Fusiliers (51 page)
TWENTY-THREE
When Lieutenant Colonel Balfour and Serjeant Lamb Parted Company
The sight greeting Lieutenant General James Johnston at the parade ground near Doncaster, Yorkshire, was that of a veteran regiment, proud in its bearing but much reduced in numbers. Undertaking the usual duties of a general commanding a British district, Johnston gave the 23rd its first formal inspection for eleven years. There were 137 Fusiliers drawn up in parade order, with a handful of officers at their head, including Lieutenant Colonel Balfour.
It was the reviewing officer’s job, that 14 May 1784, to record what was good and what was bad. His practised eye soon spotted that many of the men had battered belts and pouches or had not been issued with them at all. Their muskets were in a poor state too, many having been lugged about America for years prior to the long sea journey home. In general they were tired men with equipment to match.
Somebody, perhaps Balfour or Adjutant Watson, had hit upon a clever idea though. The regiment’s black felt hats sported a festive decoration. Three white feathers had been fixed to each, splaying out from the cockade to make the Prince of Wales’s symbol. When the Fusiliers raised their right hands to the brim of their hats and doffed them in honour of the inspecting general, the swish of plumage made ‘a very pretty effect when saluting’. General Johnston was not just impressed with this little touch of showmanship, he could see, in the way the 23rd performed its evolutions and in the battle-hardened countenances of its men, all the signs of a veteran corps. He concluded his official report by pronouncing them ‘a very remarkable fine battalion’.
The Fusiliers parading that morning in Doncaster were, however, already reduced to the rump, or to put it more kindly, a cadre, of that regiment that had campaigned throughout the American war. They had landed in Portsmouth four months earlier, a chilly homecoming for men who had endured so much. Serjeant Roger Lamb had wasted little time seeking his discharge, applying in person to Colonel Balfour a few days later, while the regiment was halted temporarily in Winchester.
Lamb had been haunted by the circumstances of his leaving home and enlistment more than eleven years previously. He was determined to get back to Ireland as soon as possible, but he knew that the simple pleasure of homecoming would be complicated by sadness at turning his back on his army mentor. Lamb could not heal the rupture with his real father, since he had died years earlier. On the other hand, the man who ‘always behaved like a father to me’ was very much alive, for Lamb used those words about Nisbet Balfour. That tall, driven Scot had transformed his own life during eight years of the American War. Having begun it as a captain commanding a light company at Bunker Hill, he served as a major on General Howe’s staff before reaching the position of commanding officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, gaining with it the power to alter Lamb’s life.
Balfour knew that the future efficiency of the 23rd depended on retaining men like that Irish serjeant, a veteran of so much fighting, from Saratoga to Camden and Guilford. Balfour, wrote Lamb, ‘kindly and humanely reasoned with me, in order to prevail on me to remain in the army’. When flattery and persuasion failed, the commanding officer suggested that there were ways that it could be made financially worthwhile. Lamb had already seen how commanding officers could line his pockets by letting him act as a surgeon’s mate, a secretary to the commandant of New York or adjutant of loyalist corps. If he would only stay in the Fusiliers, Lamb had the stuff of which an adjutant or quartermaster were made.
Alas, those arguments in the barracks in Winchester were not sufficiently compelling, so Balfour was disappointed. Lamb loved the family of his regiment, but felt that his affections had not been returned. Shortly before the 23rd had sailed from America, another man had been appointed serjeant major of the Fusiliers. If all of the fine words that Balfour used towards Serjeant Lamb were true, then why had someone else been given the post? Balfour, who had sailed for
England before the unfortunate appointment was made, had evidently erred in this matter. Nettled by the failure of his new family, Lamb sealed his determination to return and make his peace with his old one.
The serjeant was insistent on taking his discharge forthwith. Officers of the 23rd arranged for him to go before the board at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea in the hope that Lamb might begin his new life with a pension of a few pennies each day. The board, though, did not see any obvious injury to the proud man standing before them, nor did they think him old enough to merit a stipend. Lieutenant Calvert and others remonstrated with Lamb to go back before the board, but his impatience to get home had by that time possessed him.
‘I left London on the 15th March’, wrote Lamb, ‘and landed in Dublin on the 19th, to the inexpressible joy of an aged mother, two sisters and other relations who had long given up every hope that I was alive.’ Lamb surely grieved that his father, with whom he had argued to the point he left home, did not survive to witness the homecoming.
Lamb’s discharge went through the regiment’s books officially on 24 February 1784, the same day that a great slew of Fusiliers – half of those who had come back from America – were lost to the army. In all 142 men of the 23rd were discharged that year. Among the other trusted non-commissioned officers that left the regiment before the review at Doncaster in May was Charles Collins, another of the serjeants who had escaped with Lamb after Yorktown.
Of the 137 men standing in front of General Johnston in May 1784, about 115 were veterans, twenty being new recruits. Paradoxically, those who had enlisted before 16 December 1775 and were therefore not eligible for discharge formed a substantial proportion of the soldiers on parade. Men like Corporal Robert Mason, who had been a drummer at Lexington, were still young enough to have some useful service in them. Mason, having survived his court martial for desertion as well as the entire American campaign, proved to one of those soldiers who thrived in a peacetime army. Within a couple of years of the 23rd’s return he secured the post of drum major. Marching at the head of the regiment like some strutting peacock was perhaps a fitting destiny for a soldier regarded at the time of that 1779 court martial as a womaniser. As for the other survivors, seventy-three of those still in the 23rd at the time of the Doncaster review were more than thirty years old. Most of them were too aged and worn out for further service and would be discharged within the year. The army’s leaders
had, by their rule of December 1775, produced the worst of both worlds: scores of men who had valuable battle experience but were still in their twenties grabbed the discharges available to them, disappearing; but those who had enlisted before that date had done so for life and many were, by 1784, too old to offer much further service.
By its ill-considered regulations, Horse Guards thus lost the services of a great many men who had taken part in the victorious charge at Camden or counted the cost of inadequate siege preparations at Yorktown. With officers, though, things were different. Even before the regiment reached its station at Doncaster, Lieutenant Colonel Balfour had scattered notes conferring six months’ leave among many of those who performed hard service in the last years of the war.
Lieutenant Calvert had been reunited with his family in London, but had soon set off on a voyage of pleasure around France. Major Mackenzie went off to Scotland for reunions with various branches of his family. Captain Apthorpe meanwhile joined in efforts to re-build the regiment with a new recruiting drive, under guidance of that skilled old man-catcher Richard Temple.
Few of the 23rd’s officers sold out during the years that followed the regiment’s return. The bargain between them and their sovereign was quite different, after all, to that of the rank and file. The officers would enjoy a genteel life, the happy society of social advantage, while all the time receiving pay – often for doing very little. They remained, though, along with the officers of regiments like the 33rd who had endured the Philadelphia campaigns or those in the Carolinas, a vital fund of experience, men able to contradict with all the authority of veterans the parade-ground pedants who insisted on the formalism of the drill manual. It was to be this fight, the argument about the tactical or disciplinary lessons of America, that would be the battleground of argument in the coming years.
The scene on the pastures of Silesia on the morning of 19 August 1785 was one calculated to impress the visitor. Thousands of troops, clad in the dark blue coats distinctive of the Prussian service, filed out of their bivouacs and arrayed themselves in a single vast battle line, stretching across the gently undulating land. When the signal to begin was given these thousands of souls began moving as if animated by a single intelligence. ‘The 29 battalions’, wrote Colonel David Dundas, ‘were formed with correctness in one line of above 2½ miles in extent,
immediately began to fire, each battalion by platoons.’ They came forward, a great wall of disciplined manpower, ready to sweep away anyone who stood before them, alternately marching and firing, being put through their paces. The army of Frederick the Great was engaged in its autumn manoeuvres.
The Prussians were showing off for their distinguished guests, displaying to British officers who might struggle to keep three or four battalions wheeling or marching in a compact line that they could do it with ten times that number, and barely a goose-stepped foot put wrong. Colonel Dundas’s head told him that there was rarely a place or a situation where 18,000 infantry could be used in this way. But his heart flew when he saw such precision, and he compared it to the absurd heterogeneity that had taken over his own army, where every lieutenant colonel seemed to think he knew best. Beyond his giddy love for things Prussian, Dundas felt something more visceral: envy witnessing the Prussian system that had defeated the French decades before during the Seven Years War. He also harboured a determination to try and raise his own army to an equal footing, for without this, they would stand no chance on the battlefields of Europe. In his official report to George III, Dundas wrote, ‘The facility with which these troops manoeuvre and bring superior numbers to a point of attack, must in general be decisive against an enemy not equally expert in movement.’
Dundas attended the Silesian exercises as part of the suite of the King’s second son, whom ‘Farmer George’ had named Frederick, after the Prussian monarch, launching him on the career of a soldier. Prince Frederick, who had taken the title Duke of York, had already been abroad for nearly five years when he attended the Silesian review. He celebrated his 22nd birthday during the trip to Prussia. The strapping young duke had been packed off to the Continent by his father in the hope of learning military science while keeping him clear of the clinches, card tables and capers that had marked his adolescence in England. As he nurtured his military prodigy, George III had already conferred upon the young man the command of a regiment of Guards and the rank of major general.
The duke’s party made its way from Berlin to Potsdam and Magdeburg that autumn, along the way being joined by Lieutenant General Earl Cornwallis. They watched one display of Prussian might after another, with great phalanxes of cuirassiers or hussars cantering
about with an animation Frederick’s infantry could never show, artillery firing off hundreds of shot and household troops all being put through their paces.
Cornwallis had turned his veteran eye first upon the young prince, and he had not been impressed, recording, ‘his military ideas are those of a wild boy of the Guards’. The general had seen where the youthful impetuosity of that type had got them at Guilford Courthouse, where the headlong advance of the 2nd Guards Battalion had almost cost him the battle. As an officer who had led a small army through the Carolinas just a few years before, Cornwallis could not quite believe what he was witnessing in Prussia. It was a travesty of military exercise, the product of a force that had not done battle for a quarter of a century boiled down, distilled, into a bizarre tactical caricature.
‘The manoeuvres’, wrote Cornwallis, ‘were such as the worst General in England would be hooted at for practising; two lines coming up within six yards of one another, and firing in one another’s faces until they had no ammunition left: nothing could be more ridiculous.’
Prussian drill required the soldiers to be packed shoulder to shoulder, usually in three ranks, to march more slowly than redcoats, and to execute their changes of formation by breaking the regiment down into smaller bodies, each with their own ‘pivots’ or points of alignment. In short, any adoption of such tactics by the British Army would require term to unlearn every bitter lesson of America. Yet as the Duke of York’s Prussian progress of 1785 proceeded, Cornwallis realised this was precisely what was at stake. Dundas was infecting the king’s son with his enthusiasm for Frederick the Great’s army.