Free Fusiliers by Mark Urban Page B

most of their conquest, emphasising the valour of their soldiers in expelling such large numbers of enemy men ‘entrenched up to their chins’ upon such a strong position.
    The battle, named after Bunker Hill, a rather larger eminence just behind Breed’s Hill, had provided the stand-up fight that many British officers had longed for, but instead of giving the rebels their ‘drubbing’, the outcome caused the most profound shock and dismay.
    Writing home privately, Howe gave vent to dark feelings: ‘The general’s returns will give you the particulars of what I call this unhappy day – I freely confess to you, when I look to the consequences of it, in the loss of so many brave officers, I do it with horror.’
    In explaining their grievous setback, senior officers pinpointed indiscipline. The redcoat had earned a reputation for courage and steadiness during the Seven Years War and earlier conflicts. At Bunker Hill they had in fact proven nervous and disorderly. So shocking was this discovery that Henry Clinton jotted his notes about what had happened in cipher, lest others read it: ‘All was in confusion, officers told me that they could not command their men and I never saw so great a want of order.’
    Some of those at Lexington and Concord had already noticed the soldiers’ ‘wild’ behaviour, but its consequences had not been so ruinous. At Bunker Hill, men had pushed forward without being ordered to, had then stopped to open fire in front of the rail fence – causing the whole plan to falter – and fallen into such confusion infront of that obstacle that they had killed one another by mistake, and had later proved for a time immovable in front of the earthworks on Breeds Hill itself. The American defenders of the redoubt would later claim that they had only lost it because they ran out of ammunition.
    ‘As I am certain that every letter from America will be opened at the post office, I cannot in general give you my thoughts freely upon the situation of our affairs,’ Lord Rawdon wrote to England a few weeks after the battle, expressing a widespread fear that discussing the reasons for the army’s disaster might cause one’s loyalty to the Crown to be called into question. The nub of it, Rawdon nevertheless went on to explain, was that ‘our confidence in our own troops is much lessened since the 17th of June. Some of them did, indeed, behave with infinite courage, but others behaved as remarkably ill.’ Certain officers, he conceded, had not done their duty either.
    When news spread about the battle, many felt that the very heavy loss in British officers had resulted from American skill with firearms. This view was propagated in particular by those who had not been close to the fighting and who wanted to extol the prowess, and by extension the invincibility, of born frontiersmen. One British Whig who was visiting New York at the time of the battle wrote home breathlessly, ‘There are amongst the provincial troops a number of surprising marksmen, who shoot with rifle guns, and I have been assured that many of them at 150 yards will hit a card nine times out of ten.’
    John Burgoyne, talking to his friends after the battle, came up with a different and rather more credible theory for the loss among the army’s leaders:
     
    The zeal and intrepidity of the officers, which was without exception exemplary, was ill seconded by the private men. Discipline, not to say courage, was wanting. In the critical moment of carrying the redoubt, the officers of some corps were almost alone.
     
    Officers were bound to suffer disproportionately when the men refused to follow them forward. Burgoyne, like Rawdon or Clinton, found these truths so disturbing that, with the playwright’s fitting melodrama, he told his correspondent in London, ‘Though my letter passes in security, I tremble while I write it; and let it not pass even in a whisper from your Lordship to more than one person.’
    American news-sheets