Fusiliers (18 page)

In the case of the two men of the 57th convicted of rape, and of another soldier later found guilty of that crime, the reprieve followed representations from the victims’ families. In noting one of these cases in his journal, one officer pitied ‘the fate of many who suffer indiscriminately in a civil war’, but also lamented that there had been ‘other shocking abuses of this nature that have not come to public notice’. Some others made light of this crime, the young Lord Rawdon writing home facetiously:

The fresh meat our men have got here has made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished, and [the girls] are so little accustomed to these methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation.

Quite a few officers would have rejected utterly such a frivolous interpretation of the law, considering themselves instead to aspire to a code of chivalry in which they would always take the woman’s part or that of the downtrodden. For this reason, they sometimes appealed for clemency when their soldiers explained their desertion for reasons of love. One captain wrote to his mother that he had interceded for his recaptured soldier, because ‘for a woman this poor boy ventured his existence’.

The cases tried by general court martial in the second half of 1776 demonstrated that executions were still a rarity. As for the many who were due such punishment for desertion, marauding or striking their officers, there was little to be done with them but to send them back to their regiments, since the army lacked big prisons to accommodate people serving long sentences, particularly after taking thousands of American prisoners.

When it came to those captured in the battles of 1776, some private soldiers had initially been released. For many of those who escaped the bayoneting at Fort Washington that the Tories would have liked, there was the prospect of slow death instead on board one of the prison
ships in New York harbour. More than 1,000 men were taken out to the
Jersey
, a rotten old two-decker. Other warships condemned as unseaworthy, called hulks, were used to accommodate the remainder.

It cannot be said that the British had a deliberate policy of starvation on board those ships, rather that the needs of enemy prisoners ranked low, and that the leadership of the two warring parties frittered away years on legalistic bickering about prisoner exchanges while their men rotted in confinement. As 1776 came to an end, though, there was a gross disparity in the numbers of prisoners, for the British held several times as many as the Americans, a happy consequence of their success in battle.

Late that year there was general optimism about the course of the war. ‘The destruction of Washington’s Army seems extremely possible,’ Frederick Mackenzie had written in October, ‘the subjugation of the American Colonies, may be said to be nearly effected.’ The canny old Fusilier, however, later worried about whether the Americans should be pushed harder in the Jerseys.

With snows falling and the hand of winter gripping the land, British or Hessian sentries gazed across the frigid Jersey country. The 23rd had joined the army’s marches north and then south and west, hundreds of miles, without experiencing another battle. Its light infantry and grenadiers, on the other hand, grouped with the battalions of those elite troops had been frequently engaged under the command of Earl Cornwallis.

Some officers worried, as campaigning closed, what the army’s indiscipline might do to the possibility of reconciliation with the American people. Major Kemble grumbled about the generals’ failure to curb excesses and the wider effect it had. The soldiers involved were, he felt, ‘cruel to such a degree as to threaten with death all such as dare obstruct them in their depredations. Violence to officers is frequently used, and every degree of insolence offered.’

Major Charles Stuart, an officer in his mid-twenties and a rising star, was concerned by the political effects of marauding and unpunished army crimes in general. ‘Repeated orders was [
sic
] given against this barbarity’, Major Stuart wrote home to his father, ‘but the punishment annexed to the crime not being put into execution, the soldiers disregarded it.’ The consequences of this laxity to the overall struggle for America were clear to this officer as he knew they would be to his father, a former prime minister no less: ‘Thus we went on persuading
to enmity those minds already undecided, and inducing our friends to fly to the opposite party for protection.’

Late in 1776 Thomas Watson returned to the Royal Welch Fusiliers after an absence of eighteen months. There is no record of whether the lashes awarded by the court martial were ever inflicted, and, by the end of 1776, Watson had the wish he had expressed in front of that tribunal to fight the King’s enemies once more. The court martial had given him a second chance.

If British army indiscipline posed risks to the entire enterprise over the long term, then General Howe’s enemies had something else in mind that might shift opinion a good deal more quickly. General Washington had no intention of letting the redcoats rest easy that winter.

 

NINE

 

Or How Thomas Mecan Fought for the Rest

Colonel Rall’s Christmas festivities ended in the most disgraceful manner. Carried to bed after a night’s feasting and good cheer, he was roused by the sound of cannon and drumbeats. The British decision to go into winter quarters had been exploited by George Washington to launch a counter-attack. They appeared through the driving snow in the early hours of 26 December, falling on the outposts of Rall’s Hessian brigade, which held an exposed position on the Jersey lines.

In the confused melee that followed, Colonel Rall lost 918 of his 1,200 men captured, with a further 105 killed or wounded. Washington had rallied his regiments from the depths of despair and led them to a remarkable success. Certainly it could not have come at a better time for his cause. There was no shortage of explanation or recrimination on the British side: Rall was a drunken fool; the Hessian pickets had not put out proper patrols; General Grant had known about the possibility of American attack but ignored it; the lines were too long, leaving General Howe’s troops exposed to being overwhelmed at any point.

Washington’s thrusts into the Jerseys forced several British marches or countermarches. Soldiers were snatched from the warmth of their fires, formed into ranks and pushed across the frozen countryside. On 3 January, Washington struck another blow at Princeton, catching the tail-end of a British column and causing them significant casualties. The reputation of Earl Cornwallis was bruised too, since he had left his rear exposed and failed to attack the Americans first.

These events dramatically changed the character of the war in the
Jerseys. Whigs took heart from them, and everywhere became more active. During the early months of 1777 the notion of winter quarters became meaningless because both sides were involved in a rural partisan war, one in which each side vied for information through spies or scouts and attempted to cut off the foraging parties of the other.

‘As the rascals are skulking about the whole country,’ one British light infantry captain wrote home, ‘it is impossible to move with any degree of safety without a pretty large escort, and even then you are exposed to a dirty kind of
tiraillerie
, which is more noisy than dangerous.’ The army’s extended deployments and lack of supply magazines, noted another, ‘made it absolutely necessary for us to enter into a kind of “
petite guerre
” which has kept the army the whole winter in perpetual harassment.’

It was in actions of a hundred men here or a few companies there, encountering similar-sized parties of Americans, that qualities such as alertness, self-reliance, and drive that were little valued in many European armies of the epoch were needed in abundance. Theorists at the time often called this contest of scouting, foraging and outposts
petite guerre
(a French term which in Spanish gave rise to
guerrilla
), denoting a ‘small war’ in which vital decisions were taken at the lowest level. Those involved understood that such operations suited those with local knowledge and the kind of enthusiasm unleashed by the rebellion.

Faced with this challenge, British generals were tempted to lean once more on those best adapted for
petite guerre
, their own light infantry and the jaegers, German woodsmen dressed in green coats and armed with rifles. Even so, there would never be enough such men – as General Burgoyne had realised when writing one year before about the war – to allow regiments of the line to be excused such duties, so while more specialised troops were raised, the light infantry had a tiresome winter, and officers busied themselves trying to inculcate ordinary regiments with that style of fighting.

It was only due to an uncharacteristic attack of peacetime farsightedness at the War Office back in 1773 that there was any light infantry to be found in General Howe’s army. Such troops had been used before, in the Seven Years War, but later dispensed with as an economy measure. When re-introduced two years before the American rebellion, each regiment had been ordered to take one of its ten companies and train it in the necessary tactics. These men, and the
grenadiers who formed on parade at the other end of each regiment, had been brigaded into separate battalions since the American war began. Because of their position on the two ends of the regimental battle line they were known as ‘flank companies’ or indeed ‘elite’ companies.

Robert Donkin, who had been responsible for training the Welch Fusiliers’ reformed Light Company, wrote that an officer leading such troops should be ready to ‘harass and ruin the enemy’s troops on leaving their quarters; distress them by continual
alertes
… [and when a convoy moved] to exert every sort of means to intercept, burn, or destroy it’. This was the philosophy of both sides on the outposts in the Jerseys.

Early in 1777, the 23rd’s Light Company was part of the 1st Light Infantry Battalion, occupying quarters quite near those of its parent regiment, the Fusiliers, at New Brunswick. It was under the command of Captain Thomas Mecan (who had led it at Bunker Hill). On paper at least, he commanded two subaltern officers, three serjeants, three corporals, one drummer, and thirty-five privates or ‘rank and file’. In practice, some of the men carried on pay lists were always either sick in hospital, missing (prisoners or deserted) or on command somewhere else. The thirst for manpower evident throughout the British army in America was nowhere more insatiable than in the light companies, and in February Mecan was sent another eleven men, transferees from other companies of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Of the thirty-five rank and file on his books at the start of the year, only twelve were Light Company veterans who went back to 1773; fifteen had come in after the slaughter of Bunker Hill in June 1775. Robert Mason, the young drummer who had gone out to Lexington at the start of the war, was one of those transferred to the Light Company. Mecan’s Lieutenant and 2nd Lieutenant were both new too, being aged in their early twenties and teens.

The element of experience and judgement that cemented these young men together was provided by Mecan himself, his serjeants and corporals. Both serjeants had served in the company since it had been re-named as the light one four years earlier, one of them, Thomas Light-bourn, being promoted from corporal one week after Bunker Hill. Two out of three corporals were also veterans of the original company.

By early 1777, almost everyone in the 23rd Light Company had fought many times. The old sweats had come through Lexington and
Bunker Hill, but most of them had been engaged at Long Island and subsequent affairs the previous year, including Pell’s Point in October, when they had fought ‘in the hottest part of this action’.

The light infantry was ‘the most dangerous and difficult service of this war’, according to Captain William Dansey of the 33rd’s company, an ambitious officer who believed the risk justified because it was ‘a line that must be of infinite service to me hereafter, for the preference in all promotions is given to Light Infantry officers’. Dansey came from Herefordshire and was a little younger than Mecan’s thirty-seven years. The 33rd’s Light Company commander was the son of an officer and similarly committed to his profession, and would also endure the trials and tribulations of the 1777 campaign working closely with Mecan in the 1st Battalion of Light Infantry.

The business of light companies had become too serious for the gamesters and boozers to be left in command. ‘Hamilton was one of the best men that ever was’, wrote a captain of the 52nd, ‘but drank so hard that it was recommended him to give up the Light Company.’ Someone who tumbled insensible into his bed could not be left in charge of the army’s outposts, its early warning system.

There was another breed, in addition to the serious professional soldiers, that gravitated towards the light companies, namely adventurers who came out to the army, keen to make a name for themselves in the war. Many of these men had no commissions, and found their services rebuffed. But if equipped with a letter of introduction to General Howe or some other big-wig they would be offered the chance of serving as a ‘gentleman volunteer’ in the light infantry. If they distinguished themselves serving as an ordinary soldier, a commission might be granted them. If they got killed,
tant pis
.