NEXT morning, a military specialist named Josiah Bodley stepped out at Spital Hill with a sense of purpose. His moment had come. His half-century of life on this planet had been leading up to this point.
Bodley was the country’s leading expert on the construction of siege fortifications. Known as a ‘trenchmaster’ – an early military engineer – he was entrusted with the task of transforming Spital camp into an impregnable fortress. It would be the greatest siege engineering construction built in Ireland up until that point. It had to be big enough to hold thousands of soldiers. Its walls had to be at least twice as high as a tall man. It had to be built while bullets and cannonballs flew all around the workers. Then it had to be rebuilt each morning as sallying Spaniards tore it down by night. It had to be built by a deadline of yesterday. As for materials, he could utilise only whatever grew on trees and whatever lay under his feet.
And no better man to do it than Josiah Bodley.
Josiah was the youngest of five sons, and was slightly less famous than the eldest brother, Thomas. Josiah admired what Thomas Bodley did with cataloguing old books, but that academic life wasn’t for him. He preferred to be out in the open, in all weathers, pacing with his quadrant, keeping an eye on the enemy guns as he directed the trench diggers. Let Thomas stay in his dusty library at Oxford – the one that would one day bear his surname as the Bodleian Library. Whatever alchemy Thomas worked with books, Josiah would work with soil and clay.
Josiah was Devon-born and well travelled. He had learned his trade in the dirty wars of the Netherlands. Two years ago, at forty-nine, he had been transferred to Ireland, where a single incident earned him a legendary status.
The English couldn’t shift Hugh O’Neill’s insurgents from a remote island stronghold where they had stashed huge stores of gunpowder. Bodley prepared thirty arrows tipped with ‘wild fire’, an incendiary substance famous for its rapid spread. As musketeers pinned down the Irish, his skilled archers fired the blazing arrows into the island dwellings. They were soon raging infernos. The insurgents abandoned the island and swam to shore.
That incident faded into insignificance compared to his task in Kinsale, although, later, Fynes Moryson would nonchalantly dismiss Bodley’s work in one sentence: ‘The camp was round about entrenched, and all those works perfected.’ To most people, a trench is just a linear dugout. But at the risk of sounding Tolkienish, this was much more than a hole in the ground. The trenches at Spital were a tribute to human ingenuity – a testimony to what people can achieve under pressure with nothing more than earth, clay, a few branches, and lots and lots of sweat. Josiah Bodley dug holes like Michelangelo painted ceilings.
Nothing remains of Bodley’s creation but its new name, Camphill, and some sketches on a map. But those show it to be quite remarkable. The most striking thing is its sheer size. This was a small town, perhaps two-thirds the size of Kinsale itself. Angular bastions protruded from the rectangular walls (the ‘curtain’) and from each corner to give musketeers a clear line of fire in every direction. It was perfectly symmetrical, and from each corner fluttered the red cross of St George.
How did Bodley’s men construct such a sophisticated structure from scratch?
It all began with a sap, or a preliminary trench, dug by specialist workers. These men were known as sappers or pioneers and had one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the army. They were well paid: one group of troops was given fourpence extra for every day they worked on the fortifi-cations. (Bodley himself was paid ten shillings a day, more than a company captain.) The pay varied according to the danger they faced and the number of men left alive in their unit. ‘If there are any killed,’ explains an early trenchmaster named John Muller, ‘the survivors of the Brigade receive their pay… [in some cases] one or two men have received the pay of twenty-four.’
The key to keeping them alive in the killing fields of no-man’s-land was the gabion, an open-ended cylindrical basket woven from willow branches. The most basic version, about as tall as a man, was ‘stuffed quite full with all kinds of small wood, or branches’, says Muller. Laid flat and rolled, this stuffed gabion was enough to absorb most musket balls at a distance. The workers ‘roll [the baskets] before them as they advance’, Muller explains.
The pioneers also carried empty gabion baskets. As the first worker began digging, protected by the wood-filled gabion, he would shovel the displaced soil into the empty basket. ‘He fills it with earth, giving it every now and again a blow with the spade or mallet to settle the earth,’ Muller writes. ‘And when this gabion is filled, he advances the stuffed gabion to make room for another … when this gabion is filled, he places another, and so on; then the second sapper fills the interval between the gabions with sandbags.’
These earth-filled baskets were given extra height using rolls of compressed sticks called fascines. (The word shares its origin with fascist, which derives from the fasces or rods carried by Roman magistrates. Personally, I find this connection fascine-ating.)
Fast workers could throw up a solid protective barrier within an hour. Then they could begin digging in earnest. They worked in units of eight, with four digging while the rest fetched tools. The first pioneer would dig a shallow trench about 45cm deep and wide. The man following him made it 15cm deeper and wider. The third and fourth did likewise until the four diggers had created a trench 90cm deep and wide. The four men could keep this up at high speed for two or three hours before swapping roles.
As they dug, they piled the soil into a solid earthbank on the surface, effectively doubling the height of their sanctuary. Other teams worked towards them until their trenches met and connected. ‘Work [should] be continued with all possible speed, and without interruption,’ dictates Muller.
The finished trench was impressive in its scale. Describing a typical siege-trench twenty-five years later, another military expert named Robert Ward writes that the surface earthwork was ‘near ten foot high and fifteen foot thick at the bottom … there were two footbanks for the musketeers to step upon, to give fire over the breastwork. This breastwork was … five foot high … This trench contained in circuit 16,000 paces.’ In combination, the dugout and rampart could be two and a half times the height of a tall man, and the floor of the trench wide enough to take a tent.
With plenty of manpower, an ordinary field would be transformed into a labyrinthine earthen fortress in a couple of weeks. And during the three-month siege of Kinsale, several such networks were excavated.
‘[The English] pitched their camp and entrenched themselves,’ wrote the field surgeon William Farmer. ‘They also builded a sconce [a detached outpost] and planted their great ordnance for battery.’
The result mightily impressed the Spanish and Irish in Kinsale. Spanish witnesses said that Bodley’s trenches were as high as lances (presumably four metres plus) and ladders were needed to scramble out. When Hugh O’Neill saw the English camp, several weeks later, he was daunted by ‘the great strength of the firm, impregnable walls’.
Bodley had done his bit. Now it was time for the gunners to take over.