Fusiliers (27 page)

As the grenadiers stumbled towards a low ridge Lieutenant Colonel Monkton, the 2nd Battalion commander, squinted at a line of troops forming to the front. When it was suggested that their many different coats made them enemy Monkton insisted they were loyalists but soon paid for his mistake. The Americans gave a first discharge of musketry that felled several men, including Monkton, killed by a bullet through the heart. The grenadiers charged on and drove back the first American line.

It seemed at first like Brandywine all over again, that the grenadiers would chase the enemy from one fence to another, allowing them no time to re-form. But this time it was different. The heat had already accounted for dozens of them during a five-mile race to action. As the younger officers and men rushed forward, ‘it was no longer a contest for bringing up our respective companies in the best order, but all officers as well as soldiers strove who could be foremost’. Finding the grenadiers pushing on in ragged formation, Clinton appeared. Far from getting them into some kind of order before the next assault, their general egged them on, shouting, ‘Charge Grenadiers, never heed forming!’

They were about to discover another difference from Brandywine. The men facing them, picked Continentals from New Hampshire and New York regiments, were spoiling for action. They had also wheeled
several guns into position to support them at the next obstacle they could find to form behind, a hedge separating two farms.

As the British grenadiers rushed up, 1st Battalion (including the 23rd’s grenadier company) on the right and 2nd on the left, the Americans let rip a withering volley. Cannon joined in, spewing out grapeshot and case (also called canister, being a tin full of dozens of musket balls). Captain Wills, commanding the grenadiers of the Welch Fusiliers, had a great lump of his thigh ripped off by grapeshot, and went down, blood pouring from the wound. Several Fusiliers carried him off, but he had received his death wound.

British soldiers returned fire, knocking down the men to their front. Going closer to see what was happening through the great clouds of smoke produced by the guns, Colonel Laurens’ horse was hit, the animal crumpling to the ground underneath him.

The scene of slaughter then intensified. A further American battery, sited on a hill to the left of the 2nd Grenadiers, opened a withering enfilading fire. Captain Hale of that battalion recorded ‘the rebels’ cannon playing grape and case upon us at the distance of 40 yards and the small arms within little more than half that space’. In this killing field, with severed limbs yawing through the air and the squelch of blood underfoot, the Continentals halted the grenadiers and resisted their charge. Groups of redcoats hugged the ground, or doubled back to a fold in the land that might offer some cover.

General Clinton brought up some British artillery, producing a roaring exchange of cannon, as both sides extricated their bloodied forward units. All the time, though, the odds were changing for the British as Washington’s men debouched into the fields. Under darkness, the British general broke contact with his enemy and turned back towards his destination, New York.

The cost to each side of the battle of Monmouth was similar; around 350 killed, wounded, or missing. Those who died of heatstroke, contained within those totals, amounted to around sixty to seventy men on each side. Among the British, the loss fell disproportionately on the grenadier battalions.

Writing to his father, president of Congress no less, Colonel Laurens was exultant after the battle: ‘Our officers and men behaved with that bravery which becomes free men, and have convinced the world that they can beat British grenadiers.’

When the British army resumed its onward march, there was a
problem of what to do with about forty casualties who were too sick to be moved. ‘The most mortifying circumstances attending the action’, wrote one senior British officer, ‘… we were under the necessity of leaving a great part of our wounded officers and men behind for want of a sufficiency of wagons to bring them off.’

The British army arrived in New York a few days later with a sober appreciation of their enemy. American troops had displayed high qualities in the late battle, and reports were reaching New York of a French squadron appearing any day off the coast.

General Clinton ordered the light and grenadier companies to be returned to their respective regiments. It appeared the elitist system of General Howe was being disbanded, causing alarm among many of those who had spent the previous two years fighting in the flank battalions with their high
esprit de corps
. ‘I fear I must descend, painful thought, from the awful sublimity of a Grenadier to the plebeian state of a common battalion officer,’ wrote Captain Hale of the 45th Grenadier Company. There were recriminations about why Clinton was doing this. Was it a deliberate attempt to dissolve Howe’s picked army within an army?

Officers in these corps had certainly formed a negative view about the new commander-in-chief at Monmouth. An angry Captain Hale wrote,

The general by his rashness in the last action has totally lost the confidence of both officers and soldiers, who were astonished at seeing the commander of an army galloping like a Newmarket jockey at the head of a wing of grenadiers and expressly forbidding all form and order.

The order sending flank-company men back to their regiments was quickly rescinded, the staff insisting that their general had been misunderstood and only envisaged a temporary state of affairs, in which the light infantry and grenadiers would have a short respite before being re-formed. The position of those ‘chosen’ soldiers had, though, been unmistakably diminished since the departure of William Howe, and the grenadiers knew their reputation had been damaged by impetuosity at Monmouth.

These uncomfortable ruminations were not allowed to go on for long, because on 11 July a French warship was sighted off New York. A powerful squadron under Admiral Count Charles Henri d’Estaing had appeared in American waters and would cause every strategic calculation to be revised.

While British commanders usually assumed naval dominance, it was lost that summer off America. D’Estaing had brought with him twelve line-of-battle ships, whereas the British admiral had only nine with him at New York, and they were mainly old 64s, outgunned by six new 74s and two 80-gun three-deckers of the French squadron.

The set-piece amphibious operations of 1776–77 in which the fraternal collaboration of the Howes had brought hundreds of ships to land thousands of men had disappeared. General William had gone home and would soon be followed by Admiral Lord Richard Howe. Faced with the pressure of potential naval as well as military disaster, deprived too of the Howe double-act, relations between sea and land services became far more difficult.

Whoever cruised on the American station would now have to calculate the effect that a French fleet could have, making it unsafe for any small forces to be sent by sea, and allowing Britain’s enemies to land troops of the best quality at times and places of
their
own choosing. This reversal of fortunes may have hung like a black storm-cloud over New York, but it undoubtedly presented a silver lining of sorts, for it pricked the national pride of fleet and army alike.

‘A British admiral pent up in harbour,’ Captain Dansey of the 1st Light Battalion fumed, as Royal Navy ships came in to shelter from the French squadron beyond Sandy Hook. ‘History never furnishes such an instance. How every Englishman’s heart felt the indignity of the event.’ Matters assumed an even more serious complexion when, after loitering off New York for ten days, the French set sail for a rendezvous with their American allies further north, with the British base at Rhode Island as their objective.

A relief expedition became imperative, but Lord Howe knew that many of his ships were woefully under-manned. Hundreds of sailors from the transport vessels volunteered, as did redcoats. ‘Everybody turned out that were near the fleet, and we were obliged to draw for the honour.’

Lieutenant Colonel Balfour, whose warm partisanship for the late commander-in-chief was well known to General Clinton, could expect little but suspicion from the new man. Clinton was putting his own people in, just as Howe had done when succeeding Gage. The atmosphere was acrimonious. Balfour therefore hit upon a stroke: he volunteered the Royal Welch Fusiliers for service at sea as marines, an offer Admiral Howe was happy to accept. The 23rd were going to fight the French.

With late summer, Britain’s Convention prisoners learnt that the Americans intended to march them hundreds of miles southwards to Virginia. This would present Corporal Lamb and his mates with an opportunity to abscond from the march at some point far closer to New York. They formed a plan to escape close to the North or Hudson River, an unmistakable landmark and feature that they could follow south to their destination.

Several days into their march, Lamb conferred with his two comrades about the best time to make a break. The idea of escaping the American regime and finding the British army had possessed him:

I weighed in my mind all the consequences that would probably result, should I be taken by the natives; and the more I thought of the attempt, the more I began to feel a degree of enthusiasm, to which I was before a stranger. I looked forward, not without hope, to the prospects before me and I began already to indulge the exultation of effecting my escape.

One evening when their march had halted for the day, one of Lamb’s fellow escapers, a German speaker, got chatting to the guards, who were Americans of that nation. He persuaded the guards to let them go several hundred yards beyond their sentries to a nearby house in search of food. The prisoners ‘moved further from the guards, by degrees; until we entirely lost sight of them’. Finding an old woman living in a small farmstead nearby they paid her to hide them, which she did until later that night, when she came to tell them that the column had crossed the Hudson and was on the other side.

It took Lamb and the others six days to work their way down close to Kingsbridge, a town where the British lines extended on the mainland just north of Manhattan. There had been many close shaves and moments of despair on the way. One guide agreed to take them for ten dollars and two new blankets. When they could see American soldiers through the undergrowth, this ‘pilot’ despaired, saying, ‘This is a dangerous troublesome piece of work … here is an American encampment within a mile of us; if I should be taken, I shall lose my life.’ Another twelve dollars secured his services to their next shelter.

These three escapers were sent along an underground of mercenary Americans or Tory sympathisers that had helped quite a few redcoats before them and would assist scores more afterwards. They risked their lives in this work, and at length got many of their charges to the gates of New York.

When Lamb’s moment came to cross no-man’s-land and walk towards sentries with their primed muskets, the escaped corporal cried out, ‘We are British soldiers who have made good our escape!’ With the tension and danger of crossing lines behind them, the three escapees were swiftly conducted through the works to a redoubt. ‘We were conducted with joy and wonder to the fort, and received with great kindness by the officers and men,’ wrote Lamb.

Once at headquarters, Lamb, as ringleader of the escape, underwent a lengthy interview with Major Andre, a staff officer much involved with intelligence matters who was anxious for every detail that could be remembered. ‘The major then, with much feeling and politeness’, wrote Lamb, ‘informed me that he was authorized by Sir Henry Clinton, to offer me my choice of entering in any regiment, then serving in America. I came to the resolution of serving in the 23rd, or Royal Welch Fuzileers.’

General Clinton received through hundreds of escapers an unexpected reinforcement of high quality for his depleted regiments. In the case of the 23rd, Lamb was one of forty-two men of the Convention Army who became Fusiliers, a significant number for a regiment that rarely put more than 400 men in the field during these campaigns.

The challenge of escape ensured that those who reached General Clinton’s regiments were the most resourceful and highly motivated men. Captain Frederick Mackenzie confirmed, ‘Many of them are the best soldiers.’ The escapers were the very opposite of the boozers and Lotharios responsible for most of the desertion from the Fusiliers in 1775 as the war was about to start. Lamb and men of his type were not only battle-hardened but they had seen how America kept its bargains, observed Colonel Henley’s brutality and tasted the ‘Liberty and Justice’ extolled by the revolution’s ideologues.

As the war became strategically far more complicated and dangerous for Britain, the army had been infused with the fighting spirit needed to carry on. The talk of ‘civil war’ and ‘kindred people’ that had been common in Boston in 1775 disappeared from officers’ letters and journals. As for the rank and file, Corporal Reeves represented many when he spoke of fighting for ‘King and Country’ and regarded the Americans as an enemy people. Had they not allied themselves with Britain’s oldest and most implacable foe, France? In August 1778, it was against this unholy alliance that the Fusiliers were about to enter battle.

 

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