Bunker Hill (4 page)

“Why?” Clinton
wanted to know.

“Two
reasons,” Gage said. “First of all, they’re led by a cold-blooded and nasty son
of a bitch named Israel Putnam. We trained the old bastard ourselves, back in
the French wars, and now he’s giving it back to us. He’s hard and heartless,
and I offered to make him a rich man if he’d come over to us. Second reason—do
any of you know what the levelers are?”

“Half a
notion,” said Howe. “Back in Cromwell’s time, wasn’t it? A daft set of loonies,
if I remember right.”

“Well,
it’s a current disease in Connecticut.
Pure and simple hatred
of anyone who has more than two shillings.
No proper New Englander, mind
you. A Boston man will sell his mother, if you can only make the price right,
and there’s nobody worships money and rank like these Yankees, with all their
talk of equality. But these levelers are something else indeed. They have a
thing about equality.

No rich, no poor. Or put it
all poor.
Every man on the same level.
Every piece of property the same.
It’s
a
madness
with them.”

“And when
you face muskets in the hands of those,” said Clinton, “it will be no ruffle of
drums to send them running. You mark my words.”

“Who else
is there?” Burgoyne asked.

“Over
here,” Gage said.
“Stark and six or seven hundred men out of
New Hampshire Grants.
They put them back a few miles because maybe old
Artemas Ward
don’t
know what to do with them. They are
a most peculiar lot, you know, some of them just riffraff, but most of them a
crazy Presbyterian lot, and they don’t rightly hold their land with any clear
title. That, by the way, is the crux of it with half the men out there—a deadly
fear of losing their land with the shaky title they have, and so help me God,
if we could guarantee title to all their holdings, you could go home and drink
your port in peace. But these men from the Grants with Stark are riflemen and
bloody good marksmen, and I have seen them pop the head off a turkey at a
hundred paces. They are an ignorant, bigoted lot out of the woods, buckskin men
who live half like animals, but if they were on that road back from Concord,
not one of my men would have returned from Boston.”

“I am not
bugged by riflemen,” Howe said. “They have to reload, and that’s the business
of ramming down the lead. Give them a touch of cold steel and they’ll run like
bloody rabbits.”

“Well, let
me tell you this,” Clinton interjected. “I have seen them at it. They’ll make a
line of the hundred best marksmen, and the rest will simply load. That means
they will fire every ten seconds, and there is nothing like it.”

“I have
seen that,” Gage agreed, “but they will not stand in an open field. You know,
that’s the maxim of that old bastard Putnam, that the Yankee, having an empty
head,
don’t
give two damns for it, so if you put him
behind a stone wall or a log of wood he’s brave as a lion. But his legs and
belly are another matter, and he will not have them shot at. They were lined up
across the field at Lexington, and at the first shots they ran like rabbits,
but coming back, they were behind the walls, and that was a horse of another
color.”

“Did you
try to buy John Stark?” Howe wondered. “He’s a good man, you know.”

“I sent
him a letter,” Thomas Gage said, “offering him a hundred golden guineas and his
own ranger commission. I told him that if he raised a company of five hundred
men, I would uniform them and pay them. He replied in two words.”

Burgoyne
raised a brow.
“Two words?”

“‘Fuck
you.’ It’s standard King’s English with them, and they suffer a paucity of
vocabulary. Do you know old Putnam’s order to his men? It has become a sort of
slogan with them. Let me quote him: ‘If one of you fuckin’ shitheads shows his
ass to the enemy, I will slice his balls off personally.’ And they love it. The
old man has the reputation of the foulest mouth in the colonies.”

“I wouldn’t
call it paucity of vocabulary,” Burgoyne said.

“Perhaps
not,” Gage continued. “Still, it always strikes me as an odd concomitant of
their Puritanism. They say Boston has the highest percentage of whores of any
city in the empire, and while that may be an exaggeration, it is a most
peculiar element of their holiness. That about does it,” he said, pointing to
the map. “Over here, to the north of Willis Creek, there’s a chap called Reed,
with another band of New Hampshire men, facing this little neck of land to
Charlestown.”

“What’s in
Charlestown, Thomas?” Clinton asked.

“It’s a
deserted village. It was a rebel stronghold, and they all cleared out of it. I
suppose the houses are empty now. They were last week when I sent a company
through it.”

“Why
didn’t you occupy it?” Howe asked.

“Because I don’t want to loot it.”
Gage explained. “You can’t put soldiers into an empty town and expect
them not to loot it. Hell, you couldn’t put saints into an empty town and ask
them to keep hands off, and these people are insane on the subject of looting.
With all their fine talk of liberty, it’s property they worship. Take a piece
of silver or china and they go mad.”

“Why don’t
they occupy it?”

“It’s all
wood, shingle, and siding. One broadside of hot shot and it goes up in flames.
So we leave it alone.”

They
stared at the map in silence for a while, and then Clinton pointed to the
delicate topographical swirls beyond the village of Charlestown.
“This hill?”

“Breed’s Hill.
And just beyond it, Bunker Hill.”

“What’s there?”

“Nothing.”

“Why don’t we occupy it?”

“Never occurred to me,” Gage admitted. “I
mean,
what for?”

“Then the whole harbor is ours.”

“Interesting,”
Howe said.

“It’s a
question of what we intend to do here and how long we stay here,” Gage said,
“and I’m damned if I know the answer to either question. We have three thousand
men. They have fifteen thousand. If we split up and go into the Charlestown
Neck, we’re no better off and a lot thinner.”

“With the
marines we muster better than three thousand,” Howe said. “Suppose they occupy
Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill. That would be sticky, wouldn’t it?”

Staring at
the map, Clinton said, “That would be the answer to our prayers, Sir William.
We would cut them off and let them starve, and your whole bloody rebellion
would collapse like a bag of wind.”

“What
makes you think they would sit there and starve?” Howe asked.

“What else
could they do? We put our ordnance here on Copp’s Hill, bring up ships and
barges, cut them off by water, and turn that little bridge of land into pure
hellfire.” He glanced at Burgoyne. “Not to your taste, is it, Johnny?”

“You don’t win wars that way.”

“You win a war any bloody way you can.”

“I’m afraid
I agree with Johnny,” Howe said. “They have a vision, which I suppose we gave
them.” He turned to Gage. “I don’t speak in criticism. Heaven knows, you could
not have anticipated what happened at Concord, but the plain fact of the matter
is that they ran our asses off. We have the best damn army in the world, and
that is not boasting or vainglory. It’s a matter of plain fact, which the world
knows, and as far as I am concerned, the world must continue to know. I never
wanted this rotten mess. My sentiments are with the colonies, and I have never
made a secret of that, gentlemen. But the fact remains that they have a vision
of a British army running like a pack of beaten dogs, and all Europe knows and
all Europe is farting with delight. What if we starve a few thousand of them
into surrender? What will it change? No, sir! We must see these bleeding
bastards face-to-face.”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Burgoyne.

“Does that finish it, or does that start it?” Clinton
wondered.

“Devil
only knows,” Gage said hopelessly. “It’s inconceivable that they want to make a
war with us. There’s no reason for war. Their complaints are petty, and we’ve
given into one demand after another. Except land,” he added hopelessly. “God
knows, there’s enough land out there for everyone. Most of it never touched or
explored. They want it, and the Crown wants it. They are a stiff-necked,
ignorant, and vulgar people—and righteous. They are the most righteous folk on
the face of this earth. I know, gentlemen.” He sighed. “I married one of them.
I’m sure you know that my wife is a Kemble, out of New Jersey, and while they
are not this devilish Puritan strain down there, they share the arrogance.”

Margaret
Gage came into the room in time to hear the last of this conversation. Clinton
saw her enter and noticed how her face tightened and her body stiffened.

“General
Gage,” she said very formally to her husband.

He
reddened and rose with the others to face her.

“I have no
desire to interrupt important councils, and I know your distinguished
companions speak of nothing but matters of the greatest import, still, we are
all of us to be at dinner with Reverend Hallsbury at eight o’clock. There is
only time to change.”

“Of course, my dear.
I had
forgotten.”

She turned
and left the room. Howe wanted to know who Reverend Hallsbury was.

“Very important High Church.
He’s the grandson of Lord Hallsbury, the old man in Suffolk who died a few
years ago. He’s it with the handful
who
are totally
loyal.”

“Also,”
Burgoyne added, “a young wife whose fire he stokes poorly. By God, she’s a
beauty—gifted as the fairies are, and with a magnificent pair of tits.”

Clinton
noticed how uncomfortable Gage had become.
Too long among the
Presbyterians and too long away from London.
The disgraceful, running
reteat from Concord only two months ago, a British army chivied and torn to
shreds by a pack of loutish farmers, had broken his ego. The empire’s response
to his disgrace was to send to his aid the three brightest lights in the
British military, all of them men who had fought in America during the French
and Indian Wars. Gage would not cross Burgoyne, or any of them, and this was a
pity, Clinton thought, since he was the only one among them who had any real
knowledge of the situation.

Gage saw
them to the door. Howe had a house of his own, as befitting his ranking
position; Clinton and Burgoyne were quartered together in a fine brick house
that had belonged to a cousin of James Otis’s and which he had vacated some
weeks before. They walked there together, followed by four grenadiers—a fact
that irked Burgoyne.

“It’s a
pain in the ass, Sir Henry,” Burgoyne remarked. “I’ll talk to Gage about it.
He’s an old woman. It’s utterly ridiculous, walking around this city and
trailing a military guard.”

Clinton agreed with him. “Of course you could simply
take off, the way Sir William does.” “We’re none of us Sir William, are we?”
Burgoyne smiled. “I was a bit of an ass before, wasn’t I?”

“I’ve
forgotten the whole matter,” Clinton replied.

“That’s
jolly good of you.”

“I think we’re a bit tight underneath, aren’t we? It’s
the strangest damn place. I grew up in the colonies, but that gave me no
intimacy. I was the governor’s son, and that set me apart.” “It’s the emptiness
of the place that does it,” Burgoyne com

mented
. “Ever been in a half-empty town before?”

“In Germany,” Clinton remembered. “Bizarre.”

“Notice
the damn bloody dogs.
Always slinking around.”

They were
at their quarters now, and each went to his rooms. Clinton’s quarters, on the
second floor of the house, were hot and airless. He began to sweat the moment
he entered his sitting room. Where the devil was O’Brian? Why hadn’t he aired
the place? Why weren’t his clothes laid out? He was irritable, tired, and then
it occurred to him that he experienced this state of mind whenever there was
a portend
of disaster.
But what
conceivable disaster?
Out in the harbor
lay
a
mighty British fleet. The three generals had brought with them from England
fifteen hundred of the best troops in the world. Add that to the fifteen
hundred troops already at Gage’s disposal and there were better than three
thousand.

He tore
himself out of his reverie and shouted for O’Brian, and when there was no
response, he stormed out of the room and down the stairs two at a time. He felt
some relief in the use of his body and his muscles. He was forty-five years old
and going to fat, but a look in his mirror pleased him, with its reflection of
blond hair and a boyish face. Outside the scullery, he heard the shrill voice
of O’Brian’s wife.

“Devil
take you, me boyo! You sit on your bloody ass, and here I am with five shirts
and twelve singlets and all the stinking lace that adorns the high and the
mighty and you tell me I am a slut not to have it finished. Call me a slut once
more and as sure as Mary is the mother of God, I’ll cut your bleeding heart
out.”