Fusiliers Read Online Free

in Britain who would keep the king in check by non-violent means. Indeed, Williamsbelieved very few of the things that American ‘Whigs’ claimed. His intolerance for cant was clear in his journal, when he observed that Boston boasted ‘no such thing as a play house, they were too puritanical a set to admit of such lewd diversions, tho’ perhaps no town of this size could turn out more whores than this could’.
    Williams considered the situation that was emerging in Boston to be ‘civil war’. The danger – religious-based anti-monarchism – had previously been exported from Britain but now once more endangered the mother country. An officer in another regiment wrote home candidly confessing his mixed feelings about the impending campaign: ‘Though I must confess I should like to try what stuff I am made of, yet I would rather the trial be with others than these poor fellows of kindred blood.’ In the coffee house or across the Fusiliers’ mess table these relatively liberal views would have received support from some, like Captain Robert Donkin (the veteran officer commanding the 23rd’s Light Company), but brought a lively response from others.
    Major Henry Blunt, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s second in command, took a tougher line. He believed settlement in America had created a different nation, writing home to one friend, ‘These people, most of them originally Scotch or Irish, have united in marriage with French, Germans and Dutch and from them have sprung the high-spirited race that boast so much of British Blood and British Liberty, and who have had the folly and impudence to talk of chastising Great Britain.’ The Major noted bitterly that ‘man as well as every thing else transplanted here degenerates’.
    This debate, about whether the Americans were ‘brothers’ or not would continue for years to come. It would inform British views about whether to accept or fight the colonists’ movement towards independence, as well as their opinions on the degree of force that might be used to suppress it.
    All of those celebrating that 1 March 1775 were approaching the moment when they would have to decide whether they were ready to fight. As if the looming battle against those who shared their language was not enough, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s regiment also contained many older officers who were anxious to leave.
    Captain Grey Grove, who had a reputation as a drunken sot, was coming up to thirteen years in that rank and was embittered by the promotion of younger men; and three other captains had been petitioning unsuccessfully for removal to a staff job. One of those letter writers,Captain Robert Donkin, the regimental savant keen on quoting Plutarch and Caesar, was, after years of petitioning his superiors, about to be rewarded by removal to the staff of General Gage. Of the 23rd’s seven captains, indeed, only the youngest was reckoned by his messmates to be cheerful about his duty. The other officer who did a captain’s job, Thomas Mecan, was not present at that dinner. Mecan could doubtless have raised a glass to Saint David along with the best of Irishmen, but that night some officers of his rank were required to do duty in the garrison, and, in a telling portent of what was to come, Mecan showed by doing this duty that he was never a man to shirk his responsibility. Mecan indeed was married to the job for the soldier’s life and meagre pay had never allowed him to find a wife. Mecan’s odd-sounding title, ‘captain lieutenant’, indicated that he still received a lieutenant’s money while commanding a company.
    The officers who ran the 23rd, its captain lieutenant, seven full captains, major and lieutenant colonel, had, excepting the most recently promoted captain, grown old in their rank. In an age when a gifted and well-connected officer could aspire to a lieutenant colonelcy by the age of twenty-five, Bernard and Grove were well into their forties and other captains in their late