Vinegar Hill

Vinegar Hill is an historical drama set during the Napoleonic Wars. It’s the epic story of how a cohort of young men, exiled from Ireland after the failed rebellion of 1798, joined Napoleon's Irish Legion and fought their way across the battlefields of Europe. These political refugees, the remnants of the United Irishmen, were to spearhead a planned French backed invasion of Ireland. The catastrophic naval defeat at Trafalgar in 1805 and subsequent British naval superiority meant this was not to be. Once again, a generation of Irishmen found themselves fighting across Europe, for any cause but their own. The raw recruits of the Irish Legion make the journey from idealistic rebels fighting colonial oppression to being professional soldiers in Napoleon’s army. The story begins and ends with MILES BYRNE, a courageous Irish Colonel, meeting MARY LAWLESS at a cemetery in Paris in 1850. It then shifts to 1803 as Miles' memoir of his service in France and elsewhere is dramatized. We focus on two main protagonists, Miles Byrne and WILLIAM LAWLESS. The story of how Miles and the rest of the ’98 generation were affected by the horrors they lived through in that fateful summer is told in flashbacks spread throughout the main arc of the story. The twenty year old Miles Byrne flees to Paris following the failure of the 1803 rising and the subsequent execution of United Irishman leader Robert Emmet. In Paris Miles meets William Lawless, a thirty year old ex-professor of the Dublin Royal College of Surgeons. William, along with many Irishmen, has been in Paris since fleeing arrest during the crackdown by the British authorities that preceded the 1798 rising. William takes Miles under his wing, and the two form a bond which is tested, but not broken, by their love for the same woman, Mary Evans, the daughter of United Irishman grandee Hampden Evans. The Irish Legion faces hellish conditions in battle. They serve with honor and attract the attention of Napoleon himself. Several of their number receive the medal of the Legion of Honor, the highest military honor in France established by Napoleon. We follow the trials and tribulations of Byrne and his comrades as they fight in Spain, Holland and Germany until their final battle in 1813 when, despite displays of great heroism and grace under fire, the regiment is effectively destroyed on the banks of the Bobr River in Silesia by Russian cossacks. The story ends as it began, years later in a cemetery in Paris. Mary and Miles meet, to honor her fallen husband, Miles’ great friend and colleague, William Lawless. Mary has never remarried. William was the only one for her, but she admits that there was once someone else... Despite the horrors that he's experienced Miles survived, has married and seems to have a good life. Mary and he are very close, and both of them love her late husband. Love and honor have survived the trials and horrors of war.