There is a thought experiment that the story of the Wild Geese invites.
Take a family that left Limerick in October 1691. A soldier, perhaps a minor landowner, someone who had fought under Sarsfield and knew what the Treaty meant for people like him. He boards a ship with his wife and children. He has the clothes he is wearing and the weapons he is permitted to carry and whatever cash or valuables he could convert from the property that is about to be confiscated.
He arrives in France. He is enrolled in one of the Irish regiments. He fights. He retires, perhaps, to a small house somewhere in Brittany or Alsace, where his children grow up speaking French with Irish names. His son joins the regiment and fights at Fontenoy. His grandson fights in the American War of Independence on the French side, alongside men whose grandparents had left America for Ireland and come back as something else entirely. His great-granddaughter marries a French officer and their children carry the name into the revolutionary period.
By 1850, the original Limerick family has descendants in France, in Austria, in Argentina, in the United States, in Australia. They are Catholic, mostly. They carry Irish surnames in varying states of phonetic decay. Some of them know the story. Some of them have lost it.
But the name remains. Across two hundred years, across five continents, through revolution and famine and war and the ordinary attrition of time, the name remains.
That is what The Wild Geese is about. Not just the flight. The persistence. The refusal of the name to be erased.
The Irish were scattered across the world by forces too large for any individual to resist. They went. They survived. They shaped the countries that took them in. They remembered where they came from.
History spent three hundred years trying to make them disappear. They are still here.
