Fusiliers, page 35
Under cover of darkness, the bloodied survivors of Apthorpe’s command walked back down the slope towards Yorktown, re-entering the lines just beyond the creek. Their next few days would be spent at that comparatively sheltered point they held at the west of the defences. Although plunging mortar bombs could still hit them there, they were out of the line of direct fire from the besiegers’ cannon. Their enemies meanwhile had been advancing a second parallel on the south-eastern part of the town, the place where the fate of the garrison would be decided.
As they got nearer, the French received heavier British fire, dozens of their men being killed or wounded on the night of 13 October. But the weight of shot was on their and the American side. With their batteries pounding the British defensive line from barely 300 yards, the hastily built defences began to disintegrate. Cornwallis’s engineers had piled sand or soil into defensive ramparts, placing tree trunks on the outside face to give them greater strength. These methods were satisfactory enough for an upcountry stockade and would have resisted field artillery fire for any amount of time, but 24-pound shot smashed the protective wood out of the way, and heavy howitzers then blew away the foundations or cut down men trying to make repairs. One officer reported that from 10 October onwards ‘scarcely a gun could be fired from our works, fascines, stockade, platforms, and earth, with guns and gun-carriages, being all pounded together in a mass’.
With matters assuming a desperate aspect and enemy shot raking the streets every moment, Cornwallis decided to expel the black servants who had been cowering in caves and houses for days. ‘We had used them to good advantage and set them free,’ wrote Captain Ewald of the former slaves, ‘and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.’ Hundreds of men, women and children, some of whom had been serving the redcoats since their march through the Carolinas, were driven by soldiers into no-man’s-land.
Not long after sunset on 14 October, the Allied batteries began a heavy fire on two outlying redoubts on the southern defences. A feint was made to draw British attention towards the work formerly occupied by the Fusiliers, but the main attack went in on the southerly forts. Storming parties – one French, the other American – ran up to them, under heavy fire from the British defenders, and scaled the walls, seizing two key places. From these vantage points, their batteries could flatten what remained of the defences and storming parties would have a short run into the town itself. The end was approaching.
Throughout the following day, the cacophony of cannon continued uninterrupted. Billowing eddies of smoke rolling across the land were reflected above by banks of cloud scudding across the sky. The wind was changing. By sunset, it was completely overcast and a dark night ushered in stiff breezes. Lieutenant Colonel Abercromby, commander of the light infantry during five campaigns, led 350 picked men into the enemy’s forward trenches. They bayoneted the sentries and with a blood-curdling cry of ‘Skin the bastards!’ from Abercromby stormed in, sending the gunners to flight.
A well-planned sally of this sort could change the course of a siege, for the intention was to silence the enemy guns, hammering metal spikes into the cannon’s touchholes, making it impossible to fire them. Having gained the battery, Abercromby’s Light Bobs attacked eleven guns. Like many aspects of the British defence of Yorktown, this task was poorly carried out. Clermont-Crevecoeur would later comment derisively that the stormers must have been drunk. In fact they did not have the right implements to break the guns and had instead stuck bayonets into the touchholes and broken them off.
When the light infantry returned to British lines they were elated. ‘This stroke will save us,’ a British officer told Ewald. ‘Eleven cannons is a fine thing!’ Cornwallis did not intend to gamble, though, on how long the enemy batteries would remain quiet. At 9 p.m., after they had returned from their raid, the light infantry were loaded into dozens of long boats on the York River. As the oarsmen pulled away, with a strong wind making the job harder, other redcoats filed down to the beach. The 23rd, or those of them who could fight in any case, and the Guards were collected as the second wave. Cornwallis was sending his veteran troops over to Gloucester; he intended to attack the enemy there and break out, saving as much of his army as he could. The general, at last, had stirred from his uncharacteristic passivity of previous weeks and was going to fight for it.
It took a couple of hours for the first wave to cross the York River and the boatmen to return to the beach at Yorktown. They came with bad news. The wind had got up to such a pitch that the channel had become very choppy as they rowed. Further crossings would have to be abandoned or the boats might be swamped with the loss of all on board.
On the afternoon of 17 October, a drummer was sent to British ramparts to beat out a parley. Cornwallis requested a ceasefire so that he might discuss terms for the surrender of Yorktown. By 4 p.m. the guns were silent, and the garrison enjoyed their first rest from shelling in many days.
The road south was just two miles, but for many of the 23rd it marked the culmination of more than six years’ hard fighting. By the agreement reached between the two armies, the defenders were to march out and surrender their weapons and colours. Cornwallis had tried to obtain terms similar to those at Saratoga, but Washington would have none of it, insisting instead on those imposed on the American defenders of Charleston the previous year.
French and American troops lined each side of the road, as the British and German regiments filed out, drums beating, in order of seniority, the 23rd coming behind the Guards and 17th. ‘The British paid the Americans seemingly but little attention as they passed them,’ recalled one of Washington’s soldiers, ‘but they eyed the French with considerable malice.’ One soldier of the 1st New Hampshire standing at the fence watched the 23rd pass with particular interest. It was William Hewitt, who had deserted the regiment at Boston in March 1775. As the Fusiliers passed, he recognised quite a few faces. It was, however, a sadly depleted party, for just a few dozen men of the Royal Welch emerged from the besieged town. The regiment returned just sixty-seven rank and file fit at York (plus fewer than two dozen with Champagne’s light company across the river) – around 120 men lay sick or wounded in the makeshift hospitals within the lines. So small indeed was the contingent of those able to march that the victors did not notice the absence of colours at the head of the Fusiliers’ column.
On the right of the marching column were French regiments in smart white uniforms with white gaiters, their senior officers encrusted with bejewelled stars and sashes denoting ranks or nobility or awards. The Americans by contrast ‘made a poor appearance, ragged and tattered’.
The column was led by Brigadier O’Hara (Cornwallis pleading sickness), who was directed into an open field by Brigadier General Lincoln, the loser at Charleston. There a bank of French and American senior officers watched as the regiments were called forward one by one to lay their muskets as well as colours on the ground, turn, and form up ready for the return to Yorktown. One corporal of the 76th threw his weapon down so hard that it broke, exclaiming, ‘May you never get so good a master!’ When the turn came for the Ansbach-Bayreuth troops to do the same, their colonel was in tears as he gave the order.
O’Hara discharged his melancholy duty that afternoon with his characteristic sang froid. He had been convinced for years that the Americans could not be beaten back into a state of loyalty to the Crown but had, on the contrary, become Britain’s most inveterate enemies. The brigadier had fought like a tiger at Guilford Courthouse, when the army’s honour and self-respect demanded it, but now circumstances dictated a different course. After surrendering the garrison, O’Hara wrote home, ‘Our ministers will I hope be now persuaded that America is irretrievably lost.’
Nearly 4,000 men grounded their arms in the surrender field. A similar ceremony took place on the Gloucester side, but 3,000 soldiers were too sick to put in an appearance. Cornwallis had given up 7,668 troops, more than 1,000 sailors and several hundred loyalists and servants; it was disaster on such a scale that it must produce peace.
The British and Hessian regiments marched back in silence, disarmed, into town, enduring some catcalls and insults from the American regiments as they passed. Reunited in their lines, the officers and men of the 23rd made their preparations for departure.
The night before the surrender ceremony, officers throughout Cornwallis’s army had drawn lots to see who would march into captivity and who would be free to leave with their general. Slips of paper with words denoting whether they would stay or go were screwed up and placed in a hat or bucket. Given the years of enforced idleness experienced by the Saratoga captives, there was trepidation as each man picked his slip. One captain was needed to command the regiment’s party, the duty for the 23rd falling to Thomas Saumarez. The subalterns then chose. ‘It was my lot to be on this service,’ wrote Lieutenant Calvert, who was joined by a couple of fellow subalterns.
Those officers who had better luck with the draw were free to go. Captain Peter, who had been sick through most of the siege, was well enough to travel. As acting commanding officer, he was determined to deny the enemy one particular triumph over the Fusiliers. Peter detached the 23rd’s two colours from their staffs, those flags that symbolised the regiment and the royal cause for which it had fought so earnestly those six and a half years. He and another officer each wrapped a flag around his body, concealed beneath their uniforms, before boarding a transport, the Earl of Mulgrave, that was destined for Charleston and New York. It was to prove a stormy and difficult journey, so there must have been times when Peter envied Apthorpe and Champagne, who chose to travel overland to New York.
The walking remains of the regiment left Yorktown on 21 October, under the escort of the Virginia militia. Serjeant Lamb was not with them. The Irishman had every reason to fear captivity, for he had escaped from it before and there might be consequences if he was recognised. He volunteered to do duty at the hospital, putting his skills as an occasional surgeon’s mate to good use.
One month later, Lamb went to the head of the British hospital to resign, saying he intended to try and catch up the prisoners’ column. He took some pay he was owed and donned a private’s uniform, before slipping out of Yorktown while the American guard was changing. During the days that followed, he made his way north.
It was late November so the seasons were changing; somehow he would have to steer clear of American patrols and find his way hundreds of miles back to New York, crossing several great rivers on his way.
During his trek, Lamb came across several American farmers who were prepared to shelter him at night – more through a sense of Christian pity than sympathy for the British. Several of these good Samaritans had other thoughts in mind too, for the economy of rural Virginia, battered by years of war, had a dire shortage of labour. Every kind of inducement was held out to Lamb and other stragglers or escapees to desert the King’s service, making a new life. One American offered Lamb a partnership: he would build a school house in his township and the literate Fusilier serjeant would become schoolmaster. Another offered Lamb a grant of 300 acres to farm in the new Kentucky settlements. ‘I was determined to die rather than serve any state hostile to Great Britain,’ wrote Lamb, explaining his rejection of these proposals. ‘Indeed I could not even patiently support the idea of remaining a prisoner among them.’
Lamb’s liberty was curtailed after just a few days. He and two other British escapers were arrested in Fredericktown in Maryland, less than halfway to New York. His fears of being recognised as a previously escaped prisoner from Burgoyne’s army were realised, and the serjeant passed many cold nights in dark cells before being reunited with his colleagues from the 23rd whom he joined in Winchester, Virginia, during the dying days of 1781.
The mood of the Yorktown prisoners was little improved by the fact that some of their guards were recognised as former British soldiers. The serjeant major of the 33rd spotted John Shaw, the man who had fallen into American hands with Tattersall of the 23rd just before the battle of Guilford Courthouse, in American uniform and denounced Shaw as a damned rebel. Dozens – although still a small minority – had made accommodations like Shaw’s, succumbing to the same blandishments that Lamb resisted so indignantly. In Shaw’s case, meeting and marrying an Irish Catholic had spurred him to discard the red coat, serving in a Virginia regiment before settling in the country.
In January 1782, the 23rd were moved to a large detention compound near Lancaster in Pennsylvania. It was a gruelling winter’s march for many of the men, but from Lamb’s point of view, at least, it got them closer still to New York. Arriving in their new surroundings, the Fusiliers were ordered to build their own stockade, the pen of wooden posts that would serve for their confinement. Not far away, what remained of the regiments of Burgoyne’s Convention Army had settled themselves rather more comfortably, with wooden huts sleeping six men each, vegetable plots and a church. The Yorktown prisoners soon nicknamed their quarters ‘Camp Security’ and those of the Saratoga men ‘Camp Indulgence’. For Lamb, the early joy at meeting some old comrades from the 9th, in which he formerly served, soon gave way to a sort of contempt for those who had passed four and a half years in captivity. The proud, motivated men, like Lamb himself, had long since escaped, leaving the feckless or those who dared not abandon the local girls they lay with.
Many of the Saratoga prisoners had found themselves jobs with Pennsylvania farmers. Americans seeking some hired help were required to deposit a bond with the authorities and could then take their new man 25 or even 30 miles away to work. Quite a few redcoats were happy enough to pocket two or three dollars each month hunting wolves or mucking out stables while clocking up British pay all the while. Those officers like Saumarez or Calvert of the 23rd, who had accompanied the soldiers into captivity, were there in large part to prevent the soldiers succumbing to offers of permanent local employment. So while they could do nothing to stop men taking jobs, they held back their soldiers’ pay in the hope that many would remain loyal, dreaming of the large sum due to them when their confinement ended.
For the officers themselves, captivity was crushingly tedious. Since they had given their parole to remain there, escape would have violated their sense of personal honour. Attempts to do so were extremely rare, although officers of the 23rd might have recalled that one of their number had done so in 1778. Thomas Eyre was an American-born subaltern who, captured during the skirmishing in the Jerseys early in 1777, said he was horribly mistreated, prompting his flight to British lines in Philadelphia. Eyre’s escape embarrassed General Howe, and he was soon sent to another regiment. The great majority of officers knew that it was best not even to attempt to flee.
Officers, similarly, could not take work, for it would be ungentlemanly to do so. Some tried to use the time profitably to improve their French or German, but there was a shortage of suitable books. While British or Hessian officers were free to live outside the prison camps, they had to pay rent and for all of the other necessaries of life. Many soon found their pay could barely meet these expenses. The feeling of being hard-up for months at a time added to the general misery conveyed by one captive officer:
Of all the situations of life, that of having no pursuit is the worst … time hangs heavy and I scarcely know how to spin out the day. I generally lay til ten, go to breakfast and then down to the town to play billiards or pick up the news. Here I find a number of stupid beings as dull as myself – yawning and sauntering from room to room and cursing their ill stars for keeping them in such a vile hole.
Better-connected Yorktown officers, like those of Saratoga before, soon started writing plaintive letters to their friends or patrons, trying to escape this confinement. The best hope was that the commander-inchief in New York might include them in an exchange of officers, swapping them for a captured American of similar rank.
For Serjeant Lamb and the rankers there were no such hopes of exchange, so after a couple of months recruiting his strength and waiting for the weather to improve, he was meditating another escape. Lamb, the organiser, soon found several others who wanted to join – among them Serjeant Charles Collins, a veteran of nearly ten years in the regiment and of many of its battles from Lexington onwards. Lamb told Captain Saumarez, the acting commanding officer, of their intentions and, by way of support, that officer advanced them some pay.
On 1 March 1782, the group of eight Fusiliers left their camp at Lancaster. They had availed themselves of a pass from their American commandant that entitled them to seek farm work anywhere within ten miles of the camp, but they soon passed this point of no return, pressing on towards New York. The journey took them three weeks, during which time they picked up another man who had previously deserted the 23rd but wanted to return and seek his pardon. There were numerous close shaves with American patrols and quite a few locals who shunned their appeals for food or shelter. But Lamb and his comrades eventually found their way to the loyalist underground, one farmer near Philadelphia furnishing them with a list of the ‘King’s Friends’ who would help them. Many other escaped redcoats had passed that way before, no doubt, so once in New Jersey, close to their destination, they found men willing to risk death in order to pilot them into British lines. During the last stage of the journey, the Fusiliers divided into two parties, Lamb leading one and Collins the other, in order to reduce their chances of capture.
On the evening of 22 March, a rowing boat pushed off the Jersey shore, heading towards Staten Island. In it were Lamb, two loyalists, and three other escaped Fusiliers. After days of hardships, one of Lamb’s party had dropped by the wayside, pleading he could not go on. His fate along with that of Serjeant Collins’ party were unknown as the oarsmen began battling against an increasingly strong wind. A storm was blowing up in the channel; the American boatmen feared that their little craft would be swamped. Lamb and the other redcoats left their loyalist friends in no doubt of their determination to persist or perish in the attempt. With driving rain soaking them to the skin, they battled the elements for two hours until they spotted a sloop through the murk. The boatmen felt sure she must be an American privateer, but Lamb ordered them to row on. Water was sloshing about in the bottom of the boat. ‘To our unspeakable joy,’ he later wrote, ‘we saw British soldiers standing on the deck.’
