Fusiliers by Mark Urban

recited with glee the losses of ‘the regulars’ after 17 June, but in what sense were the militia any worse as soldiers?Most of the British men had not been in action before Bunker Hill either. Their training, in the Manual Exercise (how to fire their muskets) or in drill (the necessary skill in marching required to deploy the regiment in various formations) was, in many cases, no greater and conducted with a good deal less enthusiasm than that of the militia amateurs preparing constantly on their village greens during preceding months. ‘We have learnt one melancholy truth,’ one of the British officers wounded at Bunker Hill reflected on his sick bed, ‘which is, that the Americans, if they are equally well commanded, are full as good soldiers as ours, and, as it is, are very little inferior to us even in discipline and countenance.’
    The idea, though, that an American imbued with a love of Liberty could face down the professional soldiers of a European power was too good for Whig scribblers to resist. In providing details of the battle, the Provincial Congress issued a dispatch trumpeting, ‘The Welch Fuzileers were nearly all cut off, and one captain only remains alive of that regiment.’
    It may be surmised that the Fusiliers were one of the few regiments that many readers of the newspapers printing this statement had heard of. The regiment epitomised the British army’s humiliation and, never mind the facts, the Minden men had been wiped out. The inconvenient truth that eight out of the Royal Welch Fusilier’s ten companies had not even fought at Bunker Hill had clearly escaped the American dispatch writers. The single germ of fact in this was that Thomas Mecan was the only one of the six officers in the 23rd (i.e., those in its light and grenadier companies) to make it through the day uninjured.
     
    In the days following the battle soldiers on the Charlestown peninsula faced the grim task of recovering the wounded, burying the dead and sweeping away the detritus of war. Major General Howe was given the command there as the British fortified their hard won conquest.
    Thomas Mecan was one of those who served in this unpleasant duty. The Irishman was a tough old soldier less interested in reflecting on what had gone wrong than in seeing whether he could turn it to promotion. Sitting in his tent on the heights above Charlestown, Mecan began a letter-writing campaign, seeking the promotion that he knew he could not afford to buy. Just two days after the battle, he petitioned General Gage with a memorial written in a finer hand than his own. Was he not an old soldier who had served through theGerman campaign and volunteered to lead the light infantry at Bunker Hill? ‘The events of that day made several vacant companies in the Army under your command,’ argued Mecan, anxious to step into the shoes of one of those dead captains, hoping, ‘Your Excellency will be pleased to consider his pretensions, and grant him such reward as you think his services merit.’ Mecan canvassed powerful men in London too, one of whom, the commander-in-chief at headquarters in Horse Guards, replied that he should trust in General Howe who would ‘do everything that he can to contribute to the happiness of deserving officers’. Words of this kind, so often written to fob off a jaundiced old soldier, would in this case happily be proven right long before Mecan even received the reply from London.
    There was at least promotion to be gained in all that bloodletting, and it was in this theme that the army more widely took some comfort. In the desperate struggle at the rail fence or redoubt one or two heroes had emerged. ‘Lord Rawdon behaved to a charm,’ Major General Burgoyne wrote home to his wife, ‘his name is established for life’. This passage formed part of his letter published in British newspapers. Quite a few aristocratic young blades would soon be finding their way to America in search of similar reputation.
    Those