Fusiliers (22 page)
Mecan had shed blood for his sovereign before. Nearly seventeen years had passed since he was shot during a failed assault on a French-held convent at Campen, during the German campaigns of the Seven Years War. He knew that a saw-bones of an army surgeon or a stinking hospital could send a man to his maker more efficiently than any American sharpshooter. But his wound did not prove this time too serious. The light infantry had begun to quip that their tactic of using trees and other cover made them favourites for bullets in the arms or legs. Mecan would, though, be unable to serve for the remainder of that campaign, a military expedition that was already being picked over by the commander-in-chief’s critics and supporters alike.
Brandywine was most certainly a victory. In tactical terms it was Howe’s finest battle, but the strategy of going to Philadelphia as Burgoyne got deeper and deeper into trouble further north had not produced a decisive battle. ‘The consequences of this victory have been exactly like those of the others,’ Fitzpatrick wrote wearily, ‘it is really melancholy to see so much misery occasioned and so many troops sacrificed every day to so little purpose.’ Those who attacked Howe from the military rather than party-political angle asked why he hadn’t started his flank march earlier, since arriving so late in the day had allowed Washington to salvage his broken army by night. The failure to pursue the following day left quite a few wondering again why their commander-in-chief was reluctant to press home his military advantages.
Camping near the field of Brandywine for a couple of days after the battle, the British dealt with some of their usual problems. The march from the Head of Elk had been accompanied by some looting that
once again nettled many officers. Earl Cornwallis seems to have been the angriest of all. It had become clear that General Howe would not confirm death sentences awarded by courts martial to soldiers who robbed civilians. Cornwallis could stand this no longer, so took the extraordinary step of summarily judging and hanging two men of his elite corps.
At 11 a.m. on 15 September the 1st Battalion of Grenadiers were ordered on parade. The resulting sentence of death was pronounced on the two miscreants and without further ado they were hanged. Lieutenant John Peebles, a veteran grenadier of the Black Watch, noted approvingly that these two men were ‘the first examples made, though often threatened and many deserved it’.
After two and a half years of campaigning, and numerous capital sentences for such crimes, the British army had actually started executing its looters. How far any lesson was learned in the army was open to question.
General Howe still preferred to play the part of merciful father to his army, frequently using the commander-in-chief’s prerogative to pardon the condemned. Howe, it appears, also regarded devastation as part of his scheme of operations against the rebels. Three men of the 23rd Fusiliers court-martialled for looting soon after the army landed at the Head of Elk had been awarded 1,000 lashes but orders announced: ‘The Commander-in-chief, considering the punishment inadequate to their crimes, is pleased to remit the punishment and to order the prisoners to be released and to join their regiment.’ If letting guilty men off because the punishment was not severe enough seemed an odd stance for the general to take, so too was his explanation of the latest stealing. After Brandywine, Howe put at least some of the blame for encouraging marauding on local people since they had gone to impromptu markets to buy back stolen goods. The examples made by Cornwallis on 16 September were not therefore regularly repeated, for quite a few condemned men escaped that fate.
With disciplinary matters attended to, the British army moved towards Philadelphia. On 21 September, General Grey pulled off a daring night raid with some companies of the 2nd Light Infantry and some regular infantry. Creeping through the darkness they had surprised the camp of some Pennsylvania regiments and done terrible slaughter with their bayonets. Around 150 Americans were killed, and seventy-one taken prisoner.
It may come as no surprise that the kind of propagandists who dubbed the killing of five demonstrators in 1770 a ‘massacre’ would have no trouble making use of the same word to described the events at Paoli. Rumours were spread that the British had refused quarter to wounded men, and such reports may have helped keep up the fighting spirit of demoralised Continental regiments, and no matter that dozens of captives were actually taken alive.
On 26 September, Earl Cornwallis marched at the head of his grenadiers into Philadelphia. Howe had gained his objective, but to little effect.
Brandywine and Paoli had shown the more politically perceptive officers in Howe’s army that the effects of military victory on support for the enemy cause would always be limited. How would the King’s partisans ever win when victories would be denounced as bloody massacres, and more dubious outcomes hailed as great American victories? Since the British newspapers routinely reprinted American dispatches or reports, the consequences of this battle of words were important in undermining support at home, causing many officers to become increasingly embittered by what they saw as American lies.
Captain Mecan did not share in the triumphal entry to Philadelphia, as he languished on his sick bed. His life was not in danger, but he had left the command of the 23rd Light Company vacant and another officer eyed it jealously.
ELEVEN
After Which the Honourable Lionel Smythe Appeared Among the Fusiliers
The Americans that morning sounded reveille for the 2nd Light Infantry in dashing style. Creeping towards the forward outposts of William Howe’s army they had obtained the element of surprise at Germantown. Running out of the dawn mist, the attackers gave war whoops, shouting that they were there to get revenge for Paoli. The British, who were mainly asleep at this hour, tried to organise their defences but soon found themselves streaming back.
During the hours of darkness some of Howe’s commanders had become concerned by intelligence that Washington’s army was moving towards them. Several regiments, including the 1st Light Infantry Battalion, which lay to the right and a little closer to headquarters than the 2nd, had put on their cartridge-pouch belts and equipment but had not been ‘stood to arms’ or paraded formed up and ready for action.
Washington had not obtained, in that sense, complete surprise but he had done well enough to cause the British serious difficulties. On the hill at the northern edge of Germantown where the 2nd L.I. had made their camp, men were hurriedly formed into platoons and companies and thrown forward against the large numbers of Pennsylvanians. The ground was much intersected with fences, buildings and clumps of trees, so the action yawed back and forth as little groups of men gained or lost local advantage. After a couple of attempts to recover the situation, wrote a young officer of the Light Bobs, ‘The battalion was so reduced by killed and wounded that the bugle was sounded to retreat.’ The rigours of campaigning had cut the
number of fit men in the 2nd Battalion to below 400, and in the first hour at Germantown, they took scores of casualties.
Howe’s force had divided itself into several elements in and around Philadelphia. Among those detachments were the 23rd, who had gone marching back into the city as an escort for some artillery and missed this battle. The army under his command that morning was only around 7,500. Washington, having excellent intelligence of British dispositions, concerted a plan to bring something like 12,000 of his own troops from different directions to fall upon Germantown. He intended to reap the rewards of sound generalship, concentrating his forces at the very time and place that Howe had dispersed his.
Some time not long after 6 a.m. General Howe, trotting up towards the sound of fighting, saw clumps of men racing back along the road or through gardens. ‘For shame! For shame, Light Infantry!’ the general shouted at his men. ‘I never saw you retreat before.’ The 2nd Light Infantry had been placed too far away from the main British encampment to receive rapid support from their comrades who were now under arms and marching up. This separation of two miles from headquarters was also apparently the reason why the troops at the northern edge of Howe’s deployment had not received the warnings of imminent attack during the night. As the Light Bobs ran back past their general those left behind in the bivouac, the 40th Foot, were the next to face the torrent rushing towards them.
Washington’s plan did not, however, simply involve attack from one direction. The 1st Light Infantry (in which the 23rd’s company served without the wounded Mecan) was soon attacked too. They were in battle formation, with the 4th Regiment formed to their left and facing in the right direction, but ‘the morning was so foggy that their columns could not be distinguished at twenty paces distance’. With a crash of musketry, an enemy brigade launched itself out of the miasma to their front and fell upon the right wing (or half) of the 4th, next to the 1st Light Infantry, sending them fleeing backwards. With the Americans rushing past their left, the 1st L.I. ‘instantly attempted wheeling to the left’, to catch them in the flank.
During the confused close-range battle, the 1st Light Infantry broke into two wings, as it had at Brandywine, with their right, formed of nearly five companies, fighting in one direction, while the left (including the 23rd Light Company) continued their attack. In this melee, the 9th Virginia Regiment got between the two wings of the 1st
L.I., and when soldiers of the smaller right wing started trudging back from beating off another enemy force, they saw the Virginians plundering the battalion’s encampment, ‘upon which the officers with the most determined bravery encouraging their men, … charged [the Americans] though very inferior to their numbers and effectually routed them’. The 9th Virginians were caught between two fires, having light infantry to their front and rear, and suffered accordingly.
After three hours of fighting in fenced fields and copses, the tide began to turn. The early morning mist burned off, allowing the British, exploiting their central position, to concert counter-attacks on the different American columns. The 40th Regiment, holding out in the brick-built Cliveden mansion, had occupied hundreds of Continentals, who tried in vain to storm the building supported by artillery, rather than exploiting their initial success and pushing into the heart of the enemy position. Poor co-ordination between Washington’s different columns meant that two engaged each other by mistake, and there was little hope of responding to the growing number of counter-attacks.
In these actions redcoat brigades and battalions worked smoothly together, smashing apart Washington’s columns and driving them back. The attack cost the Americans more than 1,000 men, of whom 400 were taken prisoner (a significant proportion being from the 9th Virginia after it was surrounded by the Light Infantry) and more than 150 killed. Howe’s loss was about half that, but it was nonetheless a significant blow, coming near the end of a long campaign. Washington had in any case ably demonstrated at Germantown that he was still capable of offensive action and retained an effective army in being.
In the days after Germantown, Howe set his men to work reducing American fortifications on the Delaware River that effectively prevented British ships sailing up from the open seas to re-supply him. This was a difficult task, for the defenders of the two main forts proved tenacious and tactics employed by Howe’s subordinates rather inefficient.
In late October, nonetheless, Howe and his people pronounced themselves satisfied with the campaign, believing they had discomfited the naysayers. ‘The movement of the army’, wrote Major Balfour, ‘has convinced the Americans of a truth they ever doubted before, that we can penetrate into their country, whenever we please.’ Certainly, it was true that plenty had asserted that a British army that went far from the sea would be overwhelmed, but the campaign was not over and the fate of
Burgoyne’s force advancing from Canada was, to put it mildly, uncertain.
Writing the following day, a young friend of Earl Percy’s alluded to disturbing rumours about the fate of Burgoyne’s column. American prisoners and civilians would regularly report with glee news of British reverses elsewhere, but often this was dismissed as wishful thinking or the wilful distortion of the Whig presses. Lieutenant Lionel Smythe, though, was sufficiently worried to repeat the reports, such as that in an American newspaper published nearby in Reading that said, ‘The most favourable accounts are that [Burgoyne] has returned to Fort Ticonderoga with the loss of heavy artillery.’
Smythe wrote his letter on 26 October, the same day his name appeared in orders, promoted from his lieutenancy in the 49th to captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The young man’s patron, through skilful hints via his proxies at headquarters (for Percy himself was back in England by this time), had obtained a veritable prize, command of the 23rd’s Light Company. One of the senior officer’s correspondents reported back to Percy that gaining Mecan’s crack company for Smythe had ‘made him one of the happiest men in the army’.
