Fusiliers (6 page)
Among the companies watching from the nearby Punkatasset Hill the word went around that ‘the British were burning the town’. They could not stand idly while the brutal arm of the Ministry in London destroyed their homes.
Down below, Smith organised a line of soldiers to pass buckets of water, trying to staunch the flames. He would later claim to have saved much of Concord from being consumed by fire, but no matter, the locals had drawn their own conclusions. A force of around 500 Americans moved down the hill towards the Light Infantry guarding the north bridge. About sixty or seventy light infantry had been posted on the far side of that bridge, but, faced with hundreds of advancing Americans, they ran back across the span and fell in behind another company that had remained on the Concord side.
The hot flush of fear now carried off the judgement of the British officer at the north bridge. His foes had reached the other end of the span, cutting off the three companies sent beyond it with Captain Parsons. The militia took the wooden construction without a shot, for they too were under strict orders not to fire first and had gained their success simply by marching down the hill. It was the British commander who ordered his men to open up, and as the rebels returned this firing with interest, the two companies that had run back across the bridge moments earlier were unable to shoot, because their comrades were in the way. The superior enemy fire began cutting down redcoats, bowling them over with a gasp or a scream. Within moments four of the eight British officers at the bridge were hit, and three men were killed. The light infantry began running away.
With crackling of musketry audible for miles around, Captain Parsons abandoned his own search and hastened towards the bridge, finding hundreds of rebels between himself and the rest of Colonel Smith’s force. They were cut off. As for the weighty warrior himself, he was on the other side of the Concord River, leading reinforcements towards the scene of the firing.
Fortunately for Captain Parsons’s detachment, there is no monopoly on stupidity in war, and the militia who were in a position to block his retreat to the north bridge simply fell back and watched instead. One young officer with the British column noted in his journal that their enemy ‘let Capt. Parsons with his three companies return and never attacked us; they had taken up some of the planks of the bridge, but we got over’.
With the British troops once again forming a single body in Concord, and the colonel’s original orders discharged to the best of his ability, it was time to leave. They had been in that village for something like four hours, and their enemy had not been sitting idle. The British had seen
for themselves the enemy militia converging on them, but other reports were gabbled among the frightened soldiers: of a wounded redcoat near the north bridge scalped by the Americans (bludgeoned it would transpire later by a boy with an axe). Outrage ran through the ranks, an emotion that would undermine what remained of their discipline and therefore success of what they had yet to do.
Smith intended to take his men the two miles back to Lexington in much the same formation as they had come up: grenadiers in the centre, on the road, with strong parties of light infantry covering his flanks. But within a few hundred yards of the column setting off, at a bend on the road called Merriam’s Corner, it became obvious that the return would not resemble their orderly outward journey in any way. They would be fighting for their very survival.
More than 1,000 rebels were waiting. They had no intention of forming line, by the European drill book. ‘They hardly ever fired but under cover of a stone wall, from behind a tree, or out of a house’, noted one British officer, ‘and the moment they had fired they lay down out of sight until they had loaded again.’ Marching through the hail of whizzing, cracking balls at Merriam’s Corner, a few men fell but the column pressed on.
The light infantry, running along the hilltops and engaging the rebels behind their cover, were soon nearly spent. ‘We at first kept our order and returned their fire as hot as we received it, but when we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail,’ wrote one officer, ‘and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarcely able to act.’
A dread realisation spread through Colonel Smith’s force. If they fired and used most of their cartridges and exhausted themselves in the first mile or two of their journey, how could they possibly make it the fifteen further miles back to Boston? They felt they were beyond salvation. ‘We had been flattered ever since the morning with expectations of the British brigade coming out, but at this time had given up all hopes of it, as it was so late,’ wrote one of Smith’s force.
Panic was running through the light infantry: ‘We began to run rather than retreat in order’, wrote one British subaltern, another confessing it was a ‘critical situation’. Reaching Lexington Green once more, several officers from the light battalion got ahead of their men and formed a little line, preparing to confront them. The captains and lieutenants turned about to face the redcoats running towards them,
‘and presented their bayonets and told the men that if they advanced they should die’. Even this desperate expedient did not restore the order of a properly formed line, although it checked the headlong rush of Pitcairn’s mob. At this moment of despair, deliverance appeared on the ridge just beyond Lexington.
For on the high ground leading elements of Percy’s brigade, marching out from Boston, had finally appeared.
Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd described the practised ease with which ‘we were ordered to form the line, which was immediately done by extending on each side of the road’. But the New England landscape of meadows, fences and trees was no parade ground, and Mackenzie soon noted, ‘by reason of the stone walls and other obstacles, [the line] was not formed in so regular a manner as it should have been’.
Percy himself was under no illusions about what he saw unfolding around Lexington, as soldiers from Smith’s column fled up the road towards him. Late he may have been, but, as Percy would write to his father, the duke, ‘I had the happiness, however, of saving them from inevitable destruction.’ It was about 2.30 p.m.
Some of the exhausted light infantry and grenadiers dropped to the ground gasping for breath, others glugged water from their canteens or looked to the reinforcements to refill their empty cartridge pouches. While Smith’s men were brought back into some kind of order, the chorus of muskets or sporting guns carried by the minutemen and militia companies resumed once more, the enemy was swarming around them. Some casualties from the fighting at Lexington had been brought on commandeered wagons or horses, but several had been left behind.
The Fusiliers, formed according to the regulation, presented their muskets and fired some big, ripping, volleys into the undergrowth, trying to nail their skulking enemy. ‘Our men threw away their fire very inconsiderately,’ thought Mackenzie, ‘and without being certain of its effect.’ Whatever training these soldiers had received, it had been in levelling and firing their weapons on the words of command, not choosing their moment against fleeting targets. Most of them, furthermore, had not been in action before.
In the European mode of warfare one line of infantry gave fire to another at close range, sometimes as little as forty or fifty yards, much like ships pummelling one another with broadsides. At Lexington, the
enemy were not so considerate as to form shoulder to shoulder, right in front of the Fusiliers, in such a way that would have allowed even the most mediocre shot a chance of finding a target. So hundreds of musket balls, produced with billows of smoke, did little damage to the Americans.
Percy had brought with him two cannon, six-pounders, and these were now fired at the rebels. This bought the British some moments of peace, less by the effect of the ball than by the panic caused by the shocking, unexpected, boom of artillery. Seeing that some of the buildings saved by Smith that morning were being used by sharpshooters, Percy gave orders for them to be torched and flames soon began consuming them.
About an hour after arriving in Lexington, he issued orders for the march back to Boston. Smith’s men would take the lead, flankers would be sent out from the fresh battalions to surprise those lying in wait along the road, and the Fusiliers would bring up the rear. The whole force was ordered to move away from the village slightly before the march got under way.
‘We immediately lined the walls and other cover in our front with some marksmen,’ wrote Mackenzie, who as adjutant was the 23rd’s drill master, watching the Fusiliers with professional satisfaction as they ‘retired from the right of companies by files to the high ground a small distance to our rear, where we again formed in line’. This elaborate piece of military choreography saw each of the regiment’s line of eight companies falling back simultaneously from one point to another.
Once the new line was formed, the regiment’s commanders went along it, checking its arrangement. Captain Lieutenant Mecan watched them deploying with a practised eye. Drummer Mason beat out the signals of command and Corporal Grimes would have been ready to correct any man who stepped out of place.
By the time the head of Earl Percy’s brigade began its march, though, the men of the 23rd were simply intent on living through that day. It took about half an hour, one regiment falling in behind the other on the road, before their turn came to join the rear. All the time, while the 23rd waited, they spotted rebels moving through the undergrowth, trying to follow the column and get around their flanks. Finally they were moving too.
As they marched along, the crackling of musketry moved with them.
Percy pushed his soldiers ‘as fast as good order and not blowing the men would allow’. But he noticed, all around, the rebels followed them ‘like a moving circle’.
Percy’s flank guards tramped along, cresting the higher ground or crashing through the farmyards on each side of the main column. This precaution paid dividends in many places, surprising the New Englanders, looking one way as they awaited their enemy but receiving instead the last and most hideous surprise of their lives; a bayonet plunged into their flank or a musket going off, point blank, in their face. These men died to the curses of enraged redcoats, as did dozens who fired from windows.
‘We were now obliged to force almost every house in the road, for the rebels had taken possession of them and galled us exceedingly,’ noted a lieutenant with one of the flanking parties, ‘but they suffered for their temerity for all that were found in the houses were put to death.’ Although the soldiers had noticed on their way out to Lexington that women and children had apparently disappeared from the villages along the Boston road, it is obvious that not all of those killed in those frenzied moments in passageways, larders or on stairs had been firing at the King’s troops.
After quite a few of these ghastly encounters, the soldiers helped themselves to pewter plate, rings or clothing before bursting out of the doors and catching up with their mates. In some, though, greed defeated survival, and those who looted more systematically met their end at the hands of the enraged citizenry.
About half way back to Boston, seven miles into the march, Earl Percy was obliged to replace the 23rd at the tail of the column. The task of keeping at bay the mob of pursuing enemy militia was not an easy one, and many of the Fusiliers were running low on cartridges. Not for the first time that day, officers bemoaned their soldiers’ wild, often panicked, shooting. Their muskets were largely inaccurate in firing at anything further than a hundred yards away, it was true, and even those described by Mackenzie as ‘marksmen’ would have had only the most rudimentary idea of how to hit their target. In fairness to these soldiers, the men of Percy’s brigade had been issued with only thirty-six rounds each, and his two cannon had just twenty-four shot between them.
In the village of Menotomy, just a few miles short of Boston, there was another gauntlet to be run in the form of militia. Once again the
firing came from all around them, musket balls whizzing and cracking about their ears. Here the 23rd’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Bernard, was wounded, his thigh shattered by shot.
Two miles further on, as the head of the column approached Cambridge, Brigadier Percy made an important decision, to turn left where the road forked, taking the road to Charlestown, near Boston, rather than returning directly to the city by the route they had followed out in the morning. This proved a wise choice, for the rebels had pulled up the planking on a bridge over the Charles River, just beyond Cambridge, one that Percy’s brigade crossed earlier in the day, and were lying in ambush there.
It was 7 p.m. before the redcoats marched over Charlestown Neck, on to a peninsula facing the city. The local people in Charlestown had heard reports of that day’s fighting. Although many supported the insurrection against ministerial power, they saw that evening in the powder-blackened faces of the British soldiers a mood so ugly that they did everything possible to assist them back across the bay to Boston. The people of Charlestown came out by candlelight to help wounded soldiers into rowing boats and skiffs. That process would last long into the night, and it took until the early hours for the Fusiliers to get back in the city.
Mackenzie, the serjeant major, company commanders and others went among the ranks, tracking down men who had been wounded or asking after those seen disappearing into some house or yard. They calculated the 23rd’s loss at four killed, twenty-six wounded and six missing. Of the latter, three would soon turn up as prisoners of the rebels. They were men of the light and grenadier companies who had been detached under Pitcairn and Smith during the morning’s actions. As for British losses overall, sixty-eight soldiers had been killed, 167 wounded and twenty-two were missing. Among the officers, a couple had been killed (both light infantry officers) and fifteen wounded, a few of the latter being captured by the rebels.