Fusiliers (42 page)

Houston’s company ‘fired on their flank, and that brought down many of them’. Instinctively the Fusiliers turned around and ran back towards the ridge they had just descended, with the Virginians in pursuit. The fight became one of companies and even smaller groups of men, as the redcoats rallied and came forward. After ‘severe firing’, the Virginians began to break.

One of the Virginian officers, over to the (American) left of the road where the 71st and von Bose Regiment had gone in, wrote grimly, ‘Holcombe’s Regiment and ours broke off without firing a single gun and dispersed like a flock of frightened sheep.’ When he bellowed at the men, trying to halt their flight, this major received a bayonet wound from one of his own soldiers. As the left part of Greene’s second line broke, it ran away from the Guilford road, with Leslie’s
brigade in pursuit. This movement, along with that by the 33rd to the opposite flank, prompted Cornwallis to push the Guards up in order to plug the gap opening in his centre.

Cornwallis was anxious to ascertain what was happening in the woods, spurring his horse into the trees. There was a crack as his mount was shot, crumpling beneath him. A dragoon’s horse was swiftly produced and his lordship remounted, pushing forward towards where he expected to find Webster’s men.

Serjeant Lamb was one of many engaged in short range exchanges of fire, as the Fusiliers tried to deal with the last of Stevens’s men, approaching all the while the clearing of Naseby Fields. Attempts to rally the 23rd may have been hampered by the fact that their acting commander, Captain Peter, had been shot in the leg early in the engagement. At one point Lamb realised he was just a few yards from several Americans who levelled their weapons at him, and observed, ‘In such moments all fears of death are over.’ Lamb ducked down, noticing a dead guardsman in front of him, and started to help himself to the man’s cartridges. The Americans fired, but missed, the balls whistling over the Fusilier serjeant’s head. Lamb doubled back towards friendly troops and then spotted General Cornwallis, alone on his dragoon’s horse, disorientated and heading towards the Americans. Lamb explained:

I immediately laid hold of the bridle of his horse, and turned his head. I then mentioned to him that if his lordship had pursued the same direction, he would have been surrounded by the enemy, and, perhaps, cut to pieces or captured. I continued to run along side of the horse, keeping the bridle in my hand, until his lordship gained the 23rd Regiment.

In the confused woodland fighting required to dispatch the more stubborn of Stevens’s Virginian militia, the 23rd and companies of the 2nd Guards had become mixed up. Officers and serjeants went about the trees bellowing to get their men back into order. Off to the (British) left Webster managed to keep the 33rd, several dozen jaegers and Guards Light Company together. Nearing the clearing of Naseby Fields, he formed his men into line, ready to press on immediately with an assault on the final American position, the hill to his front held by Continental troops.

It was probably still less than an hour since the action had started, when Webster led his men into Greene’s chosen killing ground. From the
position where they had emerged from the trees, and perhaps also from Webster’s fine tactical eye, they tried not to cross directly in front of the 1st Maryland Regiment and 6-pounders, keeping instead to the left side of the fields, coming up towards Huger’s brigade of Virginians on the ridge. The Delaware and Virginian rifle companies that had galled Webster’s advance in front of the American first line had by this time raced back to join the third to the (American) right of Huger. As the 33rd, Guards Light Bobs and Jaegers pressed on, Kirkwood’s riflemen started to pick them off and the cannon crews heaved their weapons about so they might begin hurling grapeshot into their ranks. Lieutenant Colonel John Howard’s 1st Maryland Regiment readied their muskets.

With men falling to left and right, Webster himself was hit and went down. His attack was faltering. Kirkwood’s Delawares and some Virginian riflemen charged the 33rd and sent them running back up the hill they had just tramped down. The first men to reach the safety of this position formed up, and received the Americans, ‘pouring in a very heavy fire on them’. At this see-saw moment, it was the Americans’ turn to run back to safety.

The 2nd Battalion of Guards, ‘impatient to signalise themselves’, went forward to attack the Americans on the hill. By this time both Maryland regiments and Huger’s Virginians were lined up on that eminence, in front of Webster’s brigade, events on the other side of the road having separated into a distinct and less pivotal battle. Having formed quite near the road, the 2nd Guards, who were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Stewart but also had their brigadier (O’Hara) with them, pushed on with levelled muskets towards the 2nd Maryland Regiment, which was posted on the flank of the position, almost at right angles to the 1st Marylanders and parallel to the road.

Lieutenant Colonel Howard (in overall charge of the Maryland contingent) watched as the Guards ran ‘at the 2nd Regiment, which immediately gave way … The Guards pushed them to our rear where they took two pieces of artillery.’ Matters had reached a crisis for Greene, whose third line now stood in a danger very similar to that which had destroyed de Kalb’s command at Camden. Greene had Webster and the 33rd to his front and the 2nd Guards breaking his left flank, threatening to get behind his main defensive line. Howard wheeled the veterans of the 1st Maryland Regiment, many of whom had survived that dreadful debandade at Camden, and opened a volleying fire on the Guards.

‘The conflict between the… Guards and the first regiment of Marylanders was most terrific’, wrote one watching militiaman, ‘for they fired at the same instant, and they appeared so near that the blazes from their guns seemed to meet.’ Soon they were fighting hand to hand. It was in these grim moments of frenzied swordplay that Lieutenant Colonel Stewart was killed by a stroke across the head from a captain of the Marylanders. In this desperate struggle, Brigadier O’Hara was bayoneted and at one stage collared by Americans, only to be recovered by his men.

Having cleared the 2nd Marylanders, the Guards were too eager to press on and complete the destruction of their enemy. With the 1st Marylanders opposing their front, the 2nd Guards had left their right flank hanging dangerously, and it was on to this most tempting spot that Colonel William Washington directed several dozen of his horsemen in the attack.

Washington’s men ‘charged them so furiously that they either killed or wounded almost every man in the regiment, charging through them, breaking their ranks three or four times’. The broken 2nd Guards fled back down the hill towards their redcoat comrades. Rallying his dragoons about him after their dizzying success, Washington looked down from his vantage point, atop the hill of Guilford Courthouse, and saw Lieutenant MacLeod’s small battery in the low ground to his front. He ordered a fresh charge and the men came careering down the slope. Cornwallis, who was standing close to the battery, saw the danger, and ordered MacLeod to fire salvoes of grape into the enemy horse. It took no more than a few moments of this punishment to convince Washington’s troopers of the futility of going on, and, in Cornwallis’s words, ‘The enemy’s cavalry was soon repulsed by a well-directed fire.’

When the enemy horse were driven off, the way was open for the third and decisive British assault on Greene’s last position. The 23rd formed on the edge of Naseby Fields, with several dozen men of the 2nd Guards, bloodied survivors of Colonel Washington’s cavalry charge, rallying on their right. The 2nd Battalion of the 71st had been formed close to the road and fell in to the right of the Guards. Up the British line marched into a hail of musketry and grapeshot.

The height, wrote Calvert, was ‘defended with great obstinacy’, but with the redcoats marching towards the muzzles of the Americans’ two 6-pounders, ‘They fled on all sides.’ Greene ordered a general retreat, anxious to avoid the 71st getting behind them.

‘Such men of the Fusiliers and 71st as had strength’, wrote Saumarez of the 23rd, ‘were ordered to pursue the dispersed enemy.’ This they did for two miles, capturing two more American cannon, until, as Calvert put it, ‘From the fatigue these troops had sustained during the day it was absolutely impossible to pursue them further.’

By late afternoon the Fusiliers had returned to the battlefield and were helping to separate the wounded from the dead among those carpeting Naseby Fields and suffering on beds of pine needles in the woods. A heavy downpour set in, drenching those who cried out in the trees for deliverance.

Cornwallis’s losses had been shockingly high, with the Guards the worst afflicted. Their 216 casualties (of whom thirty-seven were dead) amounted to almost half of them that had gone into battle. The 23rd, which had got off lightly at Camden, was not so lucky this time, suffering thirteen killed and fifty-five wounded. In all, Cornwallis lost 532 men, more than twice as many as Greene.

Greene himself initially evaluated the results of the battle as ‘unfortunate’, for all three of his lines had been broken. But the American general soon realised how great the loss had been to the British, and the critical situation in which Cornwallis had been left. Greene fulminated about the North Carolina militia, claiming they had ‘deserted the most advantageous post I ever saw and without scarcely firing a gun’. He was unfair, without doubt, in suggesting that few of them had fired, for it was in front of these militia on Hoskins’ Field that the 23rd had taken their first heavy blow of the day. To the credit of that regiment, however, it had not stalled as the Grenadiers had at Bunker Hill in a similar situation, but pressed on with its attack, forcing the Americans to flee. Later, they had formed the mainstay of the assault that carried Greene’s last position. Little wonder that Cornwallis wrote to Balfour after Guilford that ‘nothing could behave better than the 23rd’.

The earl, on the day following the battle, wrote an emotional order to be read at the head of each regiment:

Lord Cornwallis desires the officers and Soldiers to accept of his warmest acknowledgements for their very extraordinary valour displayed by them in the action of yesterday; he will endeavour to do justice to their merit in his representation to their Sovereign and the Commander-in-chief and shall consider it the greatest honour of his life to have been placed at the head of so gallant an army.

Several hundred miles marched under the most trying conditions, two major battles and any number of minor skirmishes had produced a powerful bond between the general and his men. There was, inevitably, after 15 March, a sorrow that so many had lost their lives, and that the results had not been more productive. Cornwallis in his dispatch paid tribute in formal style, but perhaps the most remarkable testimony to his small army, its trials and tribulations came in a private letter home from Brigadier O’Hara of the Guards:

No zeal or courage is equal to the constant exertions we are making; tho’ you will not find it in the Gazette, every part of our army was beat repeatedly, on 15th March, and were obliged to fall back twice. The rebels were so exceedingly numerous, as to be constantly able to oppose fresh troops to us, and to be in force in our front, flanks, and rear: it is impossible to say too much in praise of our officers and men in a conflict that lasted near two hours, tho’ so powerfully out-numbered, their spirit and constancy never forsook them, and at length crowned their manly exertions with victory.

The brigadier survived two wounds sustained in the battle. Webster’s case was more doubtful, since one of his legs had been shattered and he was in extreme pain. For many of the soldiers, lying, pleading for help, their misery was just beginning that evening. The downpour that set in lasted the best part of two days, and the army ‘remained on the very ground on which it had been fought, covered with dead and dying and with hundreds of wounded, rebels, as well as our own’.

At length, wagons took the survivors back down the road to New Garden, where a makeshift hospital was set up in the New Garden Meeting House.

For Surgeon Hill and his mates tip-toeing between the groaning bodies, each day at New Garden required incredible exertions, for hundreds of wounded – American, Hessian and British – had been placed under the care of half a dozen medics. The good Quakers of that settlement lent a hand, mopping the blood and excrement from the floors of their Meeting House-turned-hospital. Major General Greene had, at British request, sent a couple of his own physicians across the lines to help. Hill had no more than a couple of chests of instruments that had been carried on one of the army’s last remaining wagons, and a meagre supply of tinctures or opiates to dull the pain of his patients. He operated long hours, hacking off limbs until his arms
were stiff and his saws blunt, probing about in writhing bodies, trying to extract the lumps of metal traded by the two armies on the 15th.

A wound such as Captain Peter’s was a relatively straightforward matter for Hill, since the acting commanding officer of the 23rd had been shot through the fleshy part of the leg. It could be cleaned, dressed, and with luck the patient would survive. Colonel Webster on the other hand had his thigh shattered – there were pieces of bone throughout his leg. Amputation high up on the leg under field conditions would probably kill him.

As the pouring rain finally let up, two days after the battle, Lieutenant General Cornwallis added considerably to the stresses facing his surgeon. It was too dangerous for the army to stay where it was, when there was every possibility that Greene might move in for the kill. In 1777, Burgoyne had lingered too long after the first battle of Saratoga, allowing the New England militia to surround him, preventing his escape. Cornwallis did not intend to do the same. Hill was told to select the men who could march and those who would have to be left behind. The latter, of course, would instantly become prisoners, as would Hill and two mates caring for their patients.