Fusiliers Read Online Free PDF

other officers felt that Gage’s approach simply emboldened the Americans to go further. Both sides struggled to convince the uncommitted by appearing righteous. Even a lowly, if shrewd, officer like Lieutenant Mackenzie had understood the importance of not striking the first blow on that Sunday at the Meeting House.
    Many of the King’s men believed that the colonists, like Sam Adams on 6 March, would walk away from a fight if it was offered to them. Surely the martial prowess of the British army would still have the power to intimidate?
     
    If the officers of the 23rd were uneasy about the coming fight, what about the other ranks? Most days the Fusiliers could be seen marching about the cobbled streets, returning from some work detail or going out to the quays to practise shooting at floating casks.
    The Fusiliers defied easy generalisations. Few were Welsh, despite the regiment’s title, which derived from the patronage of the Prince of Wales. The bulk, something like three-quarters, were English and half of them were in their twenties. Although largely illiterate, with many labourers skimmed from the land, there were a good many who had formerly had trades. A small number, indeed, were highly intelligent men capable of scaling the ranks to become serjeant major or even follow the example of Richard Baily, a former ranker who served as a lieutenant in their regiment.
    Why had they joined? ‘My chief intention’, wrote one soldier, ‘being to travel and traverse the seas occasioned my inlisting.’ Sometimes, a row or debt triggered the decision to join. One seventeen-year-old who later matured into a serjeant in the 23rd lost money gambling with dissolute friends and ‘afraid to return and tell my father of my indiscretions … I shrank from my best hope, parental admonition, and formed the resolution of entering for a soldier.’ Men who joined on impulse or when cornered drunk by the recruiting party at a tavern often bitterly regretted their decision. When put on transports for America, some tried to escape or even leapt to their deaths in the sea,a shocking sight that, thankfully, had not afflicted the 23rd when it left Plymouth in 1773.
    Scores of new recruits had been thrown into the ranks prior to the regiment’s sailing to America. The rank and file were certainly a more callow bunch than the officers. Fewer than one quarter of them had served long enough to be ‘Minden men’.
    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