Fusiliers (5 page)

Since arriving on those shores two years earlier, two dozen soldiers of the Royal Welch had absconded. In one or two cases, it had been a matter of drink, no more, and they had returned, receiving lenient treatment from Colonel Bernard. A somewhat larger crop had gone when the regiment was ordered from New York to Boston. Many old campaigners regarded this as normal, since soldiers residing in a large city often lost their hearts to local girls from whom some could not bear to be parted. Those intent on desertion often went with a messmate or friend from another company.

Thomas Watson and Jacob Jones, for example, had disappeared from Boston together on 7 March. Private Watson was a ladies’ man who had struck up a relationship with a woman in New York.

In other cases, though, there were motivations that would have caused officers more disquiet. The rebels were trying to seduce soldiers into breaking their oaths, offering them money for their muskets and material rewards if they would join the cause of Liberty.

William Hewitt, who deserted the Fusiliers with another man on 17 March, had made his way to the nearby village of Ipswich in New Hampshire. Hewitt was no boy, thrown into uniform when the 23rd got its orders for America; rather he had been serving in the regiment for nearly nine years, prior to which he had worked for a time as an apprentice weaver in his native Lancashire, and was literate. Once in Ipswich, he enlisted in Captain Ezra Town’s militia company, ready to fight his former comrades.

Such sympathies were unusual in Gage’s army, but definitely motivated some. One Irish soldier who subsequently deserted the 49th, wrote that he had tried to abscond as soon as he got to Boston, ‘finding they were striving to throw off the yoke under which my native country – sunk for many years – induced me to share the same freedom that America strive for’. Irish soldiers were to prove particularly susceptible to the appeals of American Whigs, but fortunately for the 23rd the number in its ranks formed a small minority. The more common reasons for desertion were the entreaties
of a woman, arguments with messmates or a feeling of injustice resulting from some punishment.

When a private of the 52nd had been caught trying to desert on 3 March, he had been sentenced to death by general court martial – the means of dealing with serious offences among soldiers, including all capital ones – on the 9th but pardoned five days later. Despite the draconian statutes embodied in the Articles of War and Mutiny Act, General Gage rarely allowed executions. The commander-in-chief’s apparent unwillingness to use capital punishment worried many officers. ‘The lenity shown’, wrote Mackenzie in his journal, ‘has not had the effect the General expected, as some soldiers have deserted since that event.’

As the rebellion gathered pace in America, harsh punishment was out of fashion in the British army. Gage’s judge advocate, the officer who ran his courts martial, stated, ‘I disapprove of making capital punishments too familiar … when great punishments are inflicted only for great crimes, it will be the more easy to reform abuses.’ Too frequent a use of the gallows, he argued, would lead to officers concealing crimes in order to save both lives and regimental reputation. The judge advocate also thought that the lash should be ‘sparingly made use of’. The alternative for drunkenness, insolence and other non-capital offences could be fines, extra duty, spells in the ‘black hole’ and reduction to the ranks for serjeants or corporals.

Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s instincts were similar to those of General Gage and his judge advocate; he was known to believe in showing mercy towards miscreant Fusiliers. The frequent floggings with hundreds of lashes known in his father’s time of service were a rarity in Boston. Apart from anything else, those in command on the American station knew that it was all too easy for a man who considered himself hard done by to desert.

For many officers, Gage’s softness towards the army’s criminals was all of a part with his treatment of the rebels; they thought their commander-in-chief lax and ineffectual. They wanted to be able to punish their men properly in order to strengthen discipline; there was a need for forthright leadership from General Gage; most of all they wanted to show toughness to the colonists. On previous marches into the countryside the militia had run away upon the appearance of the King’s troops, convincing many that the rebellion could be nipped in the bud. These illusions were exploded at Lexington and Concord on 19 April.

 

THREE

 

Or Adjutant Mackenzie’s Observations on American Warfare

The march of Earl Percy’s brigade had barely begun as redcoats of Major John Pitcairn’s battalion deployed at the trot on Lexington Green. The late departure of that relief force meant that the 700 men of the British flank battalions sent out from Boston the previous night would have to face that morning’s crisis on their own. In their path were American militia of Captain Parker’s company. Like many of the country people of Massachusetts they had talked for months of confronting the government.

Faced that morning with the sight of picked troops moving swiftly into battle order, many of the Americans were no longer quite so sure. The odds were not good either; more than 300 British soldiers facing 130 local volunteers, men who had tilled the soil or tended the forge until a few hours earlier.

As the regulars formed, Major Pitcairn came forward on his horse and bellowed out to the armed villagers in front of him, ‘Disperse! Disperse you damned rebels!’ Captain Parker decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The command was given to file off the green.

Officers on both sides had given absolute orders to their men not to open fire first. At Lexington, early that morning of 19 April 1775, it seemed for a moment that they would be obeyed and civil war averted. Pitcairn signalled his soldiers to move forward and disarm the locals.

The sight though of the Americans lowering their weapons and moving off touched some nerve of contempt among the British soldiers. For months the local people had abused and taunted them.
Where was their courage now, when it came to a fight? Instead of a deliberate, orderly walk forward, many redcoats started shouting and cheering, running towards the Americans with fixed bayonets. Facing this onslaught, one or two of those villagers opened fire.

It took just a few moments for the British response. Without orders from Pitcairn, one of the formed British companies levelled its weapons and let fly a crashing volley. Several villagers went down. There were a few straggling shots in reply, one wounded a redcoat in the leg, another hit Pitcairn’s horse, but within moments bonds of military discipline dissolved and the British soldiers were careering in all directions, chasing after the minutemen as they fled through gardens and groves, desperate to save their lives.

Colonel Francis Smith, Pitcairn’s superior in charge of the 700 or so British troops sent out from Boston the previous night, heard the shots and came running to the head of the column. ‘Finding the Rebels scamping off (except those shut up in houses),’ the colonel wrote several weeks later, ‘I endeavoured to the utmost to stop all further firing, which in a short time I effected.’ Smith, an infantry officer in his early fifties, was thought of as a relic by many, but had the benefit of long service in America and thus a knowledge of its people.

The cooler-headed among the British officers and serjeants then began scouring the fields and farmsteads, collecting up their men. ‘We then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty,’ one young lieutenant noted, ‘the men were so wild they could hear no orders.’ Some of the soldiers were shouting and pointing out buildings which they said were being used by the rebels to fire at them. Colonel Smith dreaded what might happen if his outraged troops entered Lexington’s homes or its Meeting House, ‘knowing if the houses were once broke into, none within could well be saved’. Strict instructions were issued to block the men, and they were successfully rallied under the colonel’s eye.

Some sort of regularity had been restored, but several Americans had been killed and the remainder of Captain Parker’s company had scattered into the country, carrying breathless reports of the bloodshed to neighbouring villages. What to do? Colonel Smith had his orders, which were to push on to the village of Concord, a couple of miles further on, and destroy some cannon and other military supplies gathered there by the rebels.

After what had happened in Lexington, he was determined to press ahead in a disciplined formation. Marching towards Concord, the
road was commanded to the right by some ridges. Setting off once more, Smith used his light infantry, Pitcairn’s men, trotting along the high ground to deny it to the enemy and protect his right flank. He marched meanwhile along the road at the head of his grenadiers, tall men in bearskin caps who were, by repute, the steadiest troops of the British regiments in Boston.

A couple of shots were fired at the British but none returned, Colonel Smith noting with satisfaction that his troops moved on Concord ‘with as much good order as ever troops observed in Britain, or any friendly country’.

All the time, though, the American militia was gathering. Men from Acton, Bedford and Lincoln set off to join their brethren in the Concord companies. Some watched from heights, as the British column snaked through the New England farmland. Others ran along to one side or other of it, puffing away, glimpsing the redcoats occasionally between the trees or clapboard houses.

The alarm bell had already tolled in Concord, summoning men to arms, when some militia marched into the village, fifes and drums playing loudly, on the road from Lexington just a few minutes ahead of the enemy.

It was around 10 a.m. when Colonel Smith’s advance guard entered the sprawling township that was their objective. Their enemies for the moment left them to it, gathering by the hundreds on nearby slopes of Punkatasset Hill as Colonel Smith broke the British force into parts. The village was bounded on several sides by waterways, most importantly, the Concord River to the north and west. While searches were carried out, this stream would form a natural barrier against any attack by the colonists, so Smith deployed his men accordingly. Each of his battalions – grenadiers and light infantry – was formed of companies picked from the regiments stationed in Boston. They were meant to be the best men, taken from their parent regiments and formed into combined battalions for special tasks. After their wild behaviour in Lexington, Smith might have doubted their reliability, but he had no choice but to break the light infantry battalion into several smaller parties.

Three companies from Pitcairn’s battalion (an impressive-sounding total, but actually only around a hundred men in these peacetime establishment regiments) were sent to the south bridge over the Concord, a similar detachment to the north bridge, and a third group
of light infantry continued beyond that crossing to the home of the local colonel of militia. This last detachment contained the Light Company of the 23rd Fusiliers. Their captain was not with them that day, so the Fusiliers and others were placed under Captain Parsons of the 10th Regiment. His small force moved more than one mile beyond the north bridge, and became the farthest-flung element of Smith’s force, having gone deepest into enemy country, as thousands of armed men converged around the district.

In the village itself meanwhile the grenadiers set about searching houses. Some of the musket balls and cannon shot had been dumped hours before in a pond by locals, because Colonel Smith’s arrival came as no surprise to those who led the rebellion. Other items, like the cannon themselves, could not be easily concealed or indeed removed. So once found, British soldiers smashed the trunnions off those three artillery pieces, making it impossible to mount and therefore use them. To put the matter beyond doubt, they also set fire to the wooden gun carriages themselves.

There was symbolic violence too, directed in this case towards Concord’s Liberty Pole and the flag that fluttered from it. These had appeared in scores or even hundreds of settlements across the Thirteen Colonies of America, they were manifestations of the colonists’ desire to decide on their own affairs, free of interference by the King’s faraway ministers and of their desire to throw off ‘taxation without representation’. A few short minutes with an axe brought down the Liberty Pole in Concord.

While barging through the Town House, one of the village’s principal structures, some of the soldiers had started a fire. It took hold quickly, sending a column of smoke into the sky. Another plume snaked its way up from near the south bridge, where the British had fired the wooden gun carriages. Colonel Smith hastened towards the burning building. His soldiers joked that the old colonel was too heavy a man to get anywhere quickly. As the flames licked around the windows of the wooden Town House, thousands of militia saw the smoke. Smith’s 700 men were heavily outnumbered, and where was Percy’s brigade? They had failed to make an appearance.