Battlefield Hamlet

THE AMERICAN REBELLION (658 pp.)--Sir Henry Clinton--Edited by William B. Willcox--Yale University ($7.50).

Few generals can resist explaining how they happened to lose a battle. Make it a campaign or a whole war and the need becomes almost compulsive. In Sir Henry Clinton's case, the explanation is one that ought to interest every U.S. citizen. And who was Sir Henry? Most schoolboys know that Lord Cornwallis surrendered the British army at Yorktown, but few know that Sir Henry, the British commander in chief, left New York on the very day of the surrender with a rescuing army.

The rescue, of course, never came to pass, but then most of Sir Henry's plans seldom got beyond the planning stage. That helps to explain the obscurity of the man who commanded the British armies in North America from 1778 to 1782. In character also is the history of his painfully detailed labor of explanation, now published under the title The American Rebellion. Sir Henry wrote it to prove (as other historians have tried to do since) that the war was won not by "Mr. Washington" nor lost by Clinton, but thrown away by schemers in London and his subordinates in America. Before the book was ready for the printer, Clinton died. Now published for the first time, it seems doubtful that Englishmen of his own generation would have found it more convincing than it seems today. Simply as history, it is a fascinating look at the War of the Revolution through the eyes of a British protagonist. But it is almost equally fascinating, flossy style and all, as an unconscious giveaway of character weakness, an inadvertent confession of a general who planned much and acted little, almost passively accepted defeat from a rabble in arms and left the final explanation to his persecution complex.

Russians for Hessians? Clinton, son of the Admiral Clinton who governed New York from 1743 to 1751, liked the idea of being commander in chief of His Majesty's armies in America but didn't care much for the responsibilities that went with the job. In the Seven Years' War he had done gallantly and risen to colonel. After that he was groom of the bedchamber to the Duke of Gloucester, was elected to Parliament, went to the Balkans to observe Catherine the Great's Russian armies fighting the Turks (later Clinton wanted to see Russians instead of Hessians sent to the colonies). By the time King George and his ministers decided to put the American colonies in their place, Clinton was an aloof major general who had never held an independent command. Wrote Clinton of himself in 1775, "you know I am a shy bitch."

From the first, Clinton was at odds with his superiors, Generals Thomas Gage and William Howe. When he got the command himself, he tried over and over again to resign, quarreled with Lord Cornwallis, his second in command, to the point of scandal but never had the courage to assert his leadership when Cornwallis openly defied his orders. At the battle of Charleston in 1780, he performed well but was sure that Admiral Arbuthnot was deliberately withholding ammunition from him: "I must ever be on my guard with this man, who . . . will study to dog me." As for Cornwallis, "He will play me false." In the end, Arbuthnot had to go because Clinton was "determined never to serve with such an old woman." But Cornwallis, against his orders, says Clinton, got himself boxed at Yorktown and brought about his commander's downfall.

Failure of Nerve. The American Rebellion shows Sir Henry forever getting ready to fight but seldom getting around to it. When Washington threatened, Clinton argued that the Americans had him outnumbered and that their troops were good. When other British generals, notably Cornwallis, failed to attack, he argued that the American troops were a sickly and inferior lot. He never had enough ships, enough men, enough luck. When he planned attacks, the wind failed his ships or the enemy pulled out before he could get going. Timid when the hour called for action, he could become boastful describing what he would have done if things had gone differently. On his own testimony, Clinton was simply not fit for command. None of his excuses can hide the fact that his was a failure of nerve, character, and decision. Without intending to, he reveals in The American Rebellion that his weakness was one of Mr. Washington's most dependable weapons.

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