundred years.
While the originator of the epithet “Wild Geese” is unknown, it is maintained with some accuracy, however, that it was vernacularly coined in the early part of the 18th century and used to describe those who left Ireland to serve in foreign armies. It is found for the irst time in an oicial letter of 1726, used as if it were a current and well known phrase, and was employed most memorably and with his own touch of romance by William Butler Yeats in his poem September 1913:
“Was it for this the wild geese spread
The gray wing upon tide...”
One romantic origin of the name would have us believe that during the far of times