Fusiliers Read Free Page A

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
     

The Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Eve of Revolution
     
    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