We have, unhappily, no better authority than tradition for stating that, toward the end of the battle, a part of the Irish cavalry, led by Sarsfield, covered the retreat of the survivors of the Irish foot on Loughrea and Limerick. In fact there seems to be a complete mystery about the action of the Irish cavalry after the death of the French general. Certain it is that this force did not act with the vigor it showed in the early part of the combat on the right or with the spirit it displayed at the Boyne; and this fact deepens the doubt as to whether Sarsfield was in the fight or not. Had it not been, as we are informed by the learned Abbé McGeoghegan, in his able “History of Ireland,” for one O’Reilly, the almoner of a regiment, who caused the charge to be sounded as the fugitives passed through a boggy defile on the line of retreat, the entire Irish infantry might have been destroyed. They were also aided by darkness, caused by “a thick misty rain,” brought on, no doubt, by the detonations of the firearms, acting on a humid atmosphere. Numbers of small arms and other munitions were abandoned in the flight; all the cannon, most of the colors, and the whole camp material fell into the hands of the enemy. Aughrim was to Ireland what Culloden was to Scotland and Waterloo to France—an irretrievable military disaster, redeemed only by the desperate valor of the defeated army. Even the most bitter and partisan of the English annalists admit, although with manifest reluctance, that the Irish army fought heroically in this murderous battle. Its losses are placed by Story, who witnessed the conflict throughout, at 7,000 killed on the spot and 500, including officers, made prisoners. This statement of his shows conclusively that almost all of the Irish wounded were put to the sword. Other writers, including King James himself, make the Irish loss somewhat less, but we are inclined to think that Story, in this case, came pretty near to the truth. He says in his interesting narrative, “looking amongst the dead three days after, when all of ours and some of theirs were buried, I reckoned in some small inclosures 150, in others 120, etc., lying most of them in the ditches where they were shot, and the rest from the top of the hill, where their camp had been, looked like a great flock of sheep, scattered up and down the country for almost four miles round.” The bodies had been stripped by the camp-followers, which accounts for the white appearance to which Story makes allusion. Most of these corpses were inhumanly left above ground, to be the prey of birds and beasts, by the conquerors, and thus Aughrim is known to the Irish people as the “Field of our Unburied Dead.” It was customary a generation ago, and may be so in our day, for the Catholic peasantry passing along the roads that wind around Kilcommodan, to uncover their heads reverently and offer up prayers for the souls of the heroes of their race who died there for faith, land, and liberty.