Battle of Killala

Thirty-two days of rebel rule in Killala ended when Trench’s smoke-marked advance met them behind low stone walls. Four hundred to five hundred men died in twenty minutes of shooting and a panicked retreat through rain-washed streets, while Bourke and Bellew swung from ropes the next morning. The battle did not merely defeat an army; it exposed how quickly hope could be strangled by surrender, execution, and the certainty that no foreign banner would arrive in time.