Fusiliers (3 page)

The men following those flags understood that they were being asked to uphold the fine reputation that the 23rd had garnered during its first eighty-five years of service. Captain Lieutenant Thomas Mecan marched with the colonel’s or senior company. An Irishman (these days his name would be usually written McCann), he was, like Mackenzie, a veteran of the Seven Years War that produced epic battles in Europe where the 23rd had burnished its reputation thirteen years earlier. Although the Irish Mecan was, at thirty-six years old,
somewhat younger than the Scots Mackenzie (forty-four at this time), both men had endured long years in their lowly ranks, lacking the money to buy their way up the promotion ladder. They had aged in the service, but many of their rank and file were callow.

Robert Mason, beating out the signals of command on his drum, was just nineteen years old. If he had not been in action before, at least he had lived his entire life within the Fusiliers. He was ‘a child of the regiment’, having been born to a father within it and a mother who followed it. Most of Mason’s short life indeed had been spent in uniform, for he had been just nine years old when taken on as a drummer boy.

Corporal Jeffrey Grimes eyed the ranks of his company, looking for the man who stepped out of place or might fail in his duty. Grimes had been in the regiment for less than five years but had been promoted just after the regiment arrived in America. His new rank had brought him higher pay and the right to wear the knotted woollen cord on his right shoulder that denoted a corporal’s status. He was a keen soldier who kept his nose clean, and might look forward to further promotion – if he survived.

Not long after 1 p.m., fifteen or so miles into their march, a man driving a horse and chaise had stopped at its head, and Earl Percy peered in to see a seriously wounded young officer of the 4th Light Company, one of the men who had left Boston the previous night. From this casualty, the brigadier learnt that the fighting all of them had expected for so long was indeed under way, and that the King’s forces were getting the worst of it.

At this moment, anyone in Percy’s brigade who might have doubted that they were about to go into action was at last disabused. Mecan had tasted battle before and hungered for a chance to show his mettle again. Mackenzie was also a veteran, but his wife back in Boston was heavily pregnant with their third child. If the slender support of his lieutenant’s pay was cut away, she might soon become destitute. Drummer Mason had grown up amid the tales of old soldiers; the moment in which he would see whether he was brave enough to join their company would soon be upon him. As for Corporal Grimes, the eyes of his superiors would be upon him, looking to see whether his rapid promotion would be justified in action.

The Fusiliers had entered an odyssey of war that would last eight years, carrying them thousands of miles through countless battles.
Some of the men who would play vital roles in the regiment’s story were serving elsewhere that day. Others were just boys sitting by their hearths in England. As for Mackenzie, Mecan, Mason and Grimes, only two would survive, one would prosper and the other face disgrace.

 

TWO

 

Or Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s Troubled Family

Several weeks before the regiment marched out of Boston on its vital mission, the 23rd had marked one of the most hallowed dates in its calendar.

The delights awaiting those who filed into the dining room on 1 March 1775 were more than anyone on foreign service had a right to expect. The table groaned with delicacies, fine wines as well as liquor flowed freely, and the band accompanied the hubbub of conversation with pleasant airs. It was the custom of the Royal Welch Fusiliers to mark the anniversary of Wales’s patron saint with a dinner fit for any person of rank or nobility.

Among the guests that evening in Boston were General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief in America, Brigadier the Earl Percy and several other gentlemen of quality, accompanied by their secretaries or staff. The seventeen guests were ably hosted by twenty-one officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who were present and who had subscribed the cost of the event from their meagre pay. Those who partook of the regiment’s hospitality were rarely disappointed. Indeed the officers of the regiment had so impressed one prominent New Yorker (the regiment had stayed one year in that city after being sent to America) that he enthusiastically recommended them to a friend in Boston: ‘As respectable a corps of gentlemen as are to be found in the uniform of any crowned head upon earth. You may depend upon their integrity. They have not left the least unfavourable impression behind them, and their departure is more regretted than that of any officers who ever garrisoned our city.’

At the head of the table sat the lieutenant colonel, Benjamin Bernard, a pleasing embodiment of the 23rd’s traditions and service. His father John has been wounded while leading a company of fusiliers during the celebrated battle of Fontenoy, fighting the French thirty years before. The commanding officer himself had served his sovereign on the field of a victory even more hallowed in the regiment: Minden, where a small force of redcoats fighting under Allied command in Germany on 1 August 1759 had defeated thousands of Frenchmen. At the other end of the table, the lieutenant colonel could spy his own son, also called Benjamin, a second lieutenant barely twenty years old. Thus three generations of the Bernard family had escaped the poorer fringes of the Anglo-Irish gentry, served their King and graced the annals of the 23rd.

Half of the officers dining that night in Boston were able to boast that they were Minden men. Even those who were not proudly called the regiment ‘Old Mindonians’. A couple still bore the scars of wounds that they had received on that celebrated field of the Seven Years War where the British line had repulsed the flower of the French army. During the blaze of musketry 218 of the Royal Welch Fusiliers had been killed or wounded, but they had not buckled.

The wars of 1756–63 had been global, producing plenty of epic feats in America too, not least the capture of Quebec by General Wolfe. This separate theatre had been given its own name – the French and Indian Wars – but many people in Boston or New York had imbibed the military prejudice that events in Europe, involving the greatest professional armies of the epoch, represented a higher form of soldiering. So even Americans, particularly those sympathetic to the King, were well aware of the distinction of Minden – for the 23rd was the only one of the six regiments that gained laurels on that German field serving in the colony of Massachusetts. One American newspaper had even published a verse extolling the Royal Welch’s valour in that faraway battle:

Some mystique still attached even to the title ‘fusiliers’ that had been given to troops chosen decades earlier to carry an advanced firearm, the
fusil
, even though they had long since lugged muskets like any other regiment. Those who looked to the army to quash any rebellion therefore expected much from the 23rd. They saw them as a picked regiment, as deadly on the field as their officers were charming in the drawing room.

When the meal was finished, the table was cleared and bumpers charged for the first toast of the evening, to the Prince of Wales. The order in which these tributes were drunk was prescribed by custom, but once the boozing started it could go on for hours and it was not uncommon for more than twenty toasts to be drunk.

A visitor gazing around the table that evening at ruddy-cheeked officers imbibing so diligently for their country could have been forgiven for thinking that the gentlemen of the Royal Welch Fusiliers were a picture of contentment. But beneath the superficial cheer, all was not well. Indeed, these officers were, for the most part, desperate to quit their stations as soon as possible. Some of them had grown old in their lowly ranks and yearned for promotion, hoping that they would gain it in the American war they now all expected. Others wanted nothing to do with such a fight.

One captain had told all and sundry before they sailed from England two years earlier that ‘nothing should induce him to go to America’. The exigencies of the service had left him with no choice. The captain commanding the regiment’s grenadiers was another malcontent who would reveal soon enough his desire to get out of that country.

There were many officers gathered around that Saint David’s Day table who, by contrast, were quite ready to do their duty against the rebels. Even among them, though, there were strongly diverging views about what methods might be used to subdue the sedition that they had witnessed during preceding months. These differences were exacerbated by the officers’ own political differences, for the schism between Whig and Tory ran deep within the army. It was matters of royal power and religious toleration that defined this divide among Britons, and increasingly also their crisis with the colonists.

One of the fusiliers at that dinner, Lieutenant Richard Williams, thought that the rebels calling themselves Whigs ‘quite reverses our characters’, implying a sympathy with those back in Britain who would keep the king in check by non-violent means. Indeed, Williams
believed very few of the things that American ‘Whigs’ claimed. His intolerance for cant was clear in his journal, when he observed that Boston boasted ‘no such thing as a play house, they were too puritanical a set to admit of such lewd diversions, tho’ perhaps no town of this size could turn out more whores than this could’.

Williams considered the situation that was emerging in Boston to be ‘civil war’. The danger – religious-based anti-monarchism – had previously been exported from Britain but now once more endangered the mother country. An officer in another regiment wrote home candidly confessing his mixed feelings about the impending campaign: ‘Though I must confess I should like to try what stuff I am made of, yet I would rather the trial be with others than these poor fellows of kindred blood.’ In the coffee house or across the Fusiliers’ mess table these relatively liberal views would have received support from some, like Captain Robert Donkin (the veteran officer commanding the 23rd’s Light Company), but brought a lively response from others.

Major Henry Blunt, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s second in command, took a tougher line. He believed settlement in America had created a different nation, writing home to one friend, ‘These people, most of them originally Scotch or Irish, have united in marriage with French, Germans and Dutch and from them have sprung the high-spirited race that boast so much of British Blood and British Liberty, and who have had the folly and impudence to talk of
chastising
Great Britain.’ The Major noted bitterly that ‘man as well as every thing else transplanted here degenerates’.

This debate, about whether the Americans were ‘brothers’ or not would continue for years to come. It would inform British views about whether to accept or fight the colonists’ movement towards independence, as well as their opinions on the degree of force that might be used to suppress it.

All of those celebrating that 1 March 1775 were approaching the moment when they would have to decide whether they were ready to fight. As if the looming battle against those who shared their language was not enough, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s regiment also contained many older officers who were anxious to leave.

Captain Grey Grove, who had a reputation as a drunken sot, was coming up to thirteen years in that rank and was embittered by the promotion of younger men; and three other captains had been petitioning unsuccessfully for removal to a staff job. One of those letter writers,
Captain Robert Donkin, the regimental savant keen on quoting Plutarch and Caesar, was, after years of petitioning his superiors, about to be rewarded by removal to the staff of General Gage. Of the 23rd’s seven captains, indeed, only the youngest was reckoned by his messmates to be cheerful about his duty. The other officer who did a captain’s job, Thomas Mecan, was not present at that dinner. Mecan could doubtless have raised a glass to Saint David along with the best of Irishmen, but that night some officers of his rank were required to do duty in the garrison, and, in a telling portent of what was to come, Mecan showed by doing this duty that he was never a man to shirk his responsibility. Mecan indeed was married to the job for the soldier’s life and meagre pay had never allowed him to find a wife. Mecan’s odd-sounding title, ‘captain lieutenant’, indicated that he still received a lieutenant’s money while commanding a company.