Fusiliers (12 page)

Faced with this bitter hardship, those seeking to brighten the mood began putting on plays. These were staged in Boston’s most important civic building, Faneuil Hall, where the first performance took place on 2 December. Lord Rawdon, the army’s bright young thing, read the prologue, and other officers took leading parts in a play,
Zara
, by Major General Burgoyne. He delayed his departure from the city to enjoy that first night before taking a ship home to England.

Those who remained sometimes dined at the expense of the two generals who kept fine tables. Others borrowed from their friends or relied upon bills from home to keep the wolf from the door. Major Hutcheson was always ready when the need arose to sub his general’s nephew.

As for that young man, he passed through the Royal Welch Fusiliers in little more than three weeks, and serves as an embodiment of what was wrong in the commissioning system. Anthony Haldimand had been commissioned into his uncle’s regiment in 1774 as a teenager. The family were Swiss, the old general serving the King of England as a soldier of fortune. When the boy had arrived in Boston, under Hutcheson’s care, he spoke no English and knew nothing of military service, despite the date on his first commission. He had attended no military academy, and indeed Britain did not have one for officers of the infantry (although there was such an establishment at Woolwich for the Artillery and Engineers).

Major General Haldimand apparently believed in the tradition that a young man embarking on the profession of arms could learn all he needed to know on actual service. Anthony had started serving with the 23rd in July, following the generals on tours of the lines and learning the rudiments of a junior officer’s art.

Lieutenant Colonel Bernard and Major Blunt showed the young man every attention, placing him under the fatherly eye of Frederick Mackenzie, who had got his company in November. By the end of that
month, young Haldimand had joined the regimental mess as it was deemed ‘necessary he should live with the corps to become better acquainted with the language and customs of it’. Two weeks later he was off, ending his ‘career’ in the 23rd.

Haldimand paid another visit to the tailors, to have the distinctive colours in his uniform changed to those of the 45th and that was that. He entered his new regiment as a lieutenant with greater seniority than many of his peers, but still knowing little of his job and unable to speak English.

One more officer joined the exodus from Boston that winter. It was Lieutenant John Lenthall, who had repulsed the American riflemen’s attack on the lines in July. He, like the officer of the 45th whose commission was bought for Haldimand, had run out of cash. The inflated prices caused by the siege were too much for many men. Late in November, he sold out.

It had taken Lenthall six years’ service to find himself in acting command of the 23rd’s grenadiers, but boys like Haldimand were daily buying their way to an equality or even overtaking him. He had struggled to stop his men running away by imposing some kind of discipline on them. The soldiers, however, carried on with their boozing and insolence, with Lenthall suffering a rebuff at the court martial when he tried to discipline one of the privates. He had to give up. So, Lieutenant Lenthall joined the generals seeking better society in London or the hobbling invalids nursing their Bunker Hill wounds, and boarded a ship for home. He turned his back on the 23rd as well as America in the dying days of 1775.

 

SIX

 

How the Colonel of the 23rd Reformed an Army

The explosions in the night of 20 March 1776 were unlike anything the citizens of Boston had heard before. Colossal blasts rent the air, shaking houses and rattling the china. The British had put dozens of barrels of powder into their own fort at Castle William and blown it sky high. The barracks on Charlestown peninsula were dealt with next. This destruction sent a clear signal to anyone who might have doubted it: the British were leaving the city.

All of this was set in motion by General Sir William Howe’s orders. He had taken over from Gage as commander-in-chief five months earlier, enjoying sweeping powers. Howe had been given discretion by his masters in London to make many strategic choices; he was gathering the strings of patronage tightly in his hands so that he could make promotions as he chose and he was engaged in reforming his army. Howe had also taken a step up in one other respect, for he had, since the previous May, been colonel of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. This title, a gift of the King, amounted almost to ownership of a regiment. Howe did not run the Fusiliers from day to day, a task left to Lieutenant Colonel Bernard and his officers, but acted as a contractor responsible for various aspects of administration such as recruiting and clothing the men. In return for overseeing this work, it was accepted that a regimental colonel could pocket the difference between the money allowed for the raising of new soldiers and the actual cost of that process. Vexed by a thousand practical questions of how he might quit Boston, General Howe had little time for the minutiae of running the 23rd. However, the fact that their titular colonel was directing the entire
army might shape the lives of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in many ways.

The quays had been the scene of incessant activity for days. Much of the garrison had already embarked before the 20th, but there was added urgency after that date as hundreds of tons of stores, dozens of cannon and thousands of troops were loaded on to ships. The harbour itself was crowded with scores of transports, civilian charters, and the Royal Navy squadron that would escort them on to the high sea. As the quartermasters and majors of brigade watched jibs lifting barrels or horses on board, they felt a pang of nervousness. Would there be enough room for everything and everyone – the last calculation being complicated by a thousand loyalists pleading for passage? With the waterside scene providing so much bustle and commotion, many soldiers took the opportunity to venture into side streets and break into houses to see what they might steal.

Although many had expected the army to quit Boston, the final impetus had only come on the morning of 5 March, when Washington’s army had appeared on Dorchester Heights and prepared emplacements for cannon there. The British had understood for an entire year before this event that guns placed in such a position could threaten ships in the harbour or bombard Boston itself, calling into question the viability of the garrison. Despite this, the ground remained undefended.

General Howe’s first impulse had been to re-take the heights by
coup de main
before heavy guns could be put into position. That evening, the 23rd, four other regiments along with battalions of grenadiers and light infantry had been carried by boat to Castle William, which sat on a small island south-west of Boston, only a few hundred yards from the Dorchester peninsula. The general meditated a dawn assault. Thus the Fusiliers and others – a force close to 2,500 men – were asked to perform a second Bunker Hill, dislodging the Americans from prepared works. It could be a desperate business, but it offered ambitious Fusiliers at least a chance to perform some heroic feat in front of their commander-in-chief and regimental colonel, thus gaining promotion.

The general had given a good deal of thought to how he might avoid a similar slaughter to that of the previous June. It cannot exactly be said that Howe was re-writing the army’s tactics since no universally accepted manual existed. A drill book (one that set out the basics of how soldiers should stand, fire and form units) had been put out in
1764, but there was no text prescribing how to fight battles, although the 1762 edition of Humphrey Bland’s
Treatise of Military Discipline
was widely owned and understood. It is also true that Howe did not promulgate his own written blueprint, but rather issued his ideas in disparate orders and directives. Taken together, though, they marked radical change, a distinctive ‘American’ way for redcoats to fight, much of it based upon his experience of fighting there during the French and Indian Wars.

Orders were given on 5 March for the grenadiers and light infantry not to load their weapons at all prior to assaulting the American position. In this way, Howe would prevent a repetition of the disaster at Bunker Hill’s rail fence, where the flank companies fell into an ineffective firing rather than prosecuting their bayonet charge. Other instructions told the regiments to deploy differently to the European pattern.

At Lexington and Concord the 23rd had done its best to form three deep, with the men so close together their shoulders nearly touched. As Frederick Mackenzie had then noticed, that was not possible on American farmland; too many enclosures, trees or streams got in the way. At Bunker Hill, Howe changed his deployment to one less dense, two deep. Even then, fences, kilns and other obstacles disordered what should have been neat lines before they reached Breed’s Hill or the rail fence. Following the battle, therefore, he told his officers to ensure that there would be 18-inch gaps between each ‘file’, a file by then being the pair of front-rank man and his rear-rank partner. This would allow them to march forward over difficult ground without bumping into one another, and allow room to side-step smaller tree-stumps or large stones. There would be further changes within weeks to many aspects of British tactics, but there had not yet been time to drill the men in these new ideas as they waited for action on that March evening in 1776.

Luckily for the soldiers sent over to Castle William, a gale blew up during the night and, the navy declaring its longboats would get swamped in the choppy sea, the attack on the Dorchester Heights was called off. Rumours ran around the men who went back into the city that thousands of rebels had been ready to face them, and that they had ingenious weapons prepared such as barrels full of rocks to be rolled down the hills as the redcoats tried to come up. The failure to attempt Howe’s plan, on the other hand, decided the fate of the
garrison and allowed the Americans to secure a further victory.

Within a fortnight of these events, the fleet was loading and within three weeks they were gone. Howe ensured an unimpeded embarkation by threatening to burn the city if the rebels molested his troops. Washington made a jubilant entry and the King’s power in Boston was snuffed out. The British quartermasters had been right to fret for they were obliged to leave behind dozens of cannon and thousands of blankets, all of which were gratefully received by the Continental Army.

As ninety men-of-war and transports made sail, racing out of the roads on to the high seas, those who were not ‘with secret’ might have wondered about the destination. Some yearned that it might be home. Early on in the siege, one officer had greeted with glee a rumour that Britain might abandon the war altogether, writing home, ‘I am not one of those bloody-minded people that wish only for revenge and slaughter.’

By April 1776 though, most of the informed observers in the army would have understood that the King was not planning to surrender his American dominions without a fight. Large armies were being raised in Europe – dozens of new battalions were being gathered in Britain, Ireland and on the Continent where several German princelings had agreed to provide men in return for cash. The fleet that had left Boston was therefore not going home, but to Halifax in Nova Scotia, where Howe would wait for his new army and plan the campaign.

Some officers thought Britain’s best option lay in a war of naval raiding, sending parties of troops to devastate American ports. Such tactics would force the Americans to spread their little army along thousands of miles of coastline, to be strong nowhere and allow the British to come and go as they pleased, avoiding large garrisons on shore or, worse, having to penetrate the interior of the continent. The march to Lexington and Concord had left quite a few officers in fear of what might happen to British forces, far from their naval support, surrounded by thousands of Americans.

The scale of preparations under way to reinforce Howe was the surest indication though that the Ministry in London had rejected the option of a seaborne war on the cheap. Instead, the forthcoming campaign was to focus on New York and the Hudson River. An American expedition sent late in 1775 to invade Canada had been
happily defeated at the gates of Quebec. The British in Canada were preparing to attack southwards, along the historic invasion route to New York, down through the lakes to the Hudson. Howe, having taken New York, would control the southern end of that great river, and could move north.

Seizing New York and, eventually, joining hands along the Hudson line held obvious appeal for the generals. Even in July 1775, Earl Percy, despairing of the Boston situation, had written, ‘I confess I should have thought it a more eligible system, to take advantage of the Great Hudson’s River to have carried the war into the heart of the country.’ Taking New York appealed because it would disrupt the colonists’ sea trade with the outside world through their principal port and, if forces could link up on the Hudson, sever overland commerce between the New England colonies and the others. Just for good measure, General Henry Clinton would be sent south with an expedition to take Charleston, the great port of the southern provinces.