Fusiliers (53 page)
As for this coming man’s former regiment, it did not participate in the Low Countries campaign, but was fighting the French on the far side of the world in Martinique. The name of Mackenzie remained on the Fusiliers’ rolls, but it was Frederick’s son James rather than the American veteran himself. George, the boy that Mrs Mac had been carrying when Frederick Mackenzie marched to Lexington in 1775, was promoted into the 23rd as a captain in 1796. Of those zealous young captains that had led the 23rd in its Carolina campaigns, only the American, Charles Apthorpe, was still with the regiment as it fought in the Caribbean. Forbes Champagne and Thomas Peter had both
taken advantage of the expansion of the army that accompanied the new war with the French to gain promotion into newly raised corps.
When it came to the serjeants and rankers that had come through Camden or Yorktown, almost none remained with the 23rd. Roger Lamb, having taken his discharge and returned to Dublin, had become a master at the Free School in Whitefriars Lane. Lamb had a weakness for father-figures, and after returning to Dublin he had discovered the prayer meetings organised by Joseph Burgess, the charismatic quartermaster of a cavalry regiment stationed in the city. These sessions, conducted in the language of the ordinary labourer or soldier, had a powerful effect on many who attended. They urged congregants to reject vice. The path to salvation that they appeared to offer seemed altogether more attractive than any preaching in pulpits of the established church. As he attended one meeting after another, Lamb became a very religious man, imbibing the doctrine of the Methodists, while contemplating the folly of his early years. ‘He found me out,’ Lamb said later of Burgess. ‘He bore with my pride, my impertinence, my ignorance, with so much tenderness and love, that at last he entirely won me.’
In a time of social ferment, some at the top of society began to worry about this new sect and its effects on the lower orders. Some generals even believed the Methodists should be repressed in the army, banned from holding meetings. Faced with such hostility, the preachers of this new message became adept at looking after their own, so it was Quartermaster Burgess who fixed Lamb up with his teacher’s job at Whitefriars Lane, for that school was a bastion of the new sects struggle to raise the poor through education. It had been established indeed by John Wesley, the sect’s founder.
Among the other old campaigners, some went to the opposite extreme, sinking into a life of drink and casual work. The army, though, was able to look after some of the 23rd’s American veterans. George Watson, the serjeant major who had later become adjutant to the Fusiliers, had played the military system skilfully in order to ensure a comfortable old age. Watson had been given a captain’s commission in 1790, and the superintendence of a Company of Invalids, those worn-out old redcoats still capable of mounting guard at a fortress. Thomas Parks, a private who came through the triage after the bloody battle of Guilford Courthouse, surviving a shot in the head, was discharged from the regiment in 1792, suffering from chronic
rheumatism, with a recommendation that he be admitted to the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham near Dublin.
Even if the Royal Welch Fusiliers was absent from Flanders as a regiment, Calvert frequently saw familiar faces from the old American army. Cornwallis’s former executives in South Carolina, Francis Rawdon and Nisbet Balfour, were both there. Rawdon, who had by this point inherited the title Earl of Moira, commanded one wing of the army and Balfour, whose connections had always been of a more modest variety, was given the lesser role of commanding a brigade. Through relentless politicking, as well as use of his Scottish family connections, Balfour, who by this point held the rank of major general, had become a Member of Parliament and colonel of a regiment newly raised in Edinburgh. Balfour’s quest to reap rewards from the state for his family’s heavy sacrifice in its service had resulted at last in success. The former commanding officer of the Fusiliers thus became a minor patron in his own right, giving fellow Scot Thomas Peter day-to-day command of his new regiment, just as he had sent him up to run the 23rd after Thomas Mecan had died in 1780 near Camden. So busy was Balfour with his new career as a man of influence, and so poor were the prospects of the army in Flanders that, after just a few weeks in command of his brigade, Balfour soon pleaded pressure of business and returned to Britain.
It cannot be said that General Cornwallis relished the idea of command in the Low Countries either, for, having discussed the gloomy prognosis for the campaign, he headed off to London after little more than one week in the field in order to brief his masters there. Whatever reports he may have given about the difficulty of the Duke of York’s situation, as a supporting member of an Austrian-led army, it did not ultimately save the prince from being recalled. York’s army had enjoyed some moments of success, but it was the reports of its setbacks and of the commander-in-chief’s own foibles that flew about London, creating the demand for change. The violent partisanship of 1775 lived on in some political circles. Whigs in 1794 also relished spreading accounts about the army’s reverses or the drinking and whoring of the King’s second son.
In the field the redcoats, bound by David Dundas’s clunking system of packed ranks and pivots, had been outmanoeuvred by the more nimble French, who performed their infantry evolutions more quickly, sending throngs of skirmishing light infantry to torment their enemies.
The orchards, hedges and rolling hillsides in which they had to fight bore little resemblance to the open Prussian drill grounds where Dundas and York nine years earlier had lost their hearts to Frederick the Great’s system of manoeuvre. As for Old Fritz’s progeny, neither the Prussian army nor the Austrians found satisfactory tactical answers to dealing with the French in Flanders. The tragic irony for Cornwallis and his comrades who had campaigned on the other side of the Atlantic was that the system of swift, open movement that had overwhelmed American light troops at Brandywine or Camden might just as easily be used against the French who capered about the woods of Flanders or lined its fences when firing at the redcoats.
The dead hand of Dundas, also present during the Flanders campaign, had not entirely throttled the initiative of those officers who could detect the difference between those tactics that looked good on Wimbledon Common and those which suit the real battlefield with all its natural or man-made obstacles. Equally, Dundas was an awkward opponent for the American veterans, for he continued to rise in the army. He was one representative of a political family that effectively turned Scotland from a rebellious backwater into a bastion of loyalism that had become highly productive – both economically and in terms of recruits – for the King.
During the latter part of 1794, the army kept trudging eastwards. Once in Holland morale sank even lower, for the people, while superficially polite, nurtured a hatred of the European
ancien regime
armies that resulted in many stragglers being picked off and murdered.
In October 1794, Calvert wrote home to an army friend in England, trying to digest the ‘dear-bought experience’ of the preceding campaign. The army had lacked artillery, skilled engineers, major generals capable of commanding infantry brigades, and its hospitals were sad charnel houses. Calvert’s despair of Britain’s allies led him to believe that the country could not place the same reliance on them in future campaigns and had to develop a force capable of meeting the French independently. He also felt that the system where powerful men could ‘recruit for rank’, raising regiments for the King in return for colonelcies and commissions for their cronies, was a complete anachronism that produced third rate bodies of men. In summary, Calvert longed to ‘restore to the army those independent disinterested feelings, and those high principles that should actuate a soldier and form the basis of the military discipline of a free country’.
It was in April 1796 that Calvert exploited his hold over the Duke of York to set his trajectory to the top of the army. Since being recalled from the Low Countries the duke had been appointed commander-inchief of the army as a whole – a post that carried with it the duties of inspecting its forces, regulating its recruitment and training, as well as liaising with ministers. The Cabinet that sent York to his new office at the Horse Guards felt it was the one post where a young prince with the rank of field marshal might be removed without shame from the command of a field army. The duke, however, was to prove an enthusiastic reformer, quickly setting about using the considerable influence that being the king’s favourite son gave him in order to change the army. But he was no details man, and, in order to keep track of the many schemes he set in train, he decided he would need Calvert.
The tradesman’s son had become an accomplished player of the power game. Tasked by his master in Flanders to keep ministers informed about the progress of the campaign, the lieutenant colonel had begun corresponding directly with men of influence. He had even been sent by the duke on a diplomatic mission to the King of Prussia. Such was Calvert’s confidence in the position he was building, that when the duke offered him the position of private secretary upon their return to London, Calvert graciously declined. He wanted something better.
Late in 1795, York asked the young colonel whether he would become deputy quartermaster general to the army. Calvert said no once more, nobly reminding his great patron that the post had been promised to another officer. It was only in April 1796 that Calvert agreed to take the post of deputy adjutant general. In fact, the absence of the deputy quartermaster general, and the fact that the chiefs of both of these divisions of the staff were aged generals with limited commitment to running their departments, meant that, at the age of thirty-three, Calvert was playing a considerable role in managing the entire army. The duke, indeed, laid upon his shoulders the additional and critical burden of surveying southern England in order to plan its defence against a French invasion.
During the young colonel’s many rides across the South Downs or along the approaches to London, he observed a countryside full of enclosed fields, copses and farmsteads, a battleground even less well suited to phalanxes of infantry or lines of cavalry than the scene of their late battles on the Continent. And while he made his observations, his masters, the commander-in-chief and Secretary at
War, were petitioned by one senior officer after another who urged the creation of large bodies of men capable of waging irregular warfare in the Kentish hopfields or Essex hedgerows. Earl Cornwallis noted, ‘The system of David Dundas, and the total want of light infantry, sit heavy on my mind.’ The earl would make his contributions to the debate about re-shaping the army from the margins, since he was later assigned to the chief command in Ireland, where social tensions would produce upheaval in 1798. However, his interventions about the army’s structure and tactics played an important part in undermining the Dundas doctrine.
The army hierarchy was slowly but surely adopting the advice of its American veterans or others who could see the folly of its ‘Prussian’ system. The formation of several companies of volunteer sharpshooters was authorised as a defence against invasion and a battalion of foreign riflemen entered service in 1798. The influence of that cerebral veteran of the Hessian Jaeger Corps, Johann Ewald was clear in the training given to these new corps, and his texts on irregular warfare appeared in English translation.
To Cornwallis and quite a few other senior officers, the formation of rifle-armed companies was a side issue. He was more concerned with the infantry of the line, urging Horse Guards to adopt ‘means of rendering the movements of the regiments more simple, and a little more active’. He wanted the redcoated regiments to repeat the process undergone by General Howe’s army in 1776 and 1777 when it adopted light infantry tactics.
Early in 1798 Calvert gained the Duke of York’s backing for a plan to reintroduce light infantry battalions. Many officers had reflected on the necessity of this step since the Flanders campaign but nothing had been done. ‘I am indeed to flatter myself that some steps will
speedily
be taken to place us in this respect on a footing with our enemy and by that means give full scope to the native gallantry of our troops,’ wrote Calvert. He proposed the formation of two battalions on the American war pattern, being the combined light companies of sixteen regiments (including the Royal Welch Fusiliers). General Howe, now approaching seventy years old, stepped forward with an offer to perform the same service he had a quarter of a century before, running a special camp to bring the army’s light infantry up to scratch. The wheel was at last being re-invented.
In his private representations, Calvert cited the example of French
tactics in Flanders as the reason why British troops must adapt or die. His logic was therefore the same as that deployed by Dundas in 1785 – that success on the Continent required Britain to copy the greatest army of the day. Other senior officers insisted that the prospect of invasion meant things must change quickly. But as the War Office and Cabinet displayed their uncanny ability to shelve one scheme after another, it fell to a general called John Money to ram home publicly what every veteran of an earlier conflict knew: that the lessons required to beat the French had been previously learned and implemented in America. Money had served with Burgoyne’s Saratoga expedition, drawing on this experience in an open letter to the Secretary at War published in 1799. Money stressed the similarity of French skirmishing tactics to those practised by the Americans at Saratoga, and warned that if the army did not form light regiments capable of contesting the enclosed fields of southern England, it risked suffering ‘another Bunker Hill’.
Money’s long missive was unusually well argued for its time, scientific in its assembly of observations, deductions and proposed remedies. It even provided some cover under which the Prussophiles might conduct a dignified retreat, pointing out that land use in Europe had changed markedly since the times of Frederick the Great, for a process of enclosure had divided up many tracts of countryside that had been open decades earlier. Money argued that the defence of southern England would require one fifth of the regular infantry and one quarter of the militia to be converted into
chasseurs
or light infantry.
