Fusiliers (50 page)

On 25 November, the last British regiments, including the 23rd, were ferried off Manhattan to Staten Island, from where they would be embarked home. Washington and his staff rode into the city hot on their heels; New York was taken over by the victors, there were noisy celebrations, and the flag of the United States flew over its streets. British soldiers, always game for some amusement at the expense of the locals, left the Union flag nailed to the flag-post at Fort George on the southern tip of Manhattan. In order to make it even harder for the victors to hoist the thirteen-striped flag of their new republic, the redcoats had removed the rope from its pulley and greased the pole.

That night of the 25th the British could have watched and heard the noisy celebrations on the waterfront, since many royal ships were still anchored in the harbour. A few days later, the Fusiliers embarked, and the transports sailed for England on 5 December; their odyssey of service that had begun more than a decade earlier was over.

From its arrival in America in the summer of 1773 to its departure in November 1783 around 1,250 men had served in the 23rd – the confusions of army bookkeepers make it impossible to give an exact figure.

The number of other ranks (serjeants, drummers, rank and file) going home, though, was 247. About sixty of these survivors were men who, like Robert Mason, had served in the 23rd throughout its
decade in America; the remainder were later additions. But if only about one fifth of the total number who had served in America boarded the ships home in 1783, what had happened to the rest? There were seventy-two men still in the recruiting pipeline (back in Britain, and a detachment stranded in Halifax). During the regiment’s years in America it had discharged more than 130 men, usually because they were unfit for further service, most of these invalids taking a free passage home. Another forty-four had transferred into other regiments. A total of 493 Fusiliers therefore left the regiment legitimately during the war or were still serving at its end.

One stark fact is clear: the majority of soldiers who joined the 23rd during the preceding decade never left America. There were 193 deserters, around 15 per cent of those who had served. Some had disappeared into the oblivion of forests and swamps, but many like William Hewitt settled, raising children in America. To these men who absconded can be added the fifty-four or so who availed themselves of an official discharge in New York after peace had been declared. Removing the surviving regiment, its dischargees, deserters and invalids from the equation, this leaves around 475 men of the 23rd who died in America. Losses in battle amounted to around seventy-five men (and five officers too), the remaining 400 or so succumbed to illness. The unhealthy winter of 1775–6 in Boston saw dozens claimed by smallpox, consumption and the flux. It was the period of 1780–81, though, that had been particularly disastrous for sickness. The regiment lost 164 soldiers during these two campaigns, and only around one quarter of that number fell in battle. The unhealthy climate of the Carolinas with its swamps, insects and miasmas had played havoc with the 23rd, as Lieutenant Colonel Balfour and Earl Cornwallis knew it would. Keeping them marching and fighting through the Carolinas may have ground down enfeebled soldiers faster or, by contrast, preserved them from the ravages of epidemics that afflicted static garrisons in the backcountry. Cornwallis and Clinton would doubtless have argued opposite views.

In all of this accounting of lives, some salient conclusions emerge. The first is that poor procedures for camp hygiene, an often wretched diet and the lamentable quackery of the few surgeons willing to serve dispatched far more redcoats than any number of actions by the Continental Army. The second is that America’s daughters, through the sweet oblivion of the conjugal bed, most likely cost King George
more men than America’s sons with their noisier manoeuvres. Those deserting Welch Fusiliers who resisted the allure of local women often fell for siren songs of a different kind – the promise of land on the Kentucky frontier or the offers of being set up in business as a teacher, smith or well-digger. The appeal of life in the New World, and its contrast with the hardships of a soldier’s lot, proved to be one of the Patriots’ best weapons.

The grim reality of campaigning in America, that sickness would claim far more men than enemy fire, would have been apparent among the 23rd’s officers too. Some eighty-eight served there during the war, although the time spent on the continent by most officers was considerably shorter than the time served by the men. Those like Charles Apthorpe or Thomas Saumarez who began their campaigns as lowly subalterns, and stayed with the Fusiliers for several years as they rose to captain, were rarities. Far more officers spent one or two campaigns in that regiment before purchasing or transferring into another, or indeed selling out. Five officers of the 23rd were killed in action or died soon afterwards from wounds. Eight received injuries in combat that were serious enough to be recorded, but perhaps twice that number received some sort of non-fatal wound in battle. The number who perished through sickness, by contrast, was thirteen.

Several officers of the regiment undoubtedly profited greatly from their time in America. Happily, none of the 23rd stood accused of fraud on a vast scale, as some men who had run the army’s wagon train or arranged its quarters did. Both Balfour and Mackenzie, though, obtained a couple of steps of rank, as well as using the additional pay they were granted to restore their financial health. Others such as Apthorpe or Peter advanced themselves by years of hard fighting. Perhaps the most canny of all the officers who started the war in the 23rd proved to be Robert Donkin. His disappointment at being denied the lieutenant colonelcy of the Royal Welch Fusiliers early in 1778 did not last long, since General Clinton soon established a new post for Donkin with the same rank. Not only did the founding commanding officer of the Royal Garrison Battalion, Donkin, get his step for free, but he also maintained his record of serving in the American theatre without suffering the risks of going into battle. Donkin’s battalion was soon dispatched to serve in the balmy safety of the Bahamas. When the war ended he was able to work the army system sufficiently well to ensure that the battalion, along with his job,
were transferred to the British establishment. Donkin became a familiar figure in his later years at the spa in Bath, living out his twilight years comfortably on general’s pay.

What were the reflections of the army that had lost the war in America? A great many, it is clear, did not accept that the British army had been beaten. Serjeant Lamb, a veteran of both the Saratoga and Yorktown capitulations, wrote: ‘It was never said of Burgoyne’s army that they ran away, but that they were slain. Nor of Cornwallis’ army that they were vanquished but that they were taken.’ Many other British veterans felt the same way; their country may have lost the war, but their army had not been defeated on the battlefield. They were sure that they were better soldiers, until the end, than the Americans. It was undoubtedly this pride in country, red coat and regiment that kept many of them fighting. It made them all the more angry with those at home whom they considered to have squandered the overall result of the war.

Balfour articulated the thoughts of many when pouring his vituperation on the heads of those parliamentarians who had put personal or factional interest ahead of any consideration for the soldiers bleeding and dying thousands of miles away. He had written of the army’s duty in America to one politician friend, ‘We must not only move as machines, but be as insensible too.’ Major Dansey too could not contain his bitterness towards those who had recently come to power in London, Whigs who had for years trumpeted every reverse suffered by the British army, such was their contempt for the King’s war, and who proudly sported the American cockade on their hats. America, wrote the major, had been ‘bartered away by turbulence and faction to the most ignoble of these wretches … now the sword is sheathed persecutions are begun more inquisitous and horrid than the Inquisitions.’

For many, the abandonment of the American loyalists was an affront to their feelings of soldierly propriety. ‘The desertion of the loyalists is looked upon by all of us as the most dishonourable act that was ever done by a nation,’ wrote one officer. ‘Faction has done what the sword could not accomplish.’ In the 23rd’s mess, with four Americans among its depleted corps of officers, the defeat of loyalism must have been particularly hard to stomach. Charles Apthorpe’s family in particular stood to lose a fortune, with its estates in New
York and Massachusetts, leaving his captaincy in the Fusiliers one of the few remaining marks of his gentility.

Many British officers believed until the end that most Americans would prefer to remain subjects of King George and that the revolution would prove one in the true sense of the word, taking the settlers through anarchy back around to where they had started off. ‘Men of all parties consider another revolution as inevitable and at no great distance,’ General Carleton wrote to London just a few weeks before he quit New York, arguing, ‘Many [Americans] look back with regard on the tranquillity and happiness of former times and are persuaded that neither peace nor safety can be procured but under their former government.’

Some of the more astute officers who had faced the American army in several campaigns had come to respect their perseverance and to understand that it was buttressed by ideological grit. American soldiers did not have to believe that ‘Liberty’ would be attained in its most perfect form, only that the cause was worth fighting for. ‘Although I shuddered at the distress of these men,’ wrote the Hessian Jaeger Captain Ewald after watching a parade of Continentals in ragged uniforms, ‘it filled me with awe for them, for I did not think there was an army in the world which could be maintained as cheaply as the American army … to what cannot enthusiasm lead a people!’

In addition to inspiring messages from their leaders, the Continental Army more often motivated its men through coercion. Washington executed more of his soldiers than the British did theirs. Throughout these years there was evidence of American commanders being willing to issue orders to shoot their own fleeing troops, whereas the only similar example recorded on the British side was at Lexington. The British also proved less willing to intimidate the general population through capital punishment. Although they did hang spies and several of those who had broken their paroles not to serve against the king in the south, they never put in place that system of ‘Committees of Public Safety’ that the revolutionaries used to crack down on loyalists or other dissenting opinion across the thirteen provinces.

As for their military strategy, Ewald, that veteran jaeger, and Mackenzie, the long-serving Welch Fusilier, shared many views about why the British had lost. ‘One capital error in the conduct of the war in this Country,’ wrote Mackenzie, was ‘that under the idea of having numerous friends in every Province … we have extended our
operations throughout most of them; by which we have not been in sufficient strength in any one, and have found those to oppose us in all.’ Mackenzie, like his Hessian colleague, felt that strategic vision had been lacking and that too many British generals had proven ineffective placemen more concerned with lining their pockets than defeating their enemy. Mackenzie was disgusted too with the faction prevailing among generals and admirals, but this was a reflection of the bitter struggle between political interests at home.

Those who had felt since the outset that victory was impossible, because you could not shoot or bayonet a civilian population back to their ‘true allegiance’, tended to be tied to the Whig cause back in Britain. Some, like Fitzpatrick of the Guards, had gone to some trouble to avoid serving in America again, whereas others of the same political cast who could not avoid it, like O’Hara – also a Guards officer – had been pessimists who carried on fighting out of a sense of professional duty. Frederick Mackenzie, by contrast, had believed until the defeat at Yorktown that a victory was possible. This would have taken the form of a loose federation under the sovereignty of King George III (an idea very similar in fact to that Mackenzie heard being preached by that revolutionary agitator Dr Warren from the pulpit of the South Meeting House in Boston in 1775) rather than the re-imposition of full colonial status with its dreaded taxes and the like. Some, like Colonel Balfour, might have shared the view that such an accommodation was possible during earlier years but by 1781 he despaired of the outcome and fought on for professional advancement alone. Cornwallis too, appears to have campaigned for his reputation while trying to exorcise the personal demons unleashed by his wife’s death.

A sense of bitterness towards those at home who had attacked the army because of their opposition to the cause it was engaged in extended even to the ranks. Serjeant Lamb, unusual no doubt because of his literacy and general intelligence, was angered by ‘virulent party writers’ in Britain who picked up American claims of redcoat brutality uncritically. He was convinced that he and his comrades had generally behaved with humanity and professionalism. Lamb the returning veteran felt very differently about himself and war to the headstrong youngster who had taken the king’s shilling. His survival through several battles, two escapes, and many fevers convinced him of ‘an higher direction, an arm omnipotent, which has been my safeguard’. Lamb realised full well that most redcoats would scorn a man showing
religious feelings. Indeed his sense that he had outgrown barrack room vice simply added to the serjeant’s conviction that he must seek his discharge as soon as possible.

Since many did not consider themselves to have been broken on the field of battle, those officers who had fostered the ‘American style’ of fighting, notably Earl Cornwallis, were determined to spread its lessons through the wider army. They favoured rapid manoeuvre, swift bayonet charges, two-deep lines of infantry with the men widely spaced, and set great store by the operations of advance guards or light troops. In time, their struggle to propagate the tactical lessons of the American war would stimulate powerful forces of reaction in the army, but as they sailed home in the short murky days at the end of that year, the guns had fallen silent and the battle of military ideas had not yet begun.