Bunker Hill Read online

  “Yes. I remember that well enough. They take young trees— saplings, we call them in Connecticut—and branches the thickness of my thumb, and they weave them the way you weave a basket, and then they wrap the basket weave around the bastions and face the wall with the same woven stuff.”

  “Of course! I’ve seen pictures of that, and if we had a fortnight or a week or even two days—but we don’t.” He stood up and pointed to the British warships. “We have the rest of today and tonight. Feversham, why don’t they attack? We’re spread out all over these hills. They could land their troops and cut through us like a scythe cuts wheat? Why don’t they?”

  Feversham thought about it.

  “You’re one of them. You know them. Tell me why.”

  “I don’t know them that well,” Feversham said. “They know what we’re doing. But they’re so damned arrogant and bloody well sure of themselves. To my way of thinking, they’re simply taking their time. They can’t see what’s on the other side. There’s the possibility that they want all of us up here, and then they cut the causeway and here we are. Or maybe not. Who knows how they think and what they think. They had the hills. They were up here, weren’t they?”

  “They surely were.”

  “And then they pulled out. Stupidity?”

  “They must have had a reason,” Gridley said.

  “I suppose.” Feversham pointed to the rooftops of Charlestown. “When they do attack, Colonel, they’ll fire those houses.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s easy and because you might have riflemen in the houses. All they have to do is drop hot shot and those wooden houses will burn like torches. I hope to God you have gotten the householders out.”

  “The houses are empty,” Gridley said. “There’s no one left in Charlestown.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Roxbury, Cambridge, Dorchester,” Gridley said. “They saw the handwriting on the wall, and they fled—modest folk, no Tories there, and they’re no different than anyone else. We all think about a rope around the neck.”

  “The houses are empty?”

  “I told you they were.”

  “Now listen,” Feversham said. “Here’s a way to build the redoubt. Think about a bed, any bed. You have a wooden frame with leather strips woven through it, crisscross. Do you follow?”

  “Go on,” Gridley said.

  “There’s our basket weave. Face both aides of the wall. They’ve likely taken the pallets with them, but they’d leave the beds. Send a party down there and take every bed in the place.”

  “My God, Feversham, that’s looting. We’re not barbarians. Those beds belong to our own people.” “I tell you, they will burn Charlestown. Can’t you believe me? There is no way in the world that place can survive.” Gridley was silent, staring at the rooftops of the little village at

  the edge of the peninsula. Three of his aides had gathered to listen. “How would we keep them in place?” Gridley finally asked. “On the outside face and the inside face. Rope them together as

  you build it.” “And to keep the earth in?” “Jackets, shirts, coats, boards. Use everything you can find.” Gridley turned to one of his men. “What do you think?” “It might work.” Gridley sighed and nodded. “All right. We’ll try it.”

  At eleven o’clock, on the night of the sixteenth of June, in the year 1775, Sir William Howe and his partner, Mrs. Joshua Loring, finished their seventh rubber of whist, taking twelve or thirteen tricks and causing Henry Clinton to exclaim, “The woman’s a witch. A hundred years ago they would have burned her at the stake, and I would be one hundred and twelve guineas richer.”

  “Oh, for shame,” Mrs. Loring cried, laughing. “Would you burn me at the stake, Sir Henry? And then what would poor Sir William do for a partner at cards?”

  “Surely he was jesting,” Prudence Hallsbury said. “And you are not to take my losses as your own, Sir Henry. If I had played well, they would be far less.”

  “Nonsense!” Clinton said gallantly. “Nevertheless,” Sir William said, “I shall, if you wish, my darling Betsy, take this poltroon to a field of honor. Witch indeed.”

  “Absolutely not! What should we do for a hand at whist? Or two hands, for that matter, since I am certain that both you excellent gentlemen are splendid marksmen and would end up shooting each other.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Clinton exclaimed. “Of course,” Mrs. Hallsbury said, “there is always that very handsome General Burgoyne.” “My dear Prudence,” Clinton said, “how can you.” And turning to Mrs. Loring, “I apologize most humbly.”

  “Sir William, shall I accept his apology?”

  “I think so, my dear. We have a limited number of talented officers, and I am too old for fields of honor.”

  “Never too old!” She rose, went around the table, and bent to kiss Sir William demurely on his cheek. “Now, excuse me for my toilet. Will you accompany me, Prudence?”

  Prudence rose, dropped a curtsy, and then, along with Mrs. Loring, went off to the closet the club kept for ladies. Sir William leaned back in his chair, rubbed his hands together, and said to Clinton, “Would you regard this rebellion as misfortune or as good fortune, Sir Henry?”

  Clinton took snuff before answering, shook out his lace cuffs, and replied to the effect that no military man should regard war as misfortune. “Any more than a musician might regard music as a misfortune.”

  “The best of situations.”

  “Sir?”

  “My wife is three thousand miles away.”

  “And when this is over, sir?” Clinton wondered.

  “That is a problem I shall face when the moment comes. Meanwhile, I am a happy man. That is, insomuch as any man can call himself happy in this vale of tears. I have had many women, Sir Henry, but in all my life—which has not been without adventure— I have never met a woman like Mistress Elizabeth Loring. Have you spoken to her husband?”

  “As you requested, Sir William.”

  “And pray, what was his response?”

  “I think I can say that he, too, is a happy man. All he could talk about was how he knew a tailor in Boston who was the best uniform maker in the colonies. He wanted the grenadiers because he fancies the headgear and the sword, but he’s a little man, and he would be laughable in the grenadiers. I think he’s in love with the motto—”

  “Nec Aspera Terrent?” Howe murmured.

  “Do not fear the use of brutality.”

  “Very fitting,” Howe said. “Evidently, we’ve found us a proper jailer. No unhappiness about Mrs. Loring?”

  “The man’s as happy as a pig in an outhouse.”

  “And did you find him a berth?”

  “With the Fifth Irish,” Clinton said, smiling. “Entirely proper, since the Irish know pigs. As the number of prisoners grows, we’ll have to find more commodious quarters than Boston jail. Perhaps the hold of one of the larger merchant ships. That would keep him out of our hair.”

  “Indeed.” Sir William poured wine and raised his glass. “To Captain Joshua Loring of His Majesty’s Service.”

  The ladies returned now, and Mrs. Loring asked what was the occasion of the toast.

  “To the peaceful and adoring cohabitation of the sexes,” Sir Henry answered.

  “Then I think that we should drink to that,” Prudence declared.

  “I think we should drink to America,” Sir William said.

  JUNE 17

  Feversham slept uneasily on the floor of the holding room in the Palmers’ house, that is, when he slept at all—bits and pieces of half slumber, awakened each time by his dreams. They were not pleasant dreams. He had been a surgeon in three great battles, and he hated war with all his heart. For the first time in years he longed for a priest to hear his confession. But there were no priests in the army, and here he was awaiting a battle that could be as bloody and awful as anything he had ever seen. These were strange people,
these Americans, with their endless talk and bluster about equality and freedom. But they were an antidote to all that his life had been, and they were the only hope he had found in his tortured existence. They possessed a kind of innocence he had never encountered anywhere else.

  In eight hours of backbreaking work, first under the burning sun and then in the darkness, they had built the redoubt on Breed’s Hill. No orders were flung at them. Gridley knew each of them by name, and his instructions were gentle and easy. They were unhappy in taking the beds out of the abandoned homes. The soldiers were poor people, and to take what belonged to other poor people sat badly with them. They used their own clothing to back up the webbing and hold the earth in place. Feversham had lived long enough in the tiny Connecticut village of Ridgefìeld to know the work that went into these homespun garments and how precious and irreplaceable they were.

  They were highly conscious of his status among them, an Englishman who had come over to their side, a gentleman and a doctor. Their attitude toward him as a doctor was a sort of veneration. A pickax, swung by a weary man, cut into the leg of another. They watched Feversham clean and sew and bind the wound. He overheard them talk about the incident. “You’ll stay with us tomorrow?” a boy of no more than sixteen years asked him. It was up to Gridley. Quietly, Gridley told him, “Warren is going to command here. The men have a feeling for you, but we can’t have two doctors in one place. You said there were only fourteen beside you and Warren?”

  “Only fourteen.”

  As the redoubt was raised, the problem of placing the cannon faced them, the main difficulty being in depressing the angle so that the shot might sweep men advancing up the hill. Feversham’s respect for Gridley grew. One of the men, and older man, had been with Gridley on the Plains of Abraham in the French war. There would have been no victory for the British then had not Gridley managed to raise the cannon up to the heights.

  As Feversham lay on the floor at the Palmers’ house, he lived over the struggle to build the redoubt. He had left before the work was finished, summoned by Warren to meet with the doctors once more and to oversee the division of bandages and catgut and surgical tools. It was past midnight when he finally reached the holding room, pulled off his boots, ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese washed down by hot coffee as thin as tea, and settled himself to sleep and dream. He had meant to write another letter to his wife, but sheer weariness and the impossibility of lighting a candle in a room where at least six other men were sprawled on the floor asleep made writing impossible. “Perhaps tomorrow,” he told himself, if there was to be a tomorrow.

  He tried to dream of his wife, but he had never been able to control a dream or direct one to his desire. He was awakened from a dream of a battlefield covered with dead soldiers, and he walked among them, searching for one he could minister to. There were none. He had seen men with a slight bullet wound in the flesh of one arm bind it up, ignore it, and go on fighting, and the wound would fester, and the men would sicken and die. The whole world was wedded to the notion that arguments could only be settled by death, and here was a British army that had come three thousand miles to spread death among the farmers who had toiled all their lives to scratch a living out of the soil of this hard New England land.

  Sheer weariness allowed Feversham to sleep, but it seemed to him that he had hardly closed his eyes when someone shook him gently. He rolled over to see Betsy Palmer holding a candlestick. “Forgive me, Dr. Feversham, but the officers are to have a meeting here in the holding room, and I must make it clear for them.”

  “What time is it?” he asked thickly.

  “Two o’clock in the morning.”

  He sat up and sighed. “All right. It’s warm, isn’t it?”

  “Quite warm.”

  “I’ll find a place in the courtyard.”

  “No, no. I wish you could sleep. I don’t know how any of you can stand it. But General Putnam wants you here. There’s water at the pump outside, and I’ll have hot coffee.”

  Feversham rose and looked around him. A woman was lighting candles on the kitchen table. The other men who had used the holding room as a place to sleep were picking themselves up and wearily shuffling through the doorway. Feversham followed them. Some of the men who had slept on the floor went off to a clump of bushes to urinate. Others were at the pump. Feversham noticed Joseph Palmer, who was lighting a post torch. The officers were arriving, tying their horses at the hitching rail.

  As Feversham waited his turn at the pump, he observed Putnam and Gridley going into the house. He splashed cold water on his face, rinsed his mouth, and felt better—almost awake, almost alert. As he turned away from the pump, he heard his name called, and he peered through the torchlight to see Warren dismounting. Warren

  joined him and shook his hand warmly.

  “How do you feel?” Feversham asked.

  “I think there’s medicine in excitement, don’t you?”

  Feversham touched his head. “You’re feverish. No, I won’t instruct you.”

  “I want to thank you for what you did at the redoubt. This is our place and home and life, but when a stranger like yourself comes to us, I feel God smiles at us a little. Forgive me for being sentimental. It’s the fever, I’m sure.”

  Embarrassed, Feversham only nodded.

  “You’ll come inside?” Warren asked.

  “I need the bushes over yonder. I’ll be inside.” Feversham went to the thicket to urinate, thinking how easily manner and custom collapsed at a time like this. “Naked we come and naked we go,” he said to himself. “It strips away so easily. What poor creatures we are, with our pretense at civilization.”

  When he entered the holding room, it was already crowded with the officers: Israel Putnam, Artemus Ward, William Prescott, John Stark, Tom Knowlton, Richard Gridley, Dr. Joseph Warren, and half a dozen others who were unfamiliar to Feversham. They crowded around the table, some on benches, others standing.

  Feversham tried to remember rank. Warren, Ward, and Putnam were all generals, but as to the others, who were colonels and who were captains he could not say. Since only a handful were not in civilian clothes but in uniforms of one militia company or another, there was no way for him to know until an officer was addressed. For all of that, Feversham was sensitive enough to feel the drama of the moment—the earnest, tired faces of the officers in the flickering candlelight, the silence of fatigue that substituted for the chatter that such a meeting in daylight would have occasioned, the strong smell of sweat, the dirt on their shirts, and the curious setting in the holding room, with the hams and sausages and cheeses hanging from the beams above them, the kitchen of a serious and hardworking householder.

  Mrs. Palmer and her husband were handing out wooden or clay mugs, whatever they could find to drink from, and pouring coffee for the officers. Only now, in the relatively greater light of the holding room, with a dozen candles on the table, did Feversham become aware of how Joseph Warren was dressed—trousers of white satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat over a silk shirt, a jabot of lace, and a coat of beautifully embroidered silk.

  He stood up at the end of the long board table and tapped with his ring to gain their attention and end the whispering. Again, Fevesham remarked to himself what an interesting man this was, so tall and slender, with the long, sensitive face of a poet.

  “Let me begin,” Joseph Warren said, “by apologizing for my festive garb. Those two wise men, Colonel Gridley and Dr. Feversham, worked out a unique manner of building a redoubt. But having only sand and stones to back up the webbing that holds the walls in place, they called for pieces of cloth to reinforce the sand and keep it in place. I decided to give them my entire wardrobe, and my good wife would not do less. So I stand before you in the only clothes that remain to me, and I am sure that before this day is over, they will be less ornate. With that said, may I offer my heartfelt praise for what you and our loyal comrades have accomplished these past fifteen hours. Where there was confusion, there is now order,
thanks to your tireless efforts. And where we were a crowd, we are now an army, in position to fight. I now give the floor to General Israel Putnam, our most beloved brother from Connecticut. He will deliver the order of the day.”

  Putnam rose, his gnarled hands clasped in front of his chin, and stood for a long moment, glancing from face to face, and then said bluntly, “Here is how we stand on the Charlestown peninsula.

  Colonel William Prescott, as you know, is in command of the general defense of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. He has established our position. The order of the day is that we will fight to the death so long as our ammunition holds. If we must retreat, we retreat in good order, facing the enemy.”

  He sat back, and Prescott stood up, leaning over the table. “We are in a good position from Bunker Hill and across the ridge to Breed’s Hill. The men stationed there have the protection of stone walls. They have been working to connect the separate pasture walls. General Putnam and his Connecticut men have taken up a position on Bunker Hill. To protect their flank, Colonel Stark has taken a stand with his riflemen, from the slope to the Mystic River. Colonel Stark,” he said, nodding at a rangy, sunburned man who sat next to Gridley.

  “We have a fence of sorts where we are,” Stark said. “Irish we had a wall of stone, but there’s no time for that. The hay in the pastures at our position is baled, and God forgive me for taking the crop of honest farmers—we’re all of us Hampshire farmers—but it’s our lives. We made a wall of the baled hay against the wood fence. It won’t stop a bullet, but it will cover us. These are good Hampshire riflemen, and I swear we’ll hold our side.”

  “The redoubt?” someone asked.

  “Not completely finished,” Gridley said, “but it’s in place. If you want the whole picture, it’s four-square, forty paces to a side. The main attack side is reinforced with woven leather and cloth. The rest is dirt and rocks. There are slits and firing steps. Tomorrow, if there’s time before they attack, we’ll dig a trench all along the one side where they can attack directly. There’s an old clay pit there and good shelter, and that anchors Colonel Knowlton’s division. He has a proper stone-wall barricade, maybe two hundred paces to connect with Johnny Stark’s New Hampshire men. Am I right, Tom?”