Bunker Hill (20 page)

“Maybe.”

“The logs
are rotten. See if you can knock one out and make a position.”

“If they break our line,” Knowlton said, “what’s
behind us?”

“Putnam’s
on Bunker Hill. He has three hundred men behind stone walls. I don’t want any
of you taken prisoner, but I don’t want any of your men to run unless you give
the order. I depend on you to measure things. We fire in volleys and under
control. Don’t leave it to the men. Put out stakes. I would say fifty feet for
the first volley, and no one fires his gun before they cross the stakes.”

The four
officers sat in silence. A few moments went by, punctured only by the thunder
of cannons from the bay.

“No questions?”

“We’ll do our best,” Stark said.

Gridley smiled and shrugged.

“I’d like
to hear from the surgeons,” Knowlton said, nodding at Warren and Feversham.

“I’ll be
in the redoubt,” Warren said. “Dr. Feversham has walked through our line.”

“Feversham?”
Prescott said.

“Outside the redoubt, there are only three of us,”
Feversham told them. “We drew straws for position. I’ll be with Colonel
Prescott. Dr. Bones will be with Colonel Stark, and Dr. Gonzales, with Major
Knowlton.” Both men were standing at the entrance to the redoubt. Feversham
nodded at them, and they acknowledged his introduction. “We’ll do our best. Dr.
Bones is an old hand at this. Dr. Gonzales is a physician in Providence, so he
is new to this. I have confidence in him. I spoke to Colonel Stark about
litters, but he holds that the lines are too thin to weaken by assigning men to
litters. So be it. We have dressings and tourniquets. We can bind a wound and
stop the bleeding, but where there is no rear and the battle is of itself,
there is not much more that we can do. As Colonel Stark put it, we’ll do our
best.”

“Thank
you,” Prescott said. “And now, gentlemen, God be with us. I thank you with all
my heart. Go to your positions. I am going to send my horse off the peninsula.
What is your will?”

“I think
the horses will simply be an impediment,” Knowlton said. The others nodded
agreement. Feversham left the redoubt and unhooked his bag of instruments from
his saddle. Stark and Knowlton strode along the ridge toward their lines of
defense, and Nutting loped down the hill to the root cellar. He made a little
dance of dodging two cannonballs that sent up their fountain of dirt on either
side of him. Prescott climbed onto the embankment.

“Feversham!”

The doctor
joined him, and Prescott handed him his spyglass. “Have a good look.” In the
meadow grass behind them, the Massachusetts militiamen that Prescott had
brought to the hill were sprawled on the ground, their wide-rimmed hats tilted over
their faces to shield them from the sun.

Feversham
had a clear view of the landing troops. Two more barges were inching to the
shore, both of them loaded with uniforms he recognized as light infantry, and
toward Morton’s Point he could make out the even ranks of the grenadiers. He
tried to do a quick count, more of a guess than anything else. A mass of men in

the
uniforms of the light infantry were forming ranks.

He
handed the glass to Prescott, who put it to his eye.

“About two thousand,”
Feversham said.

“They’re
warping two of the warships.” The cannonading had suddenly stopped.

“Into the
river,” Feversham agreed, squinting.

“Oh,
they’re a canny lot, Doctor. They got it all worked out, every bit of it. Put
the Charlestown Neck under their guns. Trap us here, stick it to us with their
cursed bayonets, and then back to England the conquering heroes go. How long do
you suppose we have before they attack?”

Feversham
shrugged.
“An hour, perhaps.
They’re cooling their
cannon. They’ll blast away with everything before it starts.”

“I must position my men,”
Prescott said, handing his spyglass to Feversham. “Keep a look on them, Doctor,
if you would. Let me know when they decide to have a go at us.”

“War can
be boring,” Prudence Hallsbury observed. “They just stand on the beach, and
they don’t do anything. They keep shooting those frightful cannon, and I do
believe we’ll lose our hearing. And it’s so hot, even here on the water.”

“When do
you expect the battle to begin?” Mrs. Loring asked Lieutenant Threadberry, well
aware of him standing behind her and enjoying her cleft.

“Well,
ma’am, that’s up to General Howe, isn’t it? You can see some troopers being
ferried over to Charlestown from the Boston docks. That’s the Irish brigade, if
I’m not mistaken. You can be sure Sir William will wait until he has all his
troops on land. Then he’ll move. Oh, you can be sure that he will. We have some
wine in a net overside, excellent French Chardonnay that Sir William provided

for
us. Not to Captain Woodly’s liking, but nothing
French is.”

“A net
overside?”
Mrs. Loring wondered.

“The day
is hot, but the water’s cold, Mrs. Loring. We put the bottles in a cord net and
float them in the cold water.”

Midshipman
Andrews appeared with two bottles of Chardonnay, and Mrs. Loring asked
Lieutenant Threadberry to join them in a toast.

“To victory?”
Threadberry
suggested.

Modestly,
Mrs. Loring assented. It would only titillate the gossip if she suggested that
they drink to Sir William. “Of course, he will lead the troops in the attack.”

“Ma’am?”

“Sir William.”

“No
doubt about that.”

In the
years ahead, indeed for the rest of his life, Evan Feversham would recall and
ponder the unreality of this day, this seventeenth of June in 1775. He was in
place by courtesy of Prescott, who, seemingly unafraid, walked along the top of
the earthen barricade, telling off the places of his men. “Just fall in—leave a
foot of space between each man and keep your heads down—here, now, you want a
bit of space to reload—and damn it, if the good Lord made a bullet for you, it
will find you, so there’s no worry about that— and you fire when I say fire, no
sooner, no later. Knowlton!” he shouted suddenly.

At the far
end of the embankment, Knowlton was spacing his Connecticut riflemen.
“Colonel?”

“Tell off
fifty of these men. I’m filling my line.”

It was theater, Feversham thought. Here he stood, the
whole American line visible to him, the redoubt, the line of earthen
breastworks stretching away from the redoubt over a hundred yards to the stone
wall that Knowlton had chosen for his position and for his Connecticut
riflemen. Then, on the other side of a rutted cart trace, he saw Stark and his
New Hampshire riflemen behind two fences and a stone wall, right down the slope
to the Mystic River, a line of defense eight or nine hundred paces long and manned
over its whole length by hardly many more than a thousand men. Certainly, they
were betrayed, whether by design or not, facing more than double their number
of the best-trained soldiers in the world, while an army of thirteen thousand
of their compatriots were in Roxbury and Dorchester and Cambridge. Yet the
incredible heart of it was, as Feversham considered, that those who were here
had accepted so matter-of-factly the situation as it was,
himself
included. Were they as nervous and afraid as he was, committed as he was out of
shame and circumstances?

He tried
to find an indication in their faces and manner, but with their lying behind
the earthworks, there was no way to tell. Some of them appeared totally
relaxed. Others fiddled with their muskets, wiping the flints so that there
might be no spot of moisture from their perspiration. Still others lay back,
hats tilted over their faces; some chatted softly. At the far end, a
farmer-turned-rebel had a tin whistle and blew a plaintive melody.

Five or
six hundred yards from where Feversham stood, the British troops were
completing their landing, the last of the barges pushing off from the Long
Wharf.
Below him, giving him a sense of being in a vast
theater on the top balcony, the marines and a regiment of light infantry stood
in ranks.
Two of their officers had spyglasses to their eyes and were
obviously pointing at him. Across the river, in Boston, Feversham could make
out clusters of people on the rooftops, perched in place to watch the
destruction of the Americans and the end of the rebellion.

Meanwhile,
Prescott, followed by a young man with a bundle of pointed sticks, was laying
out a line of the sticks about thirty paces in front of the breastworks; and
along the ridge, Knowlton was doing the same thing. “Mark these sticks!”
Prescott shouted. “No one fires until they reach the sticks. That gives you a
measure. That tells you when to shoot.”

He left
the young man to pound in the sticks and joined Feversham. “Well, Doctor, what
do you see?”

“They’re
still bringing troops across the river. There’s a boat pushing off now.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s
something doing on Copp’s Hill. They have a battery of mortars on the hill.
There’s a fire going.” He handed the spyglass to Prescott, who peered through
it.

“They’re heating firebombs.
You were right, Feversham. They’re going to burn Charlestown.”

It was not
to Gen. Henry Clinton’s liking. “They build of wood here,” he said to Burgoyne,
trying to explain his thinking and feeling that Burgoyne, if anyone, should
understand how he felt. Burgoyne came to this curious spot and even more
curious war loaded with honors, a hero of the Seven Years’ War, a
member
of Parliament once, and a playwright as well. At
thirty-six, Clinton was Burgoyne’s junior in years as well as in military
experience. For all that, he felt that Burgoyne was ill fitted for this action
in America, not only unable to comprehend the nature of their adversaries but
also unwilling to grant them any character different from a European peasant.
“Everything is wood, and they craft a house with a kind of reverence. You burn
their homes and it’s like burning their children.”

“That is a
romantic notion,” Burgoyne countered. “Believe me, Sir Henry”—giving him the
title that Howe had bestowed upon him and managing the put-down that went with
a title not yet properly his—“who puts his body at risk and his honor at risk
of necessity puts his home at risk. I see no difference. Tomorrow, when this
battle is won—and it will be won—the question will be who to hang, not whose
house to burn.”

“No battle is won until it is won.”

“Well put.
But our orders are to burn the place, and burn it we must.”

“There’s
another hour before the shot is hot. The situation could change.”

“Oh? How could it change in another hour?”

“They might surrender,” Clinton said.

Burgoyne regarded him strangely. “You really think
so?”

Clinton
pointed to where the two British warships were being warped into the Charles
River. “When those ships are in position, we command the Charlestown Neck. They
can see the ships as well as we can, and they must know it is hopeless. They
can never leave the peninsula, and if the war is to be over, well, good God,
what do we gain by burning the town?”

“We teach
them a lesson, and lessons come hard. When I was in school, they beat me, and I
learned.”

“When does Sir William plan to attack?”

“No
later than a half hour past two.”

As
Prescott and Feversham stood on the breastworks, studying the preparations on
Copp’s Hill and on the beach at Morton’s Point, Gen. Israel Putnam rode up to
the earthworks and sat on his horse, scowling as he contemplated Colonel
Prescott’s preparations. He was soaked with sweat, and his long gray hair was
in a wild tangle around his head. He spurred his horse down the length of
Prescott’s

line
and along the walls that shielded Knowlton’s men.

“He’s angry,” Feversham said.

“That son
of a bitch is always angry,” Prescott said. “It’s his normal state of mind.”

Putnam
rode back to where they were and said sourly, “Do you realize that half your
men are asleep, Colonel?”

“Those men
raised the breastworks and built the redoubt. They’ve been working all night.
Why shouldn’t they sleep?”

Putnam
thought about that for a long moment, and then he said, “I was right. The
attack will be here.”

Gridley
joined them. “You’re always right,
General
.”

The
militiamen within earshot burst out laughing.

“Thank
you!” Putnam snapped. “How many men do you have in the redoubt?”

“A few dozen.”

“Damn it,
don’t you have a count?”

Climbing
out of the redoubt and joining them, Dr. Warren said quietly, “Forty-three men,
General Putnam, counting Colonel Gridley and myself.”