by Howard Fast
Awe in his voice, Warren said, “Colonel, do they mean to attack face on, up the hill?”
“So they do, Doctor. So they do.” He raised his spyglass and peered through it.
“Why don’t we have men in those empty houses?” Feversham wondered. “They’re within rifle shot.”
“We do, maybe a dozen. We just don’t have enough riflemen. Look there.” He offered his glass to Warren, who pushed it aside. “I see it.” What he saw was two men in the British ranks who suddenly collapsed. “Marines,” Gridley said.
The marines responded with a blast of fire into the empty houses.
“They’ll burn them now. You were right, Feversham.”
“What about the other doctors?” Feversham asked Bones. “God help us if it comes down to you and me, with our men spread out from here to Bunker Hill.”
“Forget about them,” Bones said.
Prescott appeared, riding his horse up to the redoubt, standing in his stirrups. “Gridley,” he yelled, “what in hell are those men sitting around for?”
“They’re exhausted. They’ve been at it all night.”
“We’re all exhausted. The trench has to be dug. All of you!”
Warren climbed out of the redoubt. “Colonel,” he said to Prescott, “there’s so much a man can do.”
Prescott, dismounting, said quietly, “So help me God, Doctor, the way things are now, we’ll be slaughtered. The only men who are holding their line are Johnny Stark’s riflemen and two hundred Connecticut men with Knowlton. You see that stone wall and the stretch of the ridge over to Bunker Hill? I had a thousand men there last night, and now I have a handful.”
Gridley and Feversham joined them. “Where are the others?” Gridley asked.
“They ran away,” Prescott said disgustedly. “We have over twelve thousand men in Roxbury and Dorchester, and less than a thousand up here on the hills. I pleaded with Ward. He has two thousand good Massachusetts men sitting on their butts over by Cobble Hill. The old man has no guts.”
“He’s sick,” Warren said. “He’s in too much pain. I’ll ride down and talk to him. I give you my word, Prescott. I’ll bring the men back with me. They’re good men. They won’t run away.”
“Ward’s frightened,” Gridley said. “I spoke to him last night. He can’t believe that the British will attack the hills. He says it makes no sense, but he’s wrong. If they wipe us out, they hold the high ground. They can drag their big eighteen-pounders up here, and that gives them the Charlestown Neck. Did you tell him what Johnny Lovell said?”
“I told him. He doesn’t want to believe it, because if he does, he has to give us the Massachusetts men.”
“I’ll get you the Massachusetts men,” Warren said. “I’ll have them up on the hills before noon.”
Feversham walked with Warren to where Warren’s horse was tethered. “Let me go with you,” Feversham said. “You’re a sick man, Warren.”
“No, no, don’t worry about me. Better if I’m alone.” He climbed onto the horse with difficulty and rode off.
Prescott, leading his horse, joined Feversham and said, “How sick is he, Doctor?”
“He should be in bed,” Feversham said shortly. He walked with Prescott along the line of trenches that were being dug from the redoubt to a stone wall. The men in the trenches dug slowly and tiredly. “The ground’s all stone,” Prescott said miserably. He took out his watch and stared at it. “Half-past nine. I’m a miser for minutes. If they attack an hour from now, we’re finished. There’ll be a slaughter up here that I don’t want to think about. Those redcoat bastards love their bayonets. They won’t take prisoners. They have to wipe out what happened on the road back from Concord.”
Staring at the meadows below, less than a mile away, where the British troops were landing, Feversham said, “They hardly have more than a corporal’s guard on shore. Maybe a hundred marines. And your rifles got another one. It’ll be hours before they land the army.”
Prescott pressed him. “How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve seen them do it in Europe.”
“It looks like they got every boat in the fleet in the water.”
“They got three thousand men and better to take across the river,” Feversham said. “Up north in the bay, Colonel, they’re disembarking from the ships. They couldn’t quarter the whole army in Boston. I’d guess they have half of them aboard the ships. If what Johnny Lovell told you is fact, they’re putting their whole army down there in the meadows, and you will talk about stupidity. They take lessons in stupidity. If you had a mind to, you could take Boston with a thousand men, and we got better than five thousand in Roxbury and Dorchester. I can’t believe what they’re doing. Can you mount an attack on Boston?”
Prescott sighed and shook his head. “No, God help us, it’s too late. We’re not a real army, Feversham. Every damn militia commander has his own ideas, and I told you what I think of Artemus Ward. The man’s terrified. If I had three or four days to plead and threaten, then Putnam and I could put together a force to take Boston. Aside from Gridley here, and Johnny Stark and Tom Knowlton and old Putnam, we have no one who could lead and command and force Ward to fall in line. No, no, we have to defend the hills. So the question is, how much time do I have before they attack?”
Feversham replied, “There is no way on earth that they could be in a position to attack before one o’clock. On that I will stake my life. But if you want a reasonable guess, I would say closer to three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe an hour later, maybe an hour earlier, but no way before one o’clock. That gives us three—maybe four, maybe even five—hours.”
“Three hours and we can do it.” He mounted his horse and spurred away.
“He’ll do it,” Gridley said.
It was Sir William Howe, coming newly from Britain to the scene at Boston, who in a sense knighted Henry Clinton, dubbing him Sir Henry. Clinton’s first reaction was displeasure. “I resent that, Sir William. It puts me down. It’s a bad joke.”
“It is no jape,” Howe said earnestly. “My brother, Earl Richard, assured me that you were on the list and that the king would ennoble you any day. In fact, with all my heart, I believe it already done. Let me take the liberty. It helps us.”
“How does it help me?”
“I want you to stand with me against Gage. The man’s a fool.”
Clinton had his own ideas about who was the fool. Born in Newfoundland, he could, better than any of his companion generals, put himself in the minds of the Continentals. He was well aware of the fact that they were not disciplined or trained. It took the positive threat of death, if he paused or retreated or turned his back, to make a British soldier walk to his positive extinction. Such an action was neither normal nor sensible, and if the Americans had no other virtue, they were eminently sensible. When the odds were overwhelmingly against them, they would turn around and run; nor would they stupidly walk to their deaths. They were neither enlisted nor paid, and their guns were their own; they would accept a command if it made sense, and they would disobey it if it made no sense whatsoever.
But put them behind a stone wall or a redoubt or in a trench and they became a deadly opponent. He had seen that when the British regulars retreated from Concord to Boston. The farmers never stood against them, not even once, but from behind every stone wall along the way they maintained a withering, deadly fire that filled every bed the British had in the hospital they set up in Boston. When the redcoats turned to charge, the farmers ran like the very devil to take another position. It was a tactic they had learned from the woods Indians they had fought over the past hundred years.
He had tried to explain this behavior to Sir William, but Howe was too old to learn and was obsessed with the notion that he could wipe out the rebellion in one fell swoop and make for himself a place like Ireland, where he and Mrs. Loring could preside over a satrapy of their own. Indeed, Clinton in all his experience had never witnessed anything like this passion of a middle-aged m
an, a married man with a wife and children of his own, an honored member of the British peerage, ready to cast it all aside for a woman—a slattern, by Clinton’s definition—with whom he had fallen madly in love. As Clinton had put it to General Gage, a man who understood the American mind: “I’m no saint, but this passes understanding.”
It more than passed understanding as he stood with Sir William Howe on the shore facing Breed’s Hill at eleven o’clock on the morning of the seventeenth. Clinton pointed to the slope that stretched up to the redoubt and the earthworks stretching away to the right. They could plainly see men digging, apparently undisturbed by the cannonballs that arched up from the warships and crashed into the redoubt.
“It’s wasted,” Clinton said sourly.
“It’s a terrifying message,” Howe said with satisfaction.
“It doesn’t seem to terrify them.”
“It will.”
“You’ll put the whole army ashore here? Every man we have?”
“Such is my intention.”
“And Boston?”
“You will defend Boston,” Howe said smugly.
“With what? Do I defend the city myself, alone?”
“I will give you a hundred marines.”
“Good God, sir, they have seven, eight thousand men in Roxbury and Dorchester.”
“My dear Sir Henry, the Boston Neck is two hundred paces across. There is no other approach to the city. We have four twenty-pounders and gunners to serve them at the Boston Neck, and you have more than convinced me that the farmers will not attack a fortified position. If you cannot hold the neck with four guns and a hundred marines—”
“Did I say that?” Clinton replied angrily. “What is to keep them from pushing across from Dorchester? When the tide is out, you can almost walk across. What do I do with a hundred marines, put ten on the shore and ten on Beacon Hill and ten at the neck?”
“Dr. Church says that there is absolutely no chance that they will attack Boston. They are not an army, they are a mob. And by the way, I have made arrangements for Mrs. Loring to have a place on Vindicator, where she can watch the engagement. You will see that she has every comfort.”
Clinton’s retort died in his throat. He stared at his commanding officer for a long moment; then he nodded and walked away. He stood at the water’s edge, watching the barges land the troops on Morton’s Point. He saw the grenadiers stumbling under their great headgear and enormous packs, climb out of the barges, and scramble up the rocky shore to the meadow; he thought that if there were a crew of gunners worth their salt up there in the redoubt, the grenadiers could blow the barges out of the water, one by one, as deftly as a man shooting ducks from a blind. He could see the shape of the cannon in the embrasures of the redoubt, but for the life of him, he could not understand why they were silent. For a moment he fantasized himself up there at the redoubt with a company of trained artillerymen. That would give Sir William a thing or two to think about.
“And here I am, Evan Feversham,” he said to himself, “and here’s my medical staff.” There they were, a tall, skinny, dark-eyed Jew and an aged, white-haired Welshman, the three of them apparently abandoned in a hodgepodge of confusion all around them. Warren had taken off, and so had Prescott, and Gridley was shouting at the men in the redoubt to get off their asses and start digging. Bones and Gonzales stared at Eversham. What do we do now?
Do something, he told himself. Say something.
At that moment, a cannonball took the head off one of the diggers. His body stood for a moment, headless; and the other men scrambled out of the shallow trench and began to run. It was the first casualty of the day.
Feversham found himself shouting at them, “Come back!
Damn you all, come back!” He had never imagined himself in such voice, a veritable roar of command. Gridley leaped out of the redoubt and raced after the scattered men, waving a pistol wildly and yelling, “Stop, you lousy, cowardly bastards!” Another man, Captain Nutting by name, appeared from across the field, intercepting the flight and flourishing a sword. The only thing Feversham could think of at that moment was to climb up onto a pile of dirt and rocks and stand there, shouting, “Look at me! They can’t hit me!”
“Heed me!” he shouted with all the voice he could muster. “I’m in full sight of them. They can’t hit anything with those balls. They can’t shoot grape at this distance.” He waved his arms violently, and evidently the gunners below saw him and tried to train their guns on him. Two balls thudded into the pile of rocks and dirt, throwing up a shower of sand that covered him, and convincing him that he had made his point. He hopped down from the embankment, wiping the sand out of his hair and eyes. His action had its effect, and the men came walking back, shamefaced. They gathered around the headless man whose skull and brains were scattered across the ground behind the trench.
“What do we do with him?” someone asked.
“Bury him,” Gridley said, putting his pistol back into its holster. Nutting came back and offered his hand to Feversham, whose own hand was shaking like a leaf.
“My name’s Nutting, Captain Nutting. I’m with Knowlton. Who are you, sir?”
“Dr. Feversham.”
“My word, that was certainly something.”
The militiamen were staring at the corpse, still unwilling to touch it. Feversham motioned to Bones and Gonzales. “Give a hand with this.”
“Dig a hole,” Gridley growled to the men who had picked up their spades.
“Where, sir?”
“Anywhere. Over there.”
They dug a grave quickly, furiously, to rid themselves of the headless corpse. Feversham and Bones and Gonzales picked up the body and put it in the shallow grave.
Feversham pointed to remains of the man’s head. “Throw some dirt on that. It’s not something we want to think about. What was the poor devil’s name?”
“Simpkins, Doctor. He’s from Marblehead.”
“We ought to have some way to note the names,” Feversham said to Gridley.
“I should have thought of that,” Gridley said wearily. “I’ll try to do something about it.” He went back into the redoubt.
“You’re doctors, all of you?” Nutting asked, pointing to the leather aprons Bones and Gonzales wore, the big pockets heavy with surgical tools. Feversham’s equipment was in his saddlebag, his horse tethered to a rock in the shelter behind the redoubt.
“We’re all there is at the moment,” Feversham said ruefully. “Dr. Warren will be back. He’s none too well, and he’ll be in the redoubt. So there’s three of us—Dr. Bones, Dr. Gonzales, and myself. Are you in command here?”
“Until Colonel Prescott returns.”
“Then if you show us the line of defense, we’ll be better able to position ourselves.”
Prescott, whipping his horse down the road to the Charlestown Neck, met up with Israel Putnam, who was leading a contingent of some 250 Connecticut militia.
“Thank God for small favors!” Prescott exclaimed. “You’re the answer to my prayers. We’re weakest at the barricade, from the redoubt to Knowlton’s position.”
“I’m not bound for Breed’s Hill,” Putnam replied.
“Then where the hell are you going?”
“We’re fortifying Bunker Hill.”
Prescott cried, “Why Bunker Hill? The attack is at Breed’s Hill. There’s no one there, do you understand me? A hundred men who’ve been digging all night and they can hardly stand on their feet, and you’re fortifying Bunker Hill!”
“General Ward says the attack will be on Bunker Hill,” Putnam said, trying to restrain his hair-trigger temper. “And you will not address me in such voice, sir!”
“Ward doesn’t know his ass from his elbow!”
“And you, sir, where the hell is your knowledge from?”
“From the eyes God gave me, General. Right at this minute the British are landing an army at the foot of Breed’s Hill. Our intelligence says they’re going to throw everything at us, the
whole army, the whole three thousand of them, the light infantry, the grenadiers, the marines, everything, and you’re fortifying Bunker Hill!”
“It’s a ruse, Prescott!” Putnam snapped. “Not even Howe could be that stupid and order his men to climb Breed’s Hill in a frontal attack. He’ll turn your left flank and march on Bunker Hill.”
“He won’t turn our left flank. Johnny Stark’s holding the flank with his riflemen. They know every move we make, and they know that we have nothing on Breed’s Hill and nothing in the damn redoubt!”
“Fuck the redoubt,” Putnam growled.
“To hell with you!” Prescott whipped his horse and raced past the file of Connecticut militia to the Charlestown Neck. Across the neck, at the junction of the Cambridge Road, he saw the big brown tent that the Committee of Safety had raised for their command post. Dozens of men were milling around the tent. In the pasture beyond it, the Massachusetts militia were sprawled in the morning sunshine around their cook fires. A dozen horses were being watered at the Mill Pond, and still other troops were camped on the slope of Cobble Hill. Prescott felt sick at the sight. Back at Breed’s Hill, Johnny Stark’s few hundred New Hampshire men and Knowlton’s few hundred Connecticut men and the hundred or so exhausted men around the redoubt waited for extinction, and here was a whole army lounging in the June sunshine.
“Is General Ward inside?” he asked as he dismounted.
“Yes, sir.”
Prescott pushed through the cluster around the tent. Inside it was as crowded as outside, Ward sitting at a table, staring at a map. Three men whom Prescott recognized as members of the Committee of Safety were grouped around him, a clutch of militia officers argued hotly, and four men with muskets stood stiffly by the open flap. A large rent in the roof of the tent let in a shaft of sunlight.
