Fusiliers (9 page)

Chester’s men threw themselves into action at the rail fence, ‘every man loading and firing as fast as he could. As near as I could guess, we fought standing about six minutes.’ His militia had arrived near the end of the action in this sector.

About one hour after Howe’s initial attack had begun, the second assault got under way, with redcoats attacking the Breed’s Hill redoubt from two sides. Pigot’s men had the smouldering houses of Charlestown close to their left. Howe directed the remnants of the grenadiers, 5th and 52nd, towards the place where the flèches met the breastwork on Breed’s Hill.

Many more British soldiers ascending the slope went down with that distinctive slap of bullet hitting body, some in silence, others with a scream of anguish. Prescott’s men in the fort saw the marines and others under Pigot heading towards them. Once again the redcoats did not plough on regardless but began to open fire with musketry as they neared the top. ‘Finding our ammunition was almost spent,’ wrote Colonel Prescott, ‘I commanded a cessation till the enemy advanced within 30 yards when we gave them such a hot fire, that they were
obliged to retire nearly 150 yards before they could rally and come again to the attack.’

Lieutenant Waller was one of the Marines on the receiving end of this unequal firefight. Seeing his men throwing away their shots at an entrenched enemy, he tried at first, bellowing above the cacophony, to improve their aim but soon gave up: Waller realised that ‘at length half mad with standing in this situation’ they must push on, the 47th forming ‘upon our left in order that we might advance to the enemy with our bayonets without firing’.

On the other side of the hill, British troops had reached the corner where the flèches met the breastwork. Some men who had mounted these works were shot down and repulsed, leaving the majority pressed flat on the ground just a few feet from the Americans on the other side of the earthworks. One officer of the 52nd explained: ‘As soon as we got up to the works we were not nearly so much exposed to their fire as we were then in some degree covered.’

Having got to the very lip of the American works, the redcoats stayed in cover, unwilling to try their chances with the metal flying overhead. Only the officers would stand and scramble up to the top of the embankment. Captain Harris of the 5th, twice encouraging the men to follow him, felt the sickening sensation of finding himself alone. ‘[I] was ascending a third time, when a ball grazed the top of my head, and I fell deprived of sense and motion.’ Harris was caught with his head wound by Lord Francis Rawdon, a lieutenant in his regiment. Rawdon got four men to carry Harris away from the fight: leaving cover to go downhill proved as dangerous as going forward, three of the casualty-bearers being wounded.

Rawdon summoned up his courage and, exhorting his men to follow, stood up and pushed on. He got a bullet through his cap, but fortunately not his skull. Some men, at least, followed him. The American defences were crumbling as the first brave attackers scrambled over their ramparts.

On the other side of the hill, the Marines had finally pushed forward too. But whereas those on Rawdon’s side conquered the breastwork, Waller’s men entered the main work. ‘I cannot pretend to describe the horror of the scene within the redoubt when we entered it,’ Waller wrote home, ‘ ’twas streaming with blood and strewed with dead and dying men the soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the brains of others.’

The few dozen Americans who had remained inside until the last
minute fled out of the back, redcoats trying to bayonet them or taking potshots as they went. It was here, just behind the redoubt, that Major General Warren was killed. Taking his place alongside Prescott earlier that morning, the preacher turned soldier had said he was there ‘to let those damned rascals see that the Yankees will fight’. He had made his point.

With militiamen streaming back across the neck, the British mopped up, chasing their enemies from one fence or wall to another as they withdrew. It was dusk as the redcoats began digging in, the Charlestown peninsula behind them strewn with casualties. The British had lost 226 dead and about 900 wounded – there was particular shock at the loss among officers, nineteen killed and seventy wounded. American casualties amounted to about half those of the redcoats.

In their official dispatches, messages for public consumption, the British tried to make the most of their conquest, emphasising the valour of their soldiers in expelling such large numbers of enemy men ‘entrenched up to their chins’ upon such a strong position.

The battle, named after Bunker Hill, a rather larger eminence just behind Breed’s Hill, had provided the stand-up fight that many British officers had longed for, but instead of giving the rebels their ‘drubbing’, the outcome caused the most profound shock and dismay.

Writing home privately, Howe gave vent to dark feelings: ‘The general’s returns will give you the particulars of what I call this unhappy day – I freely confess to you, when I look to the consequences of it, in the loss of so many brave officers, I do it with horror.’

In explaining their grievous setback, senior officers pinpointed indiscipline. The redcoat had earned a reputation for courage and steadiness during the Seven Years War and earlier conflicts. At Bunker Hill they had in fact proven nervous and disorderly. So shocking was this discovery that Henry Clinton jotted his notes about what had happened in cipher, lest others read it: ‘All was in confusion, officers told me that they could not command their men and I never saw so great a want of order.’

Some of those at Lexington and Concord had already noticed the soldiers’ ‘wild’ behaviour, but its consequences had not been so ruinous. At Bunker Hill, men had pushed forward without being ordered to, had then stopped to open fire in front of the rail fence – causing the whole plan to falter – and fallen into such confusion in
front of that obstacle that they had killed one another by mistake, and had later proved for a time immovable in front of the earthworks on Breeds Hill itself. The American defenders of the redoubt would later claim that they had only lost it because they ran out of ammunition.

‘As I am certain that every letter from America will be opened at the post office, I cannot in general give you my thoughts freely upon the situation of our affairs,’ Lord Rawdon wrote to England a few weeks after the battle, expressing a widespread fear that discussing the reasons for the army’s disaster might cause one’s loyalty to the Crown to be called into question. The nub of it, Rawdon nevertheless went on to explain, was that ‘our confidence in our own troops is much lessened since the 17th of June. Some of them did, indeed, behave with infinite courage, but others behaved as remarkably ill.’ Certain officers, he conceded, had not done their duty either.

When news spread about the battle, many felt that the very heavy loss in British officers had resulted from American skill with firearms. This view was propagated in particular by those who had not been close to the fighting and who wanted to extol the prowess, and by extension the invincibility, of born frontiersmen. One British Whig who was visiting New York at the time of the battle wrote home breathlessly, ‘There are amongst the provincial troops a number of surprising marksmen, who shoot with rifle guns, and I have been assured that many of them at 150 yards will hit a card nine times out of ten.’

John Burgoyne, talking to his friends after the battle, came up with a different and rather more credible theory for the loss among the army’s leaders:

The zeal and intrepidity of the officers, which was without exception exemplary, was ill seconded by the private men. Discipline, not to say courage, was wanting. In the critical moment of carrying the redoubt, the officers of some corps were almost alone.

Officers were bound to suffer disproportionately when the men refused to follow them forward. Burgoyne, like Rawdon or Clinton, found these truths so disturbing that, with the playwright’s fitting melodrama, he told his correspondent in London, ‘Though my letter passes in security, I tremble while I write it; and let it not pass even in a whisper from your Lordship to more than
one
person.’

American news-sheets recited with glee the losses of ‘the regulars’ after 17 June, but in what sense were the militia any worse as soldiers?
Most of the British men had not been in action before Bunker Hill either. Their training, in the
Manual Exercise
(how to fire their muskets) or in drill (the necessary skill in marching required to deploy the regiment in various formations) was, in many cases, no greater and conducted with a good deal less enthusiasm than that of the militia amateurs preparing constantly on their village greens during preceding months. ‘We have learnt one melancholy truth,’ one of the British officers wounded at Bunker Hill reflected on his sick bed, ‘which is, that the Americans, if they are equally well commanded, are full as good soldiers as ours, and, as it is, are very little inferior to us even in discipline and countenance.’

The idea, though, that an American imbued with a love of Liberty could face down the professional soldiers of a European power was too good for Whig scribblers to resist. In providing details of the battle, the Provincial Congress issued a dispatch trumpeting, ‘The Welch Fuzileers were nearly all cut off, and one captain only remains alive of that regiment.’

It may be surmised that the Fusiliers were one of the few regiments that many readers of the newspapers printing this statement had heard of. The regiment epitomised the British army’s humiliation and, never mind the facts, the Minden men had been wiped out. The inconvenient truth that eight out of the Royal Welch Fusilier’s ten companies had not even fought at Bunker Hill had clearly escaped the American dispatch writers. The single germ of fact in this was that Thomas Mecan was the only one of the six officers in the 23rd (i.e., those in its light and grenadier companies) to make it through the day uninjured.

In the days following the battle soldiers on the Charlestown peninsula faced the grim task of recovering the wounded, burying the dead and sweeping away the detritus of war. Major General Howe was given the command there as the British fortified their hard won conquest.

Thomas Mecan was one of those who served in this unpleasant duty. The Irishman was a tough old soldier less interested in reflecting on what had gone wrong than in seeing whether he could turn it to promotion. Sitting in his tent on the heights above Charlestown, Mecan began a letter-writing campaign, seeking the promotion that he knew he could not afford to buy. Just two days after the battle, he petitioned General Gage with a memorial written in a finer hand than his own. Was he not an old soldier who had served through the
German campaign and volunteered to lead the light infantry at Bunker Hill? ‘The events of that day made several vacant companies in the Army under your command,’ argued Mecan, anxious to step into the shoes of one of those dead captains, hoping, ‘Your Excellency will be pleased to consider his pretensions, and grant him such reward as you think his services merit.’ Mecan canvassed powerful men in London too, one of whom, the commander-in-chief at headquarters in Horse Guards, replied that he should trust in General Howe who would ‘do everything that he can to contribute to the happiness of deserving officers’. Words of this kind, so often written to fob off a jaundiced old soldier, would in this case happily be proven right long before Mecan even received the reply from London.

There was at least promotion to be gained in all that bloodletting, and it was in this theme that the army more widely took some comfort. In the desperate struggle at the rail fence or redoubt one or two heroes had emerged. ‘Lord Rawdon behaved to a charm,’ Major General Burgoyne wrote home to his wife, ‘his name is established for life’. This passage formed part of his letter published in British newspapers. Quite a few aristocratic young blades would soon be finding their way to America in search of similar reputation.

Those whom Howe remembered, doing their duty manfully amidst the smoke, cacophony and confusion at Bunker Hill, would have a head start over any newcomer. Captain Lieutenant Mecan was one. In the days after the battle, proving himself in the fortification of Charlestown heights, Mecan was given several assignments by the general as well as an assistant engineer’s acting title and pay.

Captain Nisbet Balfour had also came to Howe’s notice on 17 June. He was leading the 4th Regiment’s light company in the bloody maelstrom in front of the rail fence. In the race for promotion Balfour was better placed than Mecan but well behind Rawdon. While the young peer was just twenty-one years old, Balfour was thirty. He had family connections with the landed gentry of his native Galloway in south-west Scotland but Balfour would rise through bravery, diligence and ruthlessness. The Scottish captain had carried on fighting despite being wounded at Bunker Hill and was already being entrusted with independent errands by his commanders. Nobody could have known it at the time, but Balfour’s fate would become tied to that of General Howe and indeed the Fusiliers.

For a few weeks following the battle, the British held on to the
trenches, ditches and bastions that they had placed on Charlestown peninsula at such terrible cost. General Gage, never the most aggressive of commanders, had lost his will entirely to attack the Americans. Any idea of proceeding with the plan to drive towards Cambridge had ‘been entirely set aside’. The shock of 17 June had been too great. Instead Mecan eyed the American lines from his little fortress. The British were besieged.

 

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