Fusiliers (20 page)

One officer, succeeding in his ambition to join the 23rd Light Company, knew its men revelled in a reputation for larceny and was not disappointed on his first mission gathering supplies. When a bystander expressed dismay at redcoats stripping some twenty houses of their doors and window frames, one of the Light Bob Fusiliers shot back saying, ‘Damn my eyes, painted wood burns best!’

Donkin, as a former commander of that company of the 23rd, argued that it was best to pay for cows, grain or other food gathered by foraging parties. At times the redcoats did indeed give promissory notes or cash to people they believed to be loyal or neutral, but this did not apply, of course, to rebels. Donkin moreover did not believe in censuring Light Bobs for such behaviour, noting with a certain cynicism that ‘as it will not be in [the commander’s] power to hinder
these excesses … it is more prudent to affect an ignorance of them than to be under the necessity of punishing them with severity’.

Hessian officers were sometimes censorious – not of the pillage that was a completely accepted part of European warfare – but of the excess enthusiasm that they believed was being encouraged. It was, in their view, no substitute for proper training and liable to get the Light Bobs into all sorts of scrapes.

Ewald, who co-operated frequently with British light troops, disliked the gentleman amateur approach of many of their officers, ‘men who pretend to be acquainted with military matters, and who, while they are ignorant of the method of training light troops, call everything of this nature useless pedantry’. The jaeger captain summed up the mindset of such commanders – and it was very much the ‘amazing spirit’ fostered by Howe – as being that ‘in the presence of the enemy all these school rules fall to the ground … light troops must carry everything sword in hand or with charged bayonets’.

Mecan, although comparatively advanced in years, had seen the change in its correct complexion, volunteering even in 1775 to lead the light company, and staying with it despite the obvious dangers, as the surest route to distinction. In this sense his zeal for the service held out longer than that of so many of his companions who had been commanding companies in the Fusiliers as the war started. But the campaign of 1777 was not yet begun and, indeed, half the year would be gone before General Howe launched it in earnest.

Six days after Mecan’s excursion to Bound Brook, several of his regimental colleagues found themselves under hot fire hundreds of miles away. An expedition was launched under the command of Major General William Tryon to attack a large American magazine at Danbury in Connecticut. Six regiments, including the 23rd, sent parties of 250 picked men each, removing by this expedient the slow and dubious from their ranks. When they quit the town at 8 a.m. on 27 April they left columns of smoke and widespread destruction behind. Regiments of Connecticut troops under the local firebrand, Brigadier Benedict Arnold, tried to block the redcoats’ way back to their ships, but they were bayonet-charged and scattered. The British stayed overnight in a village called Ridgefield before having to mount another charge the following day, dispersing their last opponents and getting back on board their warships.

This excursion into rebel territory was a minor event in the scheme that was unfolding, but it serves as a symptom of the confusion that surrounded the high command of William Howe. There were those who argued that the British war effort should consist entirely of Danbury raids, with some inland devastation carried out by Indian war parties, but Howe was not one of them. After much befuddled communication with London during the winter, he had opted to continue the war against American centres of power, but to do so in several directions at once.

Howe expected John Burgoyne, who was not directly under his command, to continue the work started in 1776 but suspended during the winter, of forcing his way down from Canada towards the Hudson and Albany. There was a plan to send some troops north from New York to assist this movement, a mission that would be entrusted to Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton. As if to add to the dispersion of effort, a further expedition of thousands of men had been sent to Rhode Island, which the Navy preferred as an anchorage to New York. Initially Howe had suggested that the Rhode Island force might attack into New England, possibly to draw some enemy away from Burgoyne’s push, but early in 1777, after the shock of Trenton, the commander-in-chief had clawed back some of the men sent there, leaving Earl Percy at that base in charge of a few thousand.

Neither Burgoyne, Clinton nor Percy was engaged in the main effort for 1777, though. The commander-in-chief had decided instead to make his decisive push to the south-west, rather than moving north up the Hudson towards Burgoyne. The general and his brother, Admiral Howe, would gather a great fleet and transport 15,000 men by sea up the Delaware River, from where he intended to launch an attack on Philadelphia, the rebel capital. This step ran so clearly counter to the strategic principle of keeping one’s forces concentrated that Clinton and Percy, in common with many others, thought it extremely unwise. Howe, though, had made his decision.

On 12 June the regiments on the outpost lines in Jersey received their marching orders. The 23rd was to take part in Howe’s expedition, as were his beloved light and grenadier battalions. The wagons were packed, regiments paraded and what could not be carried away was torched. In going, the British army committed its first great betrayal of the war. Thousands of families that had sided with the King in the
Jerseys were simply left behind as Howe’s brigades marched down to the waterside.

Major Stuart, son of former prime minister the Earl of Bute and brother-in-law to Earl Percy, thought it both morally dubious and militarily irresponsible to abandon a bridgehead that had cost 2,000 casualties (by his estimate) to maintain during the preceding several months. ‘The risk which all armies are liable to was our hindrance here,’ he wrote home, reflecting on the strength of opposition in inland areas, ‘and has absolutely prevented us from going 15 miles from a navigable river.’ Stuart’s political instinct was sufficiently good that he smoked out Howe’s intention to strike at Philadelphia when most officers would still have been in the dark, and confided to his father that if Burgoyne was not properly supported he would ‘tremble for the consequences’.

General Howe wanted, on the other hand, to get two strikes at Washington’s army, and the advance on Philadelphia would provide only the second. First he must extricate his redcoats from the Jerseys and get them to the sea, and he hoped that this would tempt the Americans into an attack that might offer a first chance for a major action.

The American supremo was wise to such danger as he escorted the British from New Brunswick, Perth-Amboy and the other centres of New Jersey that they had occupied. Several times during this evacuation, the British rearguard rounded on its pursuers in the hope of bringing on a major engagement. A day-tripper from New York who went to see the fighting on 22 June saw his army’s destructive exit from Jersey, recording, shocked, ‘All the county houses were in flames as far as we could see.’

In the early hours of 26 June, Howe launched a fully fledged assault, sending several thousand men, one division under Cornwallis and another under Vaughan. Cornwallis’s advance of Hessian grenadiers and British guards caught a brigade under Major General Alexander on one steep-sided, wooded hill and managed to deliver a sharp attack. Here they caused several hundred casualties and captured three guns, but it was the closest Howe came to bringing on a major battle with Washington.

Those troops remaining were embarked on boats to Staten Island and by 29 June the Jersey campaign was over. Major Nisbet Balfour, Howe’s staff officer, was bewildered that his master’s design had not achieved more. ‘They will not ever allow us to come near them,’
Balfour wrote to a friend in England, ‘… after attempting to get up with them by every means in our power … we chased them from hill to hill.’

The next three weeks were a frenzy of preparation for the expedition to the Delaware. So much time had been lost already that campaigning season that Howe wanted to galvanise his men, to infuse the whole army with some light infantry spirit. There would be no tents, the men would take a blanket each, like the Light Bobs did. All of these company commanders, or majors, lieutenant colonels even, why should they take their riding horses? Had not he, when commanding Wolfe’s light infantry at Quebec in 1759, marched the whole campaign on foot? They could sell their nags to the mounted troops for ten guineas each if they liked, but Howe was determined not to have to feed hundreds of officers’ horses. By the same logic of hungry mouths, he tried to limit the number of wives embarked.

Howe went aboard the
Eagle
, his brother’s flagship, on 17 July. The 23rd would form part of his 1st Brigade. The Fusiliers mustered 416 men when they hitched hammocks on three merchantmen, the
Elenor
, the
Saville Hunstler
and the
Isabella
. Mecan’s light company remained in the 1st Light Battalion, which had more than 700 troops. Few of the rank and file had any idea where they were going. Even at this point General Clinton felt sure that Howe was engaged in a clever ruse and would take his men north, up the Hudson to join hands with Burgoyne. This notion, though, vanished when the fleet set sail and headed south, out of New York bay. Burgoyne be buggered, Howe would do things his way.

 

TEN

 

In Which Mecan Paid the Price

The procession of warships up the broad Delaware River was an imposing sight. Most redcoats found the business of being at sea oppressive. Their fear of being wrecked, inability to swim and aversion to the sensations of shipboard life often made such voyages frightening and incomprehensible. But they could never fail to be impressed when squadrons came together in their distinctive formations, midshipmen scribbling nervously, signal flags running up lines and tars leaping about the rigging like monkeys, reefing sails. These frenetic sights and sounds brought the army the greatest pleasure when they announced an imminent return to terra firma.

‘The sailing up Chesapeak Bay’, one Light Bob wrote home, ‘was the grandest sight, sure that could be seen, we were upwards of 300 sail, all of which got up safe to the head of the bay. Lord Howe has performed wonders in bringing a fleet here.’

The passage from New York to the Head of Elk, the bay off Delaware that was their destination, had been inordinately long. During an entire month at sea they had been battered by storms and run low on rations – dozens of horses had perished in the dingy holds of their transports. It was an awfully protracted way around for a journey that before the war took three days by the ‘Flying Machine’, the smartest coach to Philadelphia. Captain Richard Fitzpatrick of the Guards was among those gazing at the Delaware shore as the wind propelled Howe’s fleet up the river. Fitzpatrick was an unusual soldier, a high-living aristocrat, gambling and drinking mate of Charles James Fox, Parliament’s most passionate
critic of the American war. Fitzpatrick too was a member of that house, and regularly provided Fox with military information so he might better puncture the pomposity of ministers who sought to justify the campaign. Fitzpatrick was so passionate in his anti-ministerial diatribes that Fox had chided him for being ‘too violent’ a Whig.

Fitzpatrick found the views ravishing as the fleet penetrated deeper into the vast American continent. They could already feel the hot sun on their shoulders, but he did not mind that as much as many did. The clearings among the trees opened up bucolic vistas of peaceful farming communities, a calm which, to his regret, they were about to shatter. Fitzpatrick was an aesthete, who had seen great antiquities in Rome, peppered his conversation with French and found the conflict with the Americans unspeakably sweaty and vulgar, concluding, ‘Nothing in the world can be so disagreeable and so odious to me as being obliged to serve in this execrable war, exclusive of the
désagrément
of being banished from society.’

The general understanding had grown during long weeks at sea that their objective was Philadelphia. But why? ‘I think it amounts very near to a demonstration,’ Fitzpatrick wrote, assuming it some clever blind to draw Washington away from Burgoyne, who was advancing south from Canada. Listening to his Tory messmates, the Guards captain mocked the idea that rebellion could be eradicated, thinking it would mean ‘extirpating the whole race’. Fitzpatrick, although aligning himself with the toughest Whig critics of the war, did not, let it be clear, care for Americans any more than the rest of the army, since he thought them ‘the most unpleasant, formal, precise, disagreeable people in the world’. For him, as for Fox in the Commons chamber back home, the war was mainly a rod with which to beat the Ministry of the day. They were preoccupied with the wider Whig struggle, and shuddered at the idea that a successful military response to the American colonists’ revolt might thwart the cause of liberty in the three home kingdoms, particularly Ireland.