Fusiliers Read Free Page B

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:
    Such ease and expertise these Fusileers shew,
You’d think each man a Fusilieer born;
Their manoeuvres so just, and their fire so true,
Wou’d delight you ’till evening from morn.
Twice ten thousand Gauls formed in battle array,
Would not dare two such regiments come near.
     

    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