Derry and Limerick
Success attends the side that makes least mistakes, and the management of the Jacobites, says their own chronicler, ruefully, had been "stark naught."
The surrender was not occasioned by the incidents of the siege, but was the culmination of a series of misfortunes. The patriotic movement lacked a head. The brave and chivalrous Sarsfield, the idol of the Irish, was, after all, but a Jacobite officer. He was too great-hearted to be a Cromwell or a Napoleon. Had he, like them, created opportunities for himself, his memory might have been less lovable, but his achievements greater. He was not a Lally Tollendal; but could he have foreseen how the treaty was kept, he would have clung to his defences to the end, like that grim warrior at Pondicherry.
Historical studies, says Renan, are often a danger to nationality, which is built up by the fusion of races: for union is always brutally created. So, for all it is well to know how to forget. ("Pour tous il est bon de savoir oublier.") Yet, surely, Knowledge is better than Forgetfulness? For, though a religious war, the war in Ireland was not one of extermination, and both Derry and Limerick have their memories of glorious deeds of courage and endurance. Both had been abandoned by regular soldiers as
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