Firing a cannon was an admittedly complex operation. It took at least seven trained men to fire one of these carriage-mounted fieldpieces. You had to jam the cartridge (a flannel bag full of powder) down the bore with a long-handled rammer and compress it with a clump of cotton rags known as the wad; then came the iron cannonball, which had to be free of any dust or dirt; otherwise it might jam in the barrel and blow the fieldpiece to smithereens. But that was only the beginning. Powder had to be poured in the vent at the rear of the gun, known as the touchhole, before another man shoved a pick down the vent and pierced the cartridge to ensure that it would ignite. Only then did the artillery officer introduce a burning match to the touchhole with a long stick known as a linstock, firing off the cannon.
The provincial army"s lack of gunpowder meant that there had been precious few opportunities for rehearsing this complicated procedure. As a consequence, the rudiments of actually firing a cannon remained a challenge for the provincial artillerymen, especially since the cartridges contained in the cannons" side boxes proved to be too large to fit down the bore. The gunners had to tear open the cartridges and transfer the powder from the bag to the cannon barrel with an elongated ladle. And then there was the just as tricky matter of aiming the fieldpiece with any accuracy. The few b.a.l.l.s successfully fired had buried themselves inoffensively in the side of Copp"s Hill. Peter Brown recounted how after this pitiful display of marksmanship, during which the cannon was "fired but a few times," the artillery officer "sw.a.n.g his hat round three times to the enemy, then ceased fire."
Prescott undoubtedly felt that he had little use for the fieldpieces at the redoubt and even less for the artillery officers and their men. For as had also become clear, being able to fire a cannon did not necessarily mean that you had any familiarity with being fired at by a cannon. After several hours of enduring the British artillery onslaught, Prescott"s men had become relatively inured to the cannonb.a.l.l.s that kept raining down on them, even the ones that skipped menacingly along the hillside, sometimes veering in unexpected directions (one man lost a leg to one of these erratically bouncing b.a.l.l.s of iron) before they buried themselves in the dirt or simply rolled to a gradual stop. Since the earthen walls of the redoubt and breastwork were able to absorb the impact of the cannonb.a.l.l.s, the structures provided surprisingly good protection from the onslaught, and by the early afternoon, the men had developed a routine whenever they knew another cannonball was headed in their direction. "We could plainly see them fall down," a spectator in Boston wrote, "and mount again as soon as the shot was pa.s.sed, without appearing to be the least disconcerted." This did not apply, apparently, to the artillery officers and their men, most of whom had already fled for the relative safety of Bunker Hill.
One artillery officer, however, was eager for action. Unlike the others-whose chief qualification, in at least two instances, was that they were related to the artillery regiment"s commander Colonel Gridley-Captain Samuel Trevett appears to have known what he was about. Prescott ordered Trevett to move two of his fieldpieces in the direction of Morton"s Hill and fire on the British soldiers as they disembarked from the boats. He also ordered Captain Thomas Knowlton and his two hundred soldiers from Connecticut to provide Trevett with whatever protection he might need as he opened up on the regulars.
Once they had left the redoubt, Prescott never saw Trevett and Knowlton again and a.s.sumed that, like the men who had accompanied Putnam with the entrenching tools, they had abandoned him for the high ground to the north. This, however, was anything but the case. Instead of deserting his commander, Knowlton hit upon a way to fix, at least in part, the mess Prescott had created by building his redoubt on Breed"s Hill.
About two hundred yards behind the fort, Knowlton came across a ditch. Just ahead of the ditch was a fence made of stone at the bottom and rails of wood at the top that ran parallel to the ditch as it extended across the width of the peninsula to the Mystic River. All it took were a few modifications to make the fence at least look like a st.u.r.dy, if hardly bulletproof, defensive structure. The surrounding field had been divided by the residents of Charlestown into a series of thin east-to-west-running strips. Fences had been built along each property line, so that the southeastern-facing slope of the hill was ribbed with wooden rails, and Knowlton and his men used these rails to build a second fence just ahead of the one that ran alongside the ditch. Stuffing some recently mowed and still-green gra.s.s in between the two fences, along with whatever rocks and pieces of wood they could find, they made a stout and serviceable barricade-a kind of wood-and-gra.s.s sandwich-that became known as the rail fence.
All of this took time, but thanks to Howe"s decision to wait for the reserve, Knowlton and his men had the opportunity they needed to build a structure that looked, at least to Howe"s eye, "cannon proof." What they didn"t have, however, were enough soldiers to man this new expanse of fence. But help was on the way.
If ever there was a man who embodied the flinty frontier spirit of backwoods New Hampshire, it was Colonel John Stark. At forty-six, he was a lean, less voluble version of Israel Putnam. Two decades earlier, while trapping in the northern wilderness, he had been taken captive by the Abenakis, who had been so impressed by his bravery that they"d adopted him into the tribe. During the French and Indian War, he"d fought with Rogers"s Rangers alongside British regulars, so he knew their ways well. Now he was fighting against the New Hampshire legislature, whose members were outraged by his refusal to curry favor for a commission. But no matter what the politicians thought, his men adored him, and with thirteen companies, Stark had the largest regiment in the provincial army. His major, Andrew McClary, was six foot six and "of an athletic frame." McClary was now marching proudly with Stark, whose bushy eyebrows seemed locked in a perpetual scowl, toward the Charlestown Neck.
The fire of the gunboats and warships cl.u.s.tered around the causeway of the Mill Pond had turned the Neck into a terrifying war zone. Cannonb.a.l.l.s kept flying across this narrow strip of land, some of them tearing the dirt into ragged furrows. The ships were also firing bar shot, evil-looking dumbbells of metal designed to take down the rigging of a sailing vessel but which also did devastating things to a human body. A soldier recounted how one of these murderous projectiles "cut off three men in two." What with the smoke, dust, and b.l.o.o.d.y chunks of torn flesh-not to mention the deafening roar-it was hardly a surprise that a crowd of fearful provincial soldiers was now blocking the approach to the Neck. In his deep and booming voice, Major McClary requested that the officers and their men immediately step aside so that Colonel Stark and his regiment could march across to Bunker Hill.
Captain Henry Dearborn was twenty-three and a doctor, and he was at the head of the column beside Colonel Stark. Despite the fact that cannonb.a.l.l.s and bar shot were tearing up the ground all around them, they were marching, Dearborn remembered, "at a very deliberate pace." He made the mistake of suggesting to his commander that they might march a little faster. "With a look peculiar to himself," Dearborn wrote, "[Stark] fixed his eyes upon me, and observed with great composure, "Dearborn, one fresh man in action is worth ten fatigued ones." " Needless to say, they did not pick up the pace.
Stark was not impressed by what he found on Bunker Hill. Putnam sat atop his white horse in what was called his "summer dress": a sleeveless waistcoat (as opposed to the long-sleeved coat an officer was expected to wear) that was more in keeping, one soldier claimed, with the leader of "a band of sicklemen or ditchers, than musketeers." Putnam seems to have devoted most of his energies that afternoon to fulminating at the crowd of more than a thousand mostly idle soldiers that had a.s.sembled around the peak of Bunker Hill. Part of the problem was that no one seemed sure what Putnam wanted them to do. Were they to build the fortifications he had started, or were they to march to the rail fence and fight? Instead of prioritizing what needed to be done to support Prescott and the line of defense that was emerging to the left of the redoubt, Putnam seems to have bounced from distraction to distraction with increasing futility. All agreed that Putnam was as brave and inspiring a fighter as you could find, but focus and strategic thinking had never been his strong suits. He was, an observer wrote, "one to whom constant motion was almost a necessity," and the Battle of Bunker Hill was not to be his finest hour. "Had Putnam done his duty," Stark was reputed to say, "he would have decided the fate of his country in the first action."
Stark led his regiment into the valley to the south. The British had begun directing their artillery fire toward the swarm of provincial soldiers atop Bunker Hill, and as a consequence, the march south proved to be almost as hot as anything Stark"s men had encountered on the Neck. Up ahead and to his right, Stark could see the redoubt and the breastwork; directly in front, he could see Knowlton and his men building the rail fence; to the left was the Mystic River. Beyond this jagged, uncertain line, about half a mile to the south, were more than two thousand British regulars. Stark could not understand what Prescott had been thinking when he built what looked to be a very puny and poorly sited redoubt and was heard to speak of "the want of judgment in the works," which he dismissively referred to as "the pen." Knowlton"s rail fence provided the beginning of a solution to the problem created by Prescott"s redoubt, but it was only a beginning. There were still two glaring weaknesses. Between the end of the breastwork and the beginning of the rail fence was a diagonal gap of several hundred yards. Luckily, the ground in this section was quite swampy, which provided something of an obstacle to the regulars, but more needed to be done. Whether or not Stark suggested it, someone began building three fleches-Vs made of either fence rails or a combination of rails, fascines, and dirt-positioned along the s.p.a.ce between the breastwork and the rail fence. In addition to plugging the gap, the fleches would allow provincial soldiers and even Captain Trevett"s cannons to fire on the left flank of any regulars who tried to attack the rail fence.
It was the other end of the rail fence to which Colonel Stark turned most of his attention. The fence went as far as it had to go to keep a sheep or a cow from straying into the fields above and below it, but it did not extend all the way to the water"s edge, where a steep bank went down to a narrow beach. All General Howe had to do was send a column of soldiers along the beach (where they would be hidden from the provincials by the bank), and he would have rendered useless all their efforts with the breastwork and rail fence. Stark later walked over this same ground with a fellow officer and told how "he cast his eyes down upon the beach and ... thought it was so plain a way that the enemy could not miss it; he therefore ordered a number of his boys to jump down the bank and with stones from the adjacent walls, they soon threw up a strong breastwork to the water"s edge behind which he posted triple ranks of his choice men." As Stark plugged up this gap, his subordinates worked to fortify the rail fence to the west with fistfuls of hay. Each soldier made sure to create "an aperture in the gra.s.sy rampart, through which ... he could take deliberate aim" with his musket.
Stark, Prescott, and Putnam were part of the same army, but as far as all three of them were concerned, they were each going to fight this particular battle on their own. With Prescott confined to the redoubt, Putnam preoccupied with building a fortification atop Bunker Hill, and Stark supervising at least the eastern portion of the rail fence, there was no one to synchronize the three of them into a single cohesive unit. Adding to the difficulty of getting these three commanders to work together were preexisting personal animosities. Stark didn"t like Putnam-a feeling that was probably mutual-and as had already been made clear by the interchange about the entrenching tools, Prescott and Putnam didn"t exactly see eye to eye.
It also didn"t help that the three of them were from different colonies. At this point a continental army did not yet exist, and in the absence of a unifying "generalissimo," a quite considerable intercolonial rivalry had developed. General Ward might be the head of the provincial army, but only the soldiers from Ma.s.sachusetts and New Hampshire were officially a part of that army; Connecticut had not yet formally placed its soldiers under Ward"s control. What had been true in Cambridge a few hours before was true now on the hills overlooking Charlestown: no one seemed to be in charge.
But that wasn"t necessarily all bad. There might be, in essence, three different commanders on the American lines, but as far as General Howe was concerned they amounted to a single, very difficult-to-read enemy. In just the last hour he had watched as the provincial fortifications organically evolved in ways of which not even he was entirely aware. Howe wasn"t up against a leader with a plan to implement; he was watching three different leaders try to correct the mistakes of the other two. The workings of this strange amalgam of desperation and internal one-upmanship were baffling and a bit bizarre, but as Howe was about to discover, the end result was surprisingly formidable.
Around three in the afternoon, David Townsend arrived at Hastings House in Cambridge. Townsend, twenty-two, was one of Joseph Warren"s apprentices, and while visiting the Carnes family, formerly of Boston and now living in Brighton, he"d learned that the British "were firing very heavy on our men at Bunker Hill." Townsend announced that he "must go and work for Dr. Warren," and set out on foot for Cambridge.
As he approached the town common, he could hear the distant firing from the battery in Boston and from the ships positioned around the Charlestown peninsula. Cambridge, however, was "quiet as the Sabbath-all the troops gone, and no one at Hastings House," except, he soon learned, for Dr. Joseph Warren.
"[He] was sick with one of his oppressive nervous headaches," Townsend remembered, "and had retired to rest and taken some chamomile tea for relief." Chamomile was recognized in the eighteenth century as a way to dissipate the black bile and thus reduce melancholy. No doubt rubbing his eyes, Warren said that if Townsend would wait to have a cup of tea with him, they could go together to Bunker Hill.
The night before, Warren had told his roommate and fellow Committee of Safety member Elbridge Gerry that he intended to join the soldiers on Bunker Hill. "As sure as you go," Gerry had said, "you will be slain." Warren admitted that Gerry was probably right but insisted that it would be impossible for him to remain in Cambridge "while my fellow citizens are shedding their blood for me."
We know that Townsend found Warren in Hastings House in the middle of the afternoon on June 17, but Warren"s whereabouts earlier in the day are unknown. He may have, as Townsend seems to suggest, spent the morning holed up at Hastings House. According to another account, he "pretended that he was going to Roxbury" so as "to deceive" his colleagues into thinking that he had decided not to go to Bunker Hill. But there is another possibility. Instead of Roxbury, he may have gone all the way to Nathaniel Ames"s tavern in Dedham.
Decades later, a woman made an extraordinary claim to the son of Warren"s brother John. Like his father and his uncle, Edward Warren was a doctor, and one of his patients told of how she had been born in Dedham around the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill and that Joseph Warren had been her mother"s doctor. The woman claimed that on the morning of the battle, Warren visited her mother in Dedham "and finding she had no immediate occasion for his services, told her that he must go to Charlestown to get a shot at the British and he would return to her in season." We"ll never know for sure whether or not Warren visited Sally Edwards on June 17, but we do know that eleven days after the battle, Dr. Nathaniel Ames delivered her a baby girl, which meant that Edward Warren"s patient might have been Joseph Warren"s illegitimate daughter.
Once Warren and Townsend had shared a cup of chamomile tea in Hastings House, they set out for Charlestown. Townsend later remembered that Warren was dressed exquisitely in "a light cloth coat with covered b.u.t.tons worked in silver, and his hair was curled up at the sides of his head and pinned up." All signs of his headache had vanished, and "he was very cheerful and heartily engaged in preparations for the battle." They were approaching Charlestown Neck when they learned that several wounded provincial soldiers had been taken to a nearby house. Warren told his apprentice that he "had better remain and dress their wounds," and with only a cane in his hand, Warren continued walking toward Bunker Hill.
William Howe was a handsome man, about six feet tall, with dark hair, black eyes, and a majestic reticence that did not prevent him from having a very good time when not on the battlefield. Politically he was a Whig, and as a member of Parliament he had spoken against the advisability of a war with Britain"s American colonies. But that was before King George had requested his presence in Boston, with the understanding that he would be next in line should General Gage"s services no longer be required.
When it came to maneuvering infantry regiments across a battlefield, Howe was considered a master tactician. Over the course of the last five years, he had introduced a new system by which light infantry companies increased the mobility of the British army, and just a few months before he had been stationed on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, conducting drills. In an age before the machine gun, lines of infantry could march boldly up to the enemy and once within musket range-about a hundred yards or so-charge ahead with their seventeen-inch-long bayonet blades thrust forward. The trick was to get the enemy to fire early enough that the first volley did minimal damage while the terrifying sights and sounds of a line of bellowing soldiers emerging from the powder smoke made the opposing force turn and run. One favorite tactic was to make it look as if you were launching an attack on one segment of the line when you were really concentrating your forces in an entirely different direction. That was what Howe hoped to do today.
Over on the left, General Pigot was to lead his men in a great show against the redoubt and breastwork while on the right Howe focused on the rail fence. But the real work was to be done by the light infantry on the beach beside the Mystic River. With the famous Welch Fusiliers leading the way, a long column of light infantry was to overwhelm whatever resistance they encountered on the beach and, in Howe"s words, "attack them in flank." Unfortunately, Howe had not been able to perform any significant reconnaissance of this crucial portion of the battlefield. Ever since the loss of the Diana, Admiral Graves had been reluctant to expose his fleet to unnecessary risk, and he had been unwilling to move any of his ships up the Mystic River. Not only could a vessel on the Mystic have provided Howe with some useful eyes and ears, her cannons could have directed a devastating stream of fire on the rear of the rebel line. Graves"s concerns about losing one of his ships in the shallows of the river did not apply to the gunboats, and Howe requested that they be rowed around the peninsula from the Charlestown milldam to the Mystic River. The tide, however, was against them, and by the time they took up their positions on the Mystic, the battle was essentially over.
Since the right-most column of light infantry was hidden behind the bank of the Mystic River, this critical movement was to remain largely unappreciated by those watching in Boston, while all attention was directed to the forces in the middle and on the left, where Howe and Pigot each had a line of ten companies, or about three hundred soldiers, with a second line following close behind. According to John Burgoyne, then standing on Copp"s Hill, the deployment of these troops was "exceedingly soldierlike; in my opinion it was perfect."
But just as the attack was about to begin, trouble arose on the left. Colonel Prescott had sent a detachment of provincials down into Charlestown, where they were now occupying empty buildings and firing on Pigot"s regulars.
As it so happened, Admiral Graves had just arrived at Morton"s Point. Ever since the night of April 19, he"d been eager to burn this troublesome town, and he now saw his chance. He asked if Howe wanted Charlestown destroyed. The general gave his consent.
Two types of projectiles were used to fire on and burn a town from without: superheated cannonb.a.l.l.s known as hotshot and circular metal baskets full of gunpowder, saltpeter, and tallow that looked so much like the ribcages of the dead that they were called carca.s.ses. The first carca.s.s fell short near the ferry dock, but the second fell in the street and was soon spewing molten fire among the surrounding houses. Just to make sure, Graves dispatched a group of sailors from the Somerset to help "fire the town," and in short order, Charlestown"s several hundred buildings, tinder dry after several weeks with little rain, had erupted into flame. "A dense column of smoke rose to great height," Henry Dearborn wrote, "and there being a gentle breeze from the southwest it hung like a thundercloud over the contending armies." In the hours to come, the cinders of Charlestown were scattered as far as Chelsea, more than two miles away.
As the inferno raged to the west, General Howe turned to address his troops one last time. "I shall not desire one of you to go a step farther than where I go myself at your head," he a.s.sured them. "Remember, gentlemen, we have no recourse to any resources if we lose Boston but to go on board our ships, which will be very disagreeable to us all." Howe"s artillery of six fieldpieces, two light twelve-pounders, and two howitzers were lined up along the crest of Morton"s Hill, and in addition to the growing plume of smoke, "innumerable swallows" could be seen dancing above the heads of the British soldiers.
Prescott estimated that there were only about 150 men left in the redoubt. They were exhausted, hungry, and nearly driven mad with thirst. The fort"s earthen walls, once moist and cool, had been baked dry by the sun. With the regulars about to begin the a.s.sault, Prescott"s men were desperate for a.s.sistance from the ma.s.s of provincials they could see lingering around General Putnam on Bunker Hill. "Our men turned their heads every minute to look on the one side for reinforcements," remembered Captain Bancroft.
But none were forthcoming-except for one man, who could be seen making his solitary way toward the redoubt. Instead of wearing a brown floppy hat or red worsted wool cap like the rest of them, he was, a witness remembered, "dressed ... like Lord Falkland, in his wedding suit." It was Dr. Joseph Warren, and the "soldiers received him with loud hurrahs."
Since leaving his apprentice on the outskirts of the Charlestown Common, Warren had crossed the Neck, and after borrowing a musket from a doctor who was tending to the wounded at a tavern on the west side of Bunker Hill, he"d found General Putnam. Warren made it clear that despite recently being named a major general he"d come not to command but to serve as a volunteer. He also wanted to know where the fighting was going to be the hottest, and Putnam had directed him to the redoubt.
Like Putnam before him, Prescott asked whether Warren was to act as his superior officer. "No, Colonel," he replied. "But to give what a.s.sistance I can, and to let these d.a.m.n rascals see that the Yankees will fight."
From the start, the British advance was plagued by unantic.i.p.ated complications. Many of the cannon had been provided with the wrong size of cannonb.a.l.l.s; as a last resort, the artillerymen took to firing alternative projectiles-cl.u.s.ters of smaller b.a.l.l.s known as grapeshot-but the mix-up stalled the initial momentum of the attack. The worst impediment came, however, from the terrain. Most of the hay on the hillside had not yet been harvested, requiring that the regulars march through a sea of waist-high gra.s.s that concealed the many rocks, holes, and other obstacles that lurked at the soldiers" feet. The fences that Captain Knowlton and his men had cannibalized to such good effect in building the rail fence provided an unforeseen hindrance to the regulars" advance. Every hundred yards or so, the soldiers encountered yet another one of these solidly built fences, requiring that they pause to take down the rails before they could push on ahead. Adding to the soldiers" torment was the heat of the afternoon sun, augmented by the swirling bonfire of Charlestown and the smothering warmth of their wool uniforms. It also didn"t help matters that they were loaded down with packs and other equipment.
But gradually, Howe"s and Pigot"s long, increasingly straggling lines of soldiers made their inevitable way up the hill as beside them a city burned and above them an army waited. For those watching in Boston, the regulars made for an unforgettable sight, what John Burgoyne called "a complication of horror and importance beyond anything that ever came to my lot to be witness to." The movement of the troops amid the unceasing cannonade from the ships and the hilltop battery were impressive, but it was the destruction of "a large and n.o.ble town" that transfixed the eye, particularly the church steeples, which had become, Burgoyne wrote, "great pyramids of fire" as entire blocks of houses collapsed in crashes of flame and smoke.
The provincials were equally impressed, especially those stationed in the redoubt, who had, one officer wrote, "the conflagration [of Charlestown] blazing in their faces." Few of them had ever confronted such a daunting display of military power and resolve. Joseph Warren had always insisted that there were limits to how far Britain was willing to go when it came to opposing her colonies, claiming "that they never would send large armies" into battle against the Americans. Now, with Charlestown burning and an army of more than two thousand soldiers marching in his direction, he must have realized that he"d been wrong. He also must have begun to wonder whether all the destruction and death that lay ahead would be justified by the ultimate result.
Prescott, however, had more immediate concerns. He must convince his exhausted, awe-struck soldiers that they had a fighting chance. He told them that "the redcoats would never reach the redoubt if they would observe his directions: withhold their fire until he gave the order, take good aim, and be particularly careful not to shoot over their heads; aim at their hips." Ebenezer Bancroft remembered that Prescott also told them to "take particular notice of the fine coats," meaning that they should do their best to shoot at the scarlet, as opposed to red, coats of the British officers.
To the east, at the rail fence, Colonel Stark told his men to hold their fire until they "could see the enemy"s half-gaiters," the heavy linen splash guards that were secured to a regular"s foot by a strap below the instep and reached halfway up the calf. At the beach Stark provided the men cl.u.s.tered behind the stone wall with a visual aid, positioning either a rock or a piece of wood about fifty yards away to indicate the place that the enemy must cross before they could open fire. In every instance, the message was the same: to maximize the effectiveness of their very limited supplies of gunpowder, they must wait till the last possible moment before they unleashed a volley. Perhaps one provincial officer even used an expression that had been in common usage for decades and told his men to hold their fire until they could see the whites of the enemy"s eyes.
Howe marched bravely at the head of his line of grenadiers toward the rail fence, his staff, including a servant clutching a bottle of wine, cl.u.s.tered about him. As they approached the rebel line, the cannonading of the enemy suddenly ceased so as to prevent any injury to the British forces during the attack. In the unnatural, smoke-filled quiet, the regulars prepared for the a.s.sault.
Over on the right, on the beach between the bluff and the river, in their own narrow corridor of sand, the light infantry of the Welch Fusiliers approached the provincial stone wall, "as if," a provincial wrote, "not apprised of what awaited them." The soldiers" uniforms were faced in royal blue. At the Battle of Minden in northern Germany in 1759, the Fusiliers had been part of an army that had proven its valor against a French force that was estimated to be 54,000 strong. Up ahead, there could not have been many more than one hundred provincials behind that stone wall. They would punch through with their bayonets fixed. It seemed strange that the enemy had not yet begun to fire; perhaps they had already turned and run.
Suddenly the provincial muskets erupted in flame and smoke. Packed in three deep behind the wall, the New Englanders took turns firing. As one man reloaded his musket, which took a little less than thirty seconds, another was blasting away at the British. As long as their powder held out, the provincials could sustain what was described as "a continued sheet of fire." Unfortunately, the Welch Fusiliers, with a steep nine-foot bank to their left and the river to their right, had nowhere to hide. Musket b.a.l.l.s slammed into their torsos and legs with a sickening slap, cutting b.l.o.o.d.y gouges into their flesh and splintering bones. (A British surgeon later wondered whether the Yankees purposely aimed low so as to add to the regulars" sufferings, since leg wounds almost always required amputation.) Every man in the front group dropped to the ground, either dead or wounded; others came up from behind and were also cut down. Over and over again, the scenario was repeated. According to Stark, "The dead lay as thick as sheep in a fold." Finally, with close to a hundred bodies lying lifeless on the beach, the remnants of Howe"s light infantry turned and fled. A minister watching from the opposite sh.o.r.e of the Mystic River reported that they "retreated in disorder and with great precipitation to the place of landing, and some of them sought refuge even within their boats. Here the officers were observed ... to run down to them, using the most pa.s.sionate gestures and pushing men forward with their swords."
It was almost as bad on the high ground to the west when the provincials opened up on the line of grenadiers. Already frustrated by the fences and the terrain, many of the grenadiers disobeyed orders and paused to fire at the entrenched enemy instead of charging ahead. Not only did this stop the advance in its tracks, Howe"s picture-perfect formation was ruined as the second line found itself stumbling into the grenadiers ahead of them. "They began firing," Howe wrote, "and by crowding fell into disorder and in this state the second line mixed with them." This confused jumble of soldiers provided the enemy with an excellent target. "There was no need of waiting for a chance to fire," one provincial soldier wrote, "for as soon as you had loaded, there was always a mark at hand, and as near as you pleased."
But if all seemed confusion, there was, among the provincials at least, a definite agenda. "Our men were intent on cutting down every officer ... ," Henry Dearborn wrote, "[shouting,] "there," "see that officer," "let us have a shot at him." When two or three would fire at the same moment ... , [resting] their muskets over the fence, they were sure of their object." The grenadiers, on the other hand, who were without the benefit of a barricade and were firing desperately from a standing position, were less effective with their muskets and inevitably shot too high. After the fighting, Dearborn noticed that an apple tree behind the rail fence "had scarcely a ball in it from the ground as high as a man"s head while the trunk and branches above were literally cut to pieces."
According to Marine Lieutenant John Clarke, one provincial soldier did particular damage to the ranks of the British officers. Standing on a platform that put him close to three feet higher than those around him, the rebel sharpshooter would see a British officer, fire, hand over his spent musket, get handed a loaded weapon, and fire again. Over the course of ten to twelve minutes, the sharpshooter killed or wounded, Clarke estimated, "no less than 20 officers" until a grenadier from the Welch Fusiliers finally shot him down.
About this time Captain John Chester and his company, their blue uniforms hidden beneath their shabbiest of clothes, had made it across the Neck to Bunker Hill. Chester was horrified by what he found. All around them, provincial soldiers were doing their best to avoid the fighting, "some behind rocks and hayc.o.c.ks and 30 men perhaps behind an apple tree and frequently 20 men round a wounded man, retreating, when not more than three or four could touch him to advantage. Others were retreating, seemingly without any excuse." Putnam was providing anything but inspirational leadership. "The plea was," Chester wrote, "the artillery was gone, and they stood no chance for their lives in such circ.u.mstances, declaring "they had no officers to lead them." "
Chester and his company pushed on toward Breed"s Hill, "the small as well as cannon shot ... incessantly whistling by us." Samuel Webb was marching beside Chester. "Descending into the valley from off Bunker Hill ... ," Webb wrote, "I had no more thought of ever rising the hill again than I had of ascending to heaven as Elijah did, soul and body together. But after we got engaged, to see the dead and wounded around us, I had no feelings but that of revenge; four men were shot dead within five feet of me."
After the first disastrous attack on the rail fence, Howe reformed his ranks and tried once again. With reinforcements, however slight, from Bunker Hill, the provincial line once again held firm, making Howe"s hoped-for bayonet charge impossible. According to a British officer, "an incessant stream of fire poured from the rebel lines ... for near 30 minutes. Our light infantry were served up in companies against the gra.s.s fence, without being able to penetrate-indeed how could we penetrate? Most of our grenadier and light infantry, the moment of presenting themselves lost three-quarter and many nine-tenths of their men. Some had only eight and nine men a company left; some only three, four, and five." One provincial soldier claimed that the regulars were reduced to piling the bodies of their dead compatriots "into a horrid breastwork to fire from." A British officer ruefully wrote, "We may say with Falstaff ... that "They make us here but food for gunpowder." "
The fire from the three arrow-shaped fleches between the breastwork and the rail fence proved particularly lethal to the grenadiers, especially since Captain Trevett, the only American artillery officer to distinguish himself that day, was there with a cannon. Several Connecticut soldiers insisted that at one point General Putnam was also in the vicinity with a cannon of his own. Having watched in outrage as two artillery officers abandoned their fieldpieces on Bunker Hill, Putnam convinced Captain John Ford, the same officer who had killed five regulars on the Battle Road on April 19, to help haul one of the cannons down to the front lines. There, Putnam a.s.sisted in firing the fieldpiece, using a ladle to jam powder from the oversize cartridge down the barrel. When a particularly effective shot tore into the regulars" ranks, one provincial soldier was heard to shout, "You have made a furrow through them!"