And No Quarter

Walsh worked in Scotland for many years; his local knowledge is put to good use, while his descriptions of the battles and events leading up to them are historically accurate, although he understates the reality of the campaign.

The bitterness of the conflict in both Ireland and Scotland was reflected in the Covenanter approach to their prisoners but the depredations of Montrose's army were remembered centuries later. Aberdeen was then and remained a stronghold of Royalist support but the three-day sack that followed the battle referenced in the novel had serious consequences for Montrose's ability to recruit.^[3] Estimates of deaths vary from 50 to 170; referring to the later claim Irish troops forced people to remove their clothes before killing them, Somers records only that he 'never saw any stripped and dirked bodies.' Despite this, the historical details are generally accurate and the novel a well-balanced evocation of the time and place.

While remembered today primarily for the film made from his short story 'The Quiet Man', in the 1930s and 1940s, Walsh was perhaps Ireland's best selling popular author whose admirers allegedly included Ernest Hemingway. Like the earlier 'Blackcock's Feather', set in the 1594-1603 Nine Years' War, the novel covers a less well-known period and perspective i.e. the Irish Brigade in Montrose's campaigns.

Walsh was writing in the aftermath of the 1922-1923 Civil War that followed the establishment of the Free State, fought with particular bitterness in his home county of Kerry. This included the war's most notorious atrocity at Ballyseedy, when nine Anti-Treaty prisoners were tied to a land mine, which was then detonated, killing eight.^[4]

Walsh appeals to the idea both of a united Gaeldom by setting the story within Montrose's combined Scottish-Irish army and a united Ireland; the hero Martin Somers an Englishman and member of the Protestant Church of Ireland, which in 2016 still had over 126,400 members in the Irish Republic.^[5] Somers also refers to his 'American mother', which may be a reference to the half-American Éamon de Valera who became Prime Minister in 1932.

• "New Maurice Walsh Novel" (1937) Ireland To-Day, volume 2, issues 7-12, page 86 Google Books