RS_11-29

November is a strange time to reflect on the American Revolution, something more suited for July, but that is what I found myself doing touring Lexington and Concord with family over Thanksgiving while enduring a cold, uncomfortable wind. We visited many graves: Hawthorne, Alcott, Thoreau, among them. Strangely, I found myself moved most by this grave more than any other; an unknown British soldier wounded on the day “the shot heard round the world” was fired at Concord’s North Bridge. He died three days later at Buckman Tavern in Lexington. Three small British flags set his grave apart, left haphazardly I would guess by British visitors to honor his death, or by someone in Lexington to remind everyone more than Americans died that day. Three other British who died at the North Bridge are known by name and buried there. Very little marks their common grave; one might entirely miss the site when walking by.

I cannot say what affected me so deeply. Perhaps the recent experience of having a son-in-law sent to advise Filipino marines in a combat zone nobody knows about, or a nephew deployed for combat in Afghanistan made me wonder of soldiers fighting 3,000 long miles from home. I found myself with questions, most keenly, who mourned his death and did they find that ever elusive “closure”? The British listed twenty-six missing from the battle that stretched from Concord back to Boston that day. There is a report of one British soldier of the 10th Light Infantry wounded at Lexington. Perhaps it is he who lies here. I cannot think what to say of soldiers fighting and dying on foreign fields, patriots all gamely in a cause, British and American. But of this British soldier, James Russell Lowell’s Lines seems as cold as the November wind:

These men were brave enough, and true
To the hired soldier’s bull-dog creed;
What brought them here they never knew,
They fought as suits the English breed:
They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the Past upon its throne:
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.

Comments (7)

7 Comments

Will
November 29th, 2010 | 5:38 pm

Yes, and in all likelihood some of his descendents have lived and fought and died in and for America in the 235 years since his death. They may have fought in 1863 to help preserve the union or save the South. They may have lined the trenches of WWl or stormed ashore at Omaha Beach. They may have fought alongside my dad in Iwo Jima and Okinawa or served next to me during my 27 years in the Navy. I may work with some of them today.
In many ways, we’re all kinsmen. One life touches a million other lives.

Benrard
November 29th, 2010 | 7:24 pm

And there are many, many Canadians decended from American Royalists who fought gamely to preserve the old order, which they loved; and having gambled all, and lost, went in to exile.

J. L. Bell
November 29th, 2010 | 10:22 pm

The report of a British soldier named Johnson wounded in the first firing at Lexington is undercut a bit by scholars not finding a man named Johnson on the roll of the 10th Regiment.

The British troops passed through Lexington again in the early afternoon, on their way back from Concord. That was when they probably left wounded or dead men behind. The provincials recorded burying several regulars in the days that followed.

Identifying those men exactly has proved difficult. One name sometimes linked to the graves in Middlesex County also appears on a gravestone in Vermont, with a story (published generations later in a newspaper) that on 19 Apr 1775 the man played dead and gave himself up to the locals, worked then for his keep a few years, married a daughter in his host family, and settled with her relations in Vermont.

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Steve Newark
November 30th, 2010 | 9:43 am

The smaller grave referred to…A walled affair under a high banked area on one side of the walk to the river and bridge seems to hold Irish named soldiers….not unusual at that time, unfortunate mercenaries all

William Tighe
December 2nd, 2010 | 5:26 pm

I note with interest and appreciation that one of the two Union Jacks by the grave is the correct one, the pre-1800 “United Kingdom of Great Britain” union flag on the viewer’s left, before (as with the contemporary one on the right) the addition of the addition of the “Cross of St. Patrick” Irish banner as a result of the Act of Union in 1800 that created the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.”

DJ Stricker
December 6th, 2010 | 3:15 pm

Thank you for your observation and well written comments. The American solider throughout history has fought to preserve our freedom on home and aboard shores. Each has given their life in exchange; death or the repercussions of their existence beyond the war. These grave monuments are a reminder, to stir our patriotic emotion and to honor the solider foreign or domestic. We are to remember so we do not recreate the past. What price Freedom? Our self or our relative?