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Four thousand Irish troops, in six infantry and one cavalry regiments, were numbered among those in the 60,000-strong French army led by Marechal Maurice de Saxe. The French were opposed by a mainly British and Dutch force. De Saxe had chosen the ground over which the battle would be fought and he had chosen well. The Irish Brigade was on the left flank of the French lines and was not involved in the early fighting during which de Saxe's main force crumbled under an intense and sustained attack led by 16,000-strong British troops under the Duke of Cumberland. Included in the ranks of this army would have been many Protestant Irish, not barred from enlistment by the Penal Laws and whose circumstances were almost as straitened as those of their Catholic fellow countrymen.

The Irish regiments, bringing with them four cannon, were sent in to dislodge Cumberland's right flank and to help save the day for the French. Amid provocative roars of 'Remember Limerick', the brigade 'sent the British reeling back', according to a contemporary account. But they suffered serious losses in doing so; at 20 per cent they were proportionately higher than any other unit of the French army. Thomas Davis, the Young Irelander, in his suitably bombastic poem 'Fontenoy', captured the inevitable racial element inherent in the ferocity of the Irish charge: 'How fierce the look these exiles wear, who're wont to be so gay/The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts today.'

There was only a theoretical element of choice involved in the en listment of the more impoverished Irish exile to Britain, Europe or, much later, America. But over the years many Irishmen not motivated by the coercive imperative of poverty joined foreign armies. Some have been idealists, political or religious, some adventurers, some simple mercenaries.

The Boer War saw two separate Irish brigades fight on the side of the Dutch South Africans. The more significant unit, led by a future leader of the Easter 1916 rebellion, Major John McBride (working in South Africa as a mine assayer), grew out of a large Irish population in the Transvaal and a number of 1798 centenary committees in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Motivated by antipathy towards Britain and including a number of unreconstructed Fenians, the Irish battalions were opposed by an army which had an Irish Brigade of its own. The committed amateurs ran into the professionals on more than one occasion. At the Battle of Dundee the pro-Boers took a number of members of the Royal Irish Fusiliers prisoner. Some of the Irish Brigade even recognised and exchanged greetings with the defeated Fusiliers. Irish units also took both sides in the Spanish Civil War, but while the political and religious gulf between them was clear their motivation was identical. Young idealists, like the poet Charlie Donnelly, the socialist Frank Ryan or Communist Party member Michael O'Riordan, went to Spain to join the International Brigade and to defend the Republic against fascism. But men like Dick Walsh from Carlow and Denis Reynolds from Cavan joined General Eoin O'Duffy's Irish Brigade to fight godless communism and to preserve the Roman Catholic religion in Spain.

The James Connolly Column (about 150 strong) of the International Brigade became part of the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion (which included many Irish Americans). They arrived, separately, in Spain in January 1937. Training for this group of socialists, communists and ex-IRA men was rudimentary and without weapons. Many, including the young Irishman Charles Donnelly, had not even handled a rifle before going into battle for the first time. Donnelly, who was far younger than he claimed to be (twenty-two as opposed to twenty-six) was a talented poet. The one verse he wrote in his brief and ultimately tragic period in Spain was suitably dark and brutal. While he was there on behalf of a cause he had no illusions about the deadly nature of war. Called 'Heroic Heart', its closing lines read:

Battering the roads, armoured columns
Break walls of stone or bone without receipt.
Jawbones find new ways with meat, loins
Raking and blind, new ways with women.

Donnelly had reached Spain by travelling incognito and often illegally. The 520 members of General Eoin O'Duffy's Irish Brigade had faced their own difficulties in making their way to Spain to assist the nationalist fofces of the fascist leader General Franco. O'Duffy had sought volunteers for his private crusade but the enterprise had been banned by the de Valera government. Denis Reynolds from Cavan, later a Fine Gael county councillor, was one of almost 400 of O'Duffy's men who were about to be prevented from departing for Spain from Galway; only the intervention of the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr Browne, enabled them to depart. Reynolds, a sharp featured and ascetic looking young man, was a dedicated anti-communist and saw the Spanish Republican government as communist in everything but name. Dick Walsh from Carlow saw Franco's camp~ugn as striking a blow for the Roman Catholic church. He travelled to Spain on the same boat as Reynolds, the Urundi.
The Battle of Jarama, which began on 6 February 1937, drew in the Irish who sided with the republican government and those (far greater in number) who supported Franco's nationalists, but the two units did not actually meet during the course of the month-long httle. Some Irish members of the International Brigade entered the contfft in its early stages. A future icon for Irish socialists, Frank Ryan-later to die in Germany after two years in a fascist prison-was wounded in the first week. The James Connolly Column was sent into action on 23 February. On 27 February the fascists went on the offensive. Charlie Donnelly was killed in an olive grove by a burst of machine-gun fire. Shortly before his death he uttered the last phrase attributed to him when he picked up a bunch of olives, squeezed them and observed: 'Even the olives are bleeding.' This epitaph is, unjustly, better known than any of his poetry.

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