It was a march of not less than four days through a wild country.

To prevent agile youths, familiar with all the shifts of a vagrant and predatory life, from stealing off to the bogs, and woods under cover of the night, was impossible.
Indeed, many soldiers had the audacity to run away by broad daylight before they were out of sight of Limerick Cathedral.

The Royal regiment, which had, on the day of the review, set so striking an example of fidelity to the cause of James, dwindled from fourteen hundred men to five hundred.

Before the last ships departed, news came that those who had sailed by the first ships had been ungraciously received at Brest.
They had been scantily fed; they had been able to obtain neither pay nor clothing; though winter was setting in, they slept in the fields with no covering but the hedges.

Many had been heard to say that it would have been far better to die in old Ireland than to live in the inhospitable country to which they had been banished.