Fusiliers (14 page)

By contrast the behaviour of Earl Percy as a major general serving in America and colonel of the 5th Regiment was regarded by many as a model of benign aristocratic patronage. As heir to the dukedom of Northumberland, Percy was scion of one of England’s greatest landowning families. In one letter to his father, the duke, Percy summed up his soldierly credo thus: ‘I serve only for credit and not for profit.’ Indeed, it was an article of faith with Percy to spend
more
on his soldiers’ uniforms than the regulation allowed. He also opened his own purse to buy commissions for men who he believed would make good officers but lacked private wealth. So whereas one nobleman might create a
ferme
ornée
– a gilded farm – or another fill his house with exquisite antiquities gathered on the Grand Tour, Major General Percy regarded the 5th with a passion as his vehicle for ideas about military taste and progress.

Percy would not allow soldiers of the 5th to be flogged, since the punishment disgusted him. After the regiment suffered heavy casualties at Bunker Hill, he chartered a ship at his own expense to take the widows and children of his fallen soldiers home. By this step he shamed the Secretary at War into providing a similar service for hundreds of women in an equally melancholy situation but belonging to other regiments, who found themselves evacuated to Halifax. ‘Though his regiment is distinguished for its admirable discipline, he will never suffer the private men to be struck,’ wrote one soldier of the 5th, ‘but endeavours to win them to their duty by generous treatment, by rewards, and by his own excellent example.’ Percy’s attitude was
unusual even if it was not unique, for Earl Cornwallis was certainly fanatical about his own regiment, the 33rd, which was also serving in America. Alas for the 23rd Fusiliers, someone like Howe, who lacked a private fortune, and was not greatly interested in his regiment, was the more usual type of colonel.

Faced with Howe’s indifference, some of the 23rd’s older officers gravitated towards Earl Percy, hoping his famed generosity might assist their promotion. Captain Jo Ferguson, for example, who was ambitious and had the money to buy his next step, had enjoyed Percy’s hospitality while the 23rd were serving with his brigade in Boston. Ferguson began corresponding with the earl. Captain Donkin, with little money to his name and tainted by his service on General Gage’s staff (all of whom knew they could expect nothing from Howe), began courting Percy too. Donkin dedicated to the earl a book he was compiling, writing fawningly in the foreword that Percy was ‘the
heir
of that
illustrious family
, in whom concentrate all the
virtues
of his
glorious ancestors
’.

In their different ways, then, officers like Blunt, Ferguson or Donkin, who might once have thought that Howe’s appointment as colonel could bring great things to them or the 23rd, were all disappointed. The Fusiliers got no special treatment. One of Howe’s critics, an observer at headquarters, castigated him for being ‘illiterate and indolent to the last degree’. If Howe could not be bothered to lavish time on regimental affairs, neither was he keen to codify his views on tactics. The general’s fear of pen and paper, it is true, may have played its role in ensuring that no proper manual was ever written of the light infantry or American approach he was now inculcating in his army. The general’s one positive quality was that he was certainly not indolent about effecting this change. For Howe, his moment of glory seventeen years earlier scaling a precipitous path to the Heights of Abraham at Quebec defined him as a soldier. At Halifax in 1776, Howe would start turning the light infantry into the elite and pattern for his whole army. He would restore his soldiers’ faith in victory and their discipline at the same time.

As May went by at Halifax there were changes aplenty. Supply ships arrived regularly from Britain. Some brought welcome gifts too. One officer noted that month that ‘the soldiers that served last campaign at Boston have each received a pair of shoes and stockings, a woollen cap
and a quantity of tobacco, a donation from the people of England’. These patriotic offerings extended to one pound of superfine tobacco and ten gallons of rum – a mind-boggling ration – for each officer. There were also special provisions for the relief of women who had lost their husbands in Boston; many were shipped home and a small number per regiment allowed to remain with the army as its servants.

For soldiers, the bounty of tobacco and rum was supplemented by plentiful fresh food. Parties were made up most days to go fishing in longboats, since any fool with a hook could pluck belting cod from these waters. Officers went on trips ashore, hunting wildfowl and fishing inland streams that teemed with trout. Constitutions were fortified too by news from Canada, as it became clear when detailed reports arrived that the Americans had suffered a major defeat, their campaign costing thousands of men and degenerating into a shambles. Spirits began to lift in Howe’s command.

By early June, preparations were at an advanced stage for the army to leave Nova Scotia. A vast fleet of chartered transports was assembling at Cork, Bremen and the Downs to bring over thousands more soldiers. There would be entire regiments from Britain, Ireland and the German states. There would also be thousands of reinforcements for the depleted army that had seen through the campaign of 1775.

During these final weeks, General Howe tried to take some steps to strengthen discipline. John Browning, a rogue in the 23rd, was ordered to be clapped in irons below the decks of one of the ships for striking an officer. Howe promised that this ‘crime of the greatest magnitude’, a capital offence, would be dealt with by general court martial as soon as the army was established further south. Three young officers caught gambling were summoned to the General’s cabin on board the
Chatham
to be admonished about the dangers of such dissolute habits.

On 10 June the signal was hoisted for the fleet to sail. One by one, ships got under way, joining in line astern for a passage out of the harbour. The soldiers peering over the taffrail marvelled at the cod teeming alongside the wooden walls of their transports. Some wondered whether Washington’s army, which had been concentrating around New York for weeks, would subject them to a series of Bunker Hills as the redcoats tried to land and deploy their armies. At 9 p.m. the leading ships made sail and the journey towards New York, the prize and focus of the impending campaign, began.

 

SEVEN

 

In Which Serjeant Grimes and Captain Grove Were Unfortunate

For a few weeks that summer, Staten Island was the focal point of a vast global effort, a destination for hundreds of ships and temporary home to more than 30,000 troops. A place known better for market gardens and pleasant coves became the cockpit for the greatest projection of power ever attempted by Britain, or for that matter any country.

The Halifax armament, 9,300 men borne in 130 ships, had begun disembarking on 2 July. Ten days later, General William Howe’s seafaring brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, sailed into view with a further 150 vessels carrying reinforcements from Europe. After that Lieutenant General Henry Clinton came in with dozens of sail of his own, following the unsuccessful attempt to take Charleston to the south.

Preparations for the next stage of the campaign lay in the hands of staff and special corps gathered for labour, like the carpenters who banged and sawed away, building shallow-draught assault boats. For a major of brigade like Mackenzie, it was a time of organising provisions, collecting each regiment’s returns – the forms they filled out stating their strengths, number of sick and so on – or gathering working parties. Matters were not helped by his difficult relationship with Francis Smith, his brigadier, the commander of the previous year’s expedition to Lexington and Concord, whom Mackenzie regarded as too overweight, old and mediocre for his job.

Below Mackenzie, the adjutants would gather information within each regiment or disseminate the brigadier’s orders. Above the captain, Howe’s deputy adjutant general, Stephen Kemble, collated figures for the army as a whole. The quartermaster general’s department
organised the camp, furnished food or forage and gathered wagons, a hundred of which were hired with their drivers on Staten Island.

For the Royal Welch Fusiliers and other regiments that had escaped the tedium of Halifax, these weeks were a time of ceaseless activity and curiosity. Each one promised a new experience, or the sight of some previously unheard-of corps.

The Ministry in London had worked unceasingly through the winter months, gathering troops in Cork, at Spithead and on the Clyde, as well as at the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. General Howe was being sent 4,400 more redcoats and 10,000 Germans, mainly from the principality of Hesse-Kassel, the hired soldiers whom the Americans called ‘Hessians’.

When the German-speakers came ashore, two military cultures collided. The princelings had copied the dress, drill, and ethos of Frederick the Great, for it was that monarch’s philosophy that had guided his Prussian troops to great victories during the Seven Years War. The grenadiers had metal-fronted mitres, twirled moustaches and heavy swords. There were fusiliers too among them, the Erbprinz, Knyphausen or von Lossberg regiments. They wore (slightly smaller) metal-fronted caps, made from cloth of their distinctive colours; carmine, orange or black. They and the British were soon sizing one another up with the pride of military men who each assumed
their
way was better.

Ministers in London had quickly become certain that they could only meet their field commanders’ requests for large reinforcements by employing foreign troops. Their arrival in America provided the Whig news-sheets with a rich theme, for the Germans were characterised as brutal automata, brought to ravish the land. Some British officers, particularly those favouring the devastation of the country, concurred. ‘The assistance of foreign troops will be highly politick,’ one ultra-Tory wrote home, ‘they are less likely to be seduced by the artifice and intrigue of these holy hypocrites.’

The Hessian officers themselves were struck by all that was strange about the new land. It began with the non-regulation appearance of Howe’s men. ‘The English have been clothed according to the hot climate,’ one field officer wrote to the Landgrave, ‘with very short and light coats, and long linen trousers down to the shoes.’ The British, on the other hand, were soon snickering at the perspiring Germans, red-faced and puffing in their heavy woollen coats, obliged by the heat to take off their bayonet belts and slinging them over shoulders on the
march so that they could open all the buttons of their waistcoats.

As to what the new arrivals thought of the ordinary redcoat, one acute Bavarian wrote:

the common British soldier is swift, marches easily … when they go against an enemy, they are fresh, optimistic, and do not worry about their life … the English keep their clothing very clean and have only the vices of cussing, swearing, drinking, whoring, and stealing and these more so than almost all other people.

These then were the qualities, good and bad, of the rankers. General Howe, though, could not get enough such men. Early schemes to expand the establishment of the 23rd and other British regiments up to something over 800 men had proven chimerical.

During the summer of 1776, men were sent to the 23rd Fusiliers in several small detachments. There were some Scottish recruits who thought they were joining another regiment entirely. A further twenty-five men found in England for other regiments were similarly re-routed. Eighteen men had been attracted to volunteer from corps serving in Ireland, and in addition to the German-speakers who served in the Hessian regiments, a few hundred were sent to British ones as reinforcements, the 23rd’s quota being thirty-seven privates, a corporal and one serjeant. In sum, the regiment that Lieutenant Williams had thought the previous summer contained rather too many ‘young troops’ found itself receiving dozens of new men speaking different languages, from widely differing backgrounds.

Dispersing these little parties of arrivals to their different companies fell to the junior officers and serjeants. They would assign the newcomers to a mess, or group of six soldiers, so called because such groups shared a camp kettle for cooking up meals.

The non-commissioned officers knew the newcomers came in two categories: draftees and recruits. Draftees were men from other corps; some, like the volunteers from the regiments based in Ireland, would already have been thoroughly familiar with the Manual Exercise of using their musket. Other drafts came from regiments in America that were broken up to augment the remainder. Nine men, for example, came to the 23rd on Staten Island from the 65th Regiment of Foot, and seven from the 69th.

Recruits on the other hand were men more recently enlisted at the tavern or county fair. Some had arrived in America without even a
uniform. They had little or no training and some of them, for example the forty men who came on the Clyde transports, had been sweet-talked by the recruiting serjeant of a different regiment. These greenhorns were often a burden for their non-commissioned officers, since they knew little, and many bitterly regretted joining, sinking into the depths of despair.