Fusiliers (47 page)

Once the Auxonne regiment’s gunners had the measure of their targets, they stepped up their bombardment briskly. They poured fire on the
Guadeloupe
, ripping through sails and rigging, smashing into its hull. The captain soon had enough, cutting his cable and steering his vessel into a safer place. The Fusiliers’ Redoubt had lost its naval support just as the army had. Having driven off that first vessel, the French gunners moved on to more advanced stuff, heating shot in great braziers, puffing away with bellows until they glowed red hot. The balls were then gingerly placed in cannon (charged with powder behind some particularly thick wadding) before being fired at the
Charon
, a larger frigate of 44 guns that stood off York itself. The heated shot soon succeeded in setting the ship alight; billowing smoke rose from the stricken vessel. The army watched dejectedly as flames consumed the largest naval ship that was supporting them

The opening of the enemy’s heavy batteries caused frantic scuttling about in the besieged town. Many places previously thought safe proved to be far from it. Great lumps of metal came smashing into the upper storeys of brick-built houses, showering the sick below with dust and masonry. Mortar bombs held even greater terror. A flat crump announced the launch of a metal sphere of 100 or 150 pounds packed with explosives. The trajectory was high, and these globes could be seen by the naked eye arcing over the town before dropping down into its streets. The fuse, measured by the experienced eye of the master gunner, would be cut to a length that would burn down, ideally, just before the end of its trajectory, exploding over the heads of its victims, showering them with metal casing. At night those manning the British lines could even see the fuses fizzing away on the mortar bombs that flew over their heads.

This danger sent many people scurrying for cover in any place they could find it. Some regiments moved tents into their trenches. Among the few civilians remaining in the town, and the army’s frightened servants, refuges were hewn in the sandy cliffs along the river shore. It soon became clear that these caves were the best place to treat casualties too.

On 11 October alone, the besieging French and American guns fired
3,600 shot into Yorktown. ‘People were to be seen lying everywhere, fatally wounded’, wrote Private Johann Dohla, ‘with heads, arms, and legs shot off … cannonballs of 24 and more pounds flew over our entire line, and over the city into the river.’ When the enemy gunners cut their mortar fuses too long, bombs that dropped in the river went off, sending great plumes of water into the sky.

For the Fusiliers in their redoubt, the dispatch of British vessels supporting their right made them inevitably the target for the full weight of enemy fire from the battery in front. Apthorpe’s two 12-pounders were the first target. ‘I maintained a barrage that never let up for an instant,’ wrote Lieutenant Clermont-Crevecoeur on the 10th. ‘I quickly put out of action the enemy batteries on which mine was trained.’ Inside the redoubt, the enemy’s balls smashed away at the gun positions and the cannon themselves. So incessant was the firing that soon no man wanted to invite death by trying to repair the damage. The following day, the French lieutenant noted with grim satisfaction that ‘the enemy fire has slackened to such a degree that it is not really dangerous’. Second Lieutenant Guyon, Calvert’s particular friend, was killed at some point in the bombardment.

Even if the guns had been dismounted, the 23rd were far from beaten. The regiment, wrote Serjeant Lamb, ‘were greatly exposed to the fire of a battery of nine guns … it was reduced to about 120, who had to maintain their post on this galling occasion, as they did with great gallantry, until we were entirely exhausted’. Lamb was so worn out that he was unable to stand. He asked another non-commissioned officer to relieve him at his post, close to the parapet, and sank to the to the ground. Moments later, Lamb’s relief became a cloud of blood and bone as a cannon ball ripped him apart. Lamb put his survival down to divine providence.

After just a couple of days of this treatment, Cornwallis’s confidence was ebbing away. He wrote to Clinton, ‘With such works on disadvantageous ground, against so powerful an attack, we cannot hope to make a long resistance.’

Major Cochrane arrived in Yorktown, having sailed through the French fleet, the day after that urgent appeal was sent at midday on 12 October, and presented the dispatches from New York. ‘I am doing everything in my power to relieve you by a direct move,’ wrote Clinton, suggesting he would sail from New York on the very day his letter reached Cornwallis. But, Clinton being Clinton, there were the
caveats, the promise might be ‘subject to disappointment’, and the commander-in-chief suggested that by his arrival in the area ‘[I] may possibly give you an opportunity of doing something to save your army.’ The onus was thus placed back on the besieged commander. Cornwallis’s ADC, Cochrane, was killed on the lines shortly after bringing this ominous message to Yorktown.

Cornwallis began to measure how many days he might hold out. Some desperate strokes were called for. A sally to destroy the enemy batteries might buy him a little more time. Honour in any case called for a more active defence than he had hitherto put up. What chance did he have of breaking out of Washington’s trap? If there was one, it was to the north, from Gloucester Point, not charging out of Yorktown into the mouths of dozens of cannon. He would need his veteran troops for such an attempt. So, on the evening of 12 October, the 23rd were ordered out of the Fusiliers’ Redoubt and relieved by the 17th Foot.

Under cover of darkness, the bloodied survivors of Apthorpe’s command walked back down the slope towards Yorktown, re-entering the lines just beyond the creek. Their next few days would be spent at that comparatively sheltered point they held at the west of the defences. Although plunging mortar bombs could still hit them there, they were out of the line of direct fire from the besiegers’ cannon. Their enemies meanwhile had been advancing a second parallel on the south-eastern part of the town, the place where the fate of the garrison would be decided.

As they got nearer, the French received heavier British fire, dozens of their men being killed or wounded on the night of 13 October. But the weight of shot was on their and the American side. With their batteries pounding the British defensive line from barely 300 yards, the hastily built defences began to disintegrate. Cornwallis’s engineers had piled sand or soil into defensive ramparts, placing tree trunks on the outside face to give them greater strength. These methods were satisfactory enough for an upcountry stockade and would have resisted field artillery fire for any amount of time, but 24-pound shot smashed the protective wood out of the way, and heavy howitzers then blew away the foundations or cut down men trying to make repairs. One officer reported that from 10 October onwards ‘scarcely a gun could be fired from our works, fascines, stockade, platforms, and earth, with guns and gun-carriages, being all pounded together in a mass’.

With matters assuming a desperate aspect and enemy shot raking the
streets every moment, Cornwallis decided to expel the black servants who had been cowering in caves and houses for days. ‘We had used them to good advantage and set them free,’ wrote Captain Ewald of the former slaves, ‘and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.’ Hundreds of men, women and children, some of whom had been serving the redcoats since their march through the Carolinas, were driven by soldiers into no-man’s-land.

Not long after sunset on 14 October, the Allied batteries began a heavy fire on two outlying redoubts on the southern defences. A feint was made to draw British attention towards the work formerly occupied by the Fusiliers, but the main attack went in on the southerly forts. Storming parties – one French, the other American – ran up to them, under heavy fire from the British defenders, and scaled the walls, seizing two key places. From these vantage points, their batteries could flatten what remained of the defences and storming parties would have a short run into the town itself. The end was approaching.

Throughout the following day, the cacophony of cannon continued uninterrupted. Billowing eddies of smoke rolling across the land were reflected above by banks of cloud scudding across the sky. The wind was changing. By sunset, it was completely overcast and a dark night ushered in stiff breezes. Lieutenant Colonel Abercromby, commander of the light infantry during five campaigns, led 350 picked men into the enemy’s forward trenches. They bayoneted the sentries and with a blood-curdling cry of ‘Skin the bastards!’ from Abercromby stormed in, sending the gunners to flight.

A well-planned sally of this sort could change the course of a siege, for the intention was to silence the enemy guns, hammering metal spikes into the cannon’s touchholes, making it impossible to fire them. Having gained the battery, Abercromby’s Light Bobs attacked eleven guns. Like many aspects of the British defence of Yorktown, this task was poorly carried out. Clermont-Crevecoeur would later comment derisively that the stormers must have been drunk. In fact they did not have the right implements to break the guns and had instead stuck bayonets into the touchholes and broken them off.

When the light infantry returned to British lines they were elated. ‘This stroke will save us,’ a British officer told Ewald. ‘Eleven cannons is a fine thing!’ Cornwallis did not intend to gamble, though, on how long the enemy batteries would remain quiet. At 9 p.m., after they had returned from their raid, the light infantry were loaded into dozens of
long boats on the York River. As the oarsmen pulled away, with a strong wind making the job harder, other redcoats filed down to the beach. The 23rd, or those of them who could fight in any case, and the Guards were collected as the second wave. Cornwallis was sending his veteran troops over to Gloucester; he intended to attack the enemy there and break out, saving as much of his army as he could. The general, at last, had stirred from his uncharacteristic passivity of previous weeks and was going to fight for it.

It took a couple of hours for the first wave to cross the York River and the boatmen to return to the beach at Yorktown. They came with bad news. The wind had got up to such a pitch that the channel had become very choppy as they rowed. Further crossings would have to be abandoned or the boats might be swamped with the loss of all on board.

On the afternoon of 17 October, a drummer was sent to British ramparts to beat out a parley. Cornwallis requested a ceasefire so that he might discuss terms for the surrender of Yorktown. By 4 p.m. the guns were silent, and the garrison enjoyed their first rest from shelling in many days.

The road south was just two miles, but for many of the 23rd it marked the culmination of more than six years’ hard fighting. By the agreement reached between the two armies, the defenders were to march out and surrender their weapons and colours. Cornwallis had tried to obtain terms similar to those at Saratoga, but Washington would have none of it, insisting instead on those imposed on the American defenders of Charleston the previous year.

French and American troops lined each side of the road, as the British and German regiments filed out, drums beating, in order of seniority, the 23rd coming behind the Guards and 17th. ‘The British paid the Americans seemingly but little attention as they passed them,’ recalled one of Washington’s soldiers, ‘but they eyed the French with considerable malice.’ One soldier of the 1st New Hampshire standing at the fence watched the 23rd pass with particular interest. It was William Hewitt, who had deserted the regiment at Boston in March 1775. As the Fusiliers passed, he recognised quite a few faces. It was, however, a sadly depleted party, for just a few dozen men of the Royal Welch emerged from the besieged town. The regiment returned just sixty-seven rank and file fit at York (plus fewer than two dozen with Champagne’s light company across the river) – around 120 men lay
sick or wounded in the makeshift hospitals within the lines. So small indeed was the contingent of those able to march that the victors did not notice the absence of colours at the head of the Fusiliers’ column.

On the right of the marching column were French regiments in smart white uniforms with white gaiters, their senior officers encrusted with bejewelled stars and sashes denoting ranks or nobility or awards. The Americans by contrast ‘made a poor appearance, ragged and tattered’.

The column was led by Brigadier O’Hara (Cornwallis pleading sickness), who was directed into an open field by Brigadier General Lincoln, the loser at Charleston. There a bank of French and American senior officers watched as the regiments were called forward one by one to lay their muskets as well as colours on the ground, turn, and form up ready for the return to Yorktown. One corporal of the 76th threw his weapon down so hard that it broke, exclaiming, ‘May you never get so good a master!’ When the turn came for the Ansbach-Bayreuth troops to do the same, their colonel was in tears as he gave the order.

O’Hara discharged his melancholy duty that afternoon with his characteristic
sang froid
. He had been convinced for years that the Americans could not be beaten back into a state of loyalty to the Crown but had, on the contrary, become Britain’s most inveterate enemies. The brigadier had fought like a tiger at Guilford Courthouse, when the army’s honour and self-respect demanded it, but now circumstances dictated a different course. After surrendering the garrison, O’Hara wrote home, ‘Our ministers will I hope be now persuaded that America is irretrievably lost.’

Nearly 4,000 men grounded their arms in the surrender field. A similar ceremony took place on the Gloucester side, but 3,000 soldiers were too sick to put in an appearance. Cornwallis had given up 7,668 troops, more than 1,000 sailors and several hundred loyalists and servants; it was disaster on such a scale that it must produce peace.

The British and Hessian regiments marched back in silence, disarmed, into town, enduring some catcalls and insults from the American regiments as they passed. Reunited in their lines, the officers and men of the 23rd made their preparations for departure.