Fusiliers (19 page)

Two examples of this species that came to the 23rd will suffice. Charles Hastings was a lieutenant in the 12th Regiment who tired of sitting in barracks while his cousin Lord Rawdon made a name for himself. He obtained his colonel’s leave and headed to Portsmouth. When the King got wind of it, he sent a messenger ordering Hastings back, for he was anxious to stop dozens of others quitting their regiments to do the same. Hastings remained one step ahead of the messenger, got to America and fought musket in hand with the 23rd Light Infantry at Pell’s Point. ‘He is much approved of by the officers commanding the battalion’, wrote Rawdon with satisfaction.

General Howe, though, evidently divined the King’s feelings on the
subject of volunteers already possessed of commissions, cold-shouldered Hastings and obliged him to return to his regiment. So while he did duty with the Fusiliers during the first half of 1777, he did not become a permanent fixture. Hastings in any case already possessed certain advantages and volunteering was best left to the truly desperate.

Francis Delaval was the bastard son of a dissolute northern aristocrat. Young Francis’s gambling, drinking and general high-living back in England outstripped his slender means. Pleading with an uncle for help when he was
£
15 in debt, Delaval received
£
20 and the promise that if he went into the army, his uniform would be paid for and an allowance of one guinea a week made to him. Francis promptly gambled the money away, and found himself in a sponging house or debtors’ prison.

When his uncle bailed him out, further escape was impossible and Francis was finally packed on board ship with the requisite letter of introduction to General Howe. Delaval was sent to the light infantry and, his mind being untainted with any previous military experience, a few weeks later in August 1776 he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant into the Royal Welch Fusiliers. At least, Mecan might have reasoned, they had got him away from the light company.

Delaval was experienced in gaming anyhow, an asset since in the taverns or backrooms of New Brunswick there was a good deal of gambling that winter. They bet on dice, or with cards at hazard and picquet. To the sober-minded officer who could ill afford it, though, hard service in the Jersey countryside, a continual round of touring sentries, reconnoitring and raiding offered a different life. ‘One satisfaction I have in America,’ an officer long used to drawing on private means wrote to his mother, ‘I save a good deal of money; even some out of my pay.’ Many then began to live the life of a professional fighting soldier, and for the light infantry more than any others, there would be no shortage of battle that year.

The march under Colonel Harcourt’s command began at 11 p.m. on 12 April. The ground was muddy underfoot, the snows having melted during the previous fortnight. Harcourt, a cavalry officer, had fifty of his own dragoons under command, the army’s two battalions of light infantry and one of grenadiers – around 1,200 men. Harcourt had gained great fame in the army by capturing Washington’s deputy,
Major General Charles Lee, in a raid near New York four months before. This night, they walked stealthily, following the line of the Raritan River up towards the village of Bound Brook. For months the river had been the front line between British and American forces in that part of Jersey, the soldiers trading shots, shouts and lewd gestures on a daily basis. That night, Harcourt’s column was on the American side of the river, where strong outposts had been set up as part of the outer defence of Washington’s main encampment nearby at Morristown.

Across the Raritan, on the British-held side, a second column set out under Colonel von Donop, consisting of Hessian grenadiers and some field artillery. They would march towards the main bridge at Bound Brook, on a road where the Americans would have not expected any attack, at dawn.

At 3 a.m., following behind Harcourt’s column, a third force began marching towards Bound Brook. Captain Johann Ewald, with thirty of his Hessian jaegers who had volunteered for this special mission, were at its head, followed by two battalions of British Guards. Ewald had earlier conducted reconnaissance of Bound Brook on behalf of Earl Cornwallis, whose plan of attack that night was being put into action.

The plan gave a distinct mission to each column: Harcourt was to
move around behind the village, ready to assault it from the rear at dawn but with a strong detachment looking the other way in case American reinforcements were sent from Morristown; Grant was to be in position by the hamlet of Raritan Landing, ready to threaten the village at the same time; von Donop was to attack across the bridge from the British side of the Raritan.

Brigadier Benjamin Lincoln commanded several hundred men in and around Bound Brook. In the village itself there was a redoubt dominating two important crossings over the Raritan and three or four cannon. It was a strong position, where Lincoln might easily have held off hundreds attacking frontally, but Cornwallis’s intentions were for a sudden and overwhelming assault.

Most officers engaged in such a complex enterprise, at night, knew that there was much that could go wrong. The firing of a carelessly dropped musket or an escaped sentry could cause the alarm to be raised. With men advancing in darkness through marshy riverside pastures, one column might take longer than expected or get lost. And how would each of the three commanders know that the others were in place before launching his assault?

The first unexpected event was that Harcourt’s scouts discovered Brigadier Lincoln was passing the night with a strong guard at Horne’s Plantation, a place they would find more than one mile from Bound Brook. The light infantry bayoneted some of his sentries and moved swiftly into the farm. Lincoln and some others escaped from their beds, barely clothed, but the Light Infantry took his papers, a few dozen men and three cannon at the plantation. They pushed through the night to Bound Brook itself.

When Ewald’s jaegers bumped into some American sentries close to the village, ‘the picket received us spiritedly and withdrew under steady fire’. Ewald pursued the retiring men closely – a sound tactic for rushing a place – until he found himself only 100 yards short of the redoubt, where he stopped. ‘The day dawned,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘and I was exposed to a murderous fire.’ In the early light, Ewald made the unpleasant discovery that only ten of his jaegers had followed his earlier rush into the village. They were pinned down.

It was no time before Harcourt and von Donop began their final moves, signalling an all out assault. The Americans abandoned their redoubt, realising they were under fire from all sides, and dozens of Continentals scattered through back gardens or orchards, trying to
escape. The British moved into the town and began destroying military stores such as gunpowder. Local homes were not spared either: ‘The place was ransacked and plundered because all the inhabitants were rebellious minded.’

As Cornwallis’s columns were withdrawn to the British side of the Raritan, they came back leading cows, towing Lincoln’s captured artillery and carrying all manner of booty. A light infantry officer summarised the cost to the enemy: ‘Three pieces of cannon, a major of artillery and two other officers with upwards of 70 men, and [we] killed and wounded near 100, the loss on our side one man killed and two wounded.’

Captain Ewald, the son of a Kassel bookseller, embodied the chivalrous code of conduct expected of a gentleman of arms with a rigorous attachment to military science, a most unusual combination. To his mind, the raid could have been even more successful but had been marred by Harcourt beginning his assault a little late, allowing many of the Americans around the redoubt to escape, and by Grant not telling him that his own column was only intended to mount a feint or dummy attack.

Ewald certainly had a hard eye – a singular one, since he had lost the other in a duel. It was true that, under slightly different circumstances, several hundred prisoners might have been taken and Harcourt might have added Lincoln to his haul of captured rebel generals, but overall, the army’s performance in mounting a difficult night-raid showed a vast improvement over its early fumblings around Boston. This was very different, after all, to the light infantry’s flight at Lexington or Lieutenant Lenthall’s raid near Penny Ferry in which his Fusiliers had ‘run away’ in panic.

General Howe was exultant at the results of Bound Brook, for he was evidently anxious for some positive stroke to report to London after the dismal news of December and January. ‘It was well conceived and conducted masterly,’ Howe wrote home, ‘the Light Infantry behaved with
amazing spirit
and with as much cleverness in the night march as possibly could be.’ Having lavished such attention on the light corps, Howe was keen to burnish their laurels. Even Ewald agreed that the ‘forage war’ in the Jerseys had been ‘very beneficial for the army, for a renewed spirit entered the hearts of the soldiers, who had been completely disheartened by the disasters of Trenton and Princeton’.

Of course, the action of 13 April was not one that had changed history in any way, and indeed the Americans had also mounted successful raids up to and including Trenton. It had, however, signalled that British soldiers, and particularly the light infantry, were adapted to the American form of war and faced the challenges ahead in high spirits.

The light infantry had mastered skirmishing: moving in small groups and exposing only the minimum necessary to shoot at their targets. Captain Dansey of the 33rd Light Infantry commented after Bound Brook, ‘We have learned from the rebels to cover our bodies if there’s a rail or a tree near us.’ Where circumstances dictated, these two battalions of picked troops could adopt any variety of formation to suit their mission, moving with each pair of men, or file, spaced widely apart or skirmishing through woods. They had definitively dropped the old system of three ranks and only formed with their men shoulder to shoulder at night, when mutual support might be more valuable. If Howe favoured light infantry officers with promotion, it was because he was using those battalions as a school whose graduates would return to their regiments, the lieutenants as captains or the captains as majors, spreading this new doctrine and ‘amazing spirit’ to the humdrum companies of the line.

In the months between Long Island and Bound Brook a very distinctive ethos had built up in the light infantry, whose men were often called the Light Bobs by brother soldiers. They liked to compare their work to the chase, one writing to his mother that ‘a day’s Yankie hunting is no more minded than a day’s fox hunting’. Moving forward so quickly, and with men spread out, drums were found impractical for signalling. What better to replace them than hunting horns, just like those the Hessian jaegers carried? ‘I never felt such a sensation before,’ wrote an American officer who, on hearing these sounds, realised he had become the quarry of the British Light Infantry, ‘it seemed to crown our disgrace.’ Buoyed up by high spirits, Light Bob officers often sought volunteers for dangerous missions, rather than using compulsion with their men.

Light infantry commanders wanted to inspire soldiers, harnessing their enthusiasm, even if that spirit sometimes arose from an expectation that picked troops should have the first right to plunder their enemy. Howe’s chosen corps added to their facility at rapid manoeuvre an expertise at stripping American property. Such was the
importance of reaping food and forage quickly that the Light Infantry even had their own distinctive language of larceny with ‘grabs’ and ‘lobs’. One young officer who imbibed this culture with alacrity explained:

Grab was a favourite expression among the Light Infantry, and meant any plunder taken by force; a Lob when you got it without any opposition, and I am very certain that there never was a more expert set than the Light Infantry at either grab, lob, or gutting a house.

During raids in the Jerseys, the capture of livestock was often an objective. In these scorched-earth contests to sustain oneself and deny the enemy sustenance, marauding enemy supplies became official policy. One light infantry private responded with the following flippant verse to an appeal by Washington for farmers to fatten up their cattle in preparation for the coming campaign: