Bunker Hill Read online

  despair, disgust, and frustration.

  “No, sir! No, sir! I will not have you treat me as a fool!”

  “When you are a fool.”

  “And you, sir, are a goddamn horse’s ass.”

  “Why? Because I counsel common sense?”

  “What in hell’s name has common sense to do with it? Do you think these men will lay around forever? No, sir. They are going home.”

  “A fortnight.”

  “He’s right. A fortnight.”

  “No army. Goddamn you, there will be no army.”

  “There is no army.”

  “I piss on that.”

  “You piss where you please, old man.”

  “Shit in your blood. Not you, Prescott. The others.”

  “By God, even for New England, that’s the foulest mouth I ever heard,” Feversham said to Warren. “Who is it?”

  “Israel Putnam,” he answered, smiling. “He speaks well of you.”

  “What a turn of phrase!”

  “He’s contained here. There’s women and children about.”

  “I’d sooner put a hoe up a pig’s ass!” Putnam shouted.

  “What is he?” asked Feversham.

  Warren smiled. “He’s hard to like. You have to know him. He’s one hell of a soldier, the only one of us who is born to it, made for it. No fear of man or God or the devil, no reluctance to kill. It’s a quality I do not comprehend, but God Almighty, we do need it. What a stupid, bloody business war is, Feversham!”

  “How old is he?” Feversham wondered.

  “Fifty-five. But he’s vigorous. The tall man next to him is William Prescott. The British wanted to buy him out, but he stayed with us. Good man. That’s Gridley next to him. The only engineer we have that’s worth a fig, and the small chap next to him is Artemus Ward. He’s the commander of the Massachusetts army. That’s Farraday, the fat one. He’s from Rhode Island, and he’ll be back there soon, he’s that nervous. And the other is Stompton, a shipmaster.”

  Feversham regarded the group with interest and curiosity. In this incredible situation that had pitted some thousands of New England farmers against the power of the mightiest empire on earth, these were the men who commanded the rebels: Putnam, short, stocky, filled with hostility and anger; Prescott, a head taller, handsome, his eyes almost hypnotically blue—forty-two or forty-three, Feversham would guess; Gridley, muscular, compact, confident; Ward, aging, tired, his face creased with pain. And there was Warren beside him, who had just been made a major general by a Congress miles away and totally unaware of the chaos here at hand.

  “Stompton,” said Warren. “I mean, one wonders, do we need a navy. So one calls a committee meeting. Subject, navy. Of course, we don’t know exactly what we are, an army, a rebellion, a state, or what. I’m a physician, so they make me a major general. Of course. Perfectly natural. Stompton is a shipmaster. Should we make him an admiral?”

  One of the men at a table called to Warren to know whether he desired to check the food figures. Of course, it was only the roughest estimate. The violent argument had washed out now. Warren said he would get to the figures later, and he introduced Feversham to Putnam and Prescott and the others. “I heard about you,” Putnam said. “You saw action in Spain and Germany, if I am not mistaken.” His words were a challenge, but apparently there was no other level upon which he could conduct a conversation.

  A little girl of three or four years clung to Feversham’s leg, and by now three more men had entered the room and were engaged in arguments with the tabulators at the tables. His fingers in the child’s silky hair, Feversham smiled and wondered how Putnam knew.

  “Damn little in Connecticut that I don’t know about. You’re from Ridgefìeld, aren’t you? Married one of the locals?”

  “I have a practice there,” Feversham said. “But action is too strong a word. I’m a surgeon.”

  “And one of the very best there is,” Warren added. “What was all the heat about? The hill again.”

  “The hill again,” said Gridley.

  “How much have you seen of real war, Doctor?” Prescott asked Feversham. “I don’t mean what we have here, skirmish and woods fighting—God knows, we all saw enough of that in the war with the French. I mean the real thing—forts and redoubts and great armies moving across a field of battle?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Feversham said.

  “From the inside?”

  “At times, yes.”

  Feversham realized that there were no real distinctions of rank here, no levels that made a thing private to one and public to another. The men at the tables left off or finished what they were doing to crowd around and listen, and other men entered and joined the crowd that already packed the sitting room. Women pushed through, some of them searching out children, grabbing them by the ears and dragging them away squalling, while two giggling teenage girls pressed through the crowd of men to place fresh candles. While it was still light outside, the room was darkened by the crowd of people. The candles would be there when needed, and Feversham decided that somewhere there were people who lived in the house which had become a public place.

  “Never been to Boston before?” Putnam demanded.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then how the hell would he know?” Putnam said.

  “No one asked him anything,” Warren said.

  “You know damn well Gridley’s going to drag him into it.”

  “Good heavens, the man’s just here,” Warren said. “He could be starving, and I haven’t offered him a crust of bread. You’ve been at this all day, with that cursed hill of yours. Leave off.”

  “Who’s in command now?” Gridley, the engineer, demanded of Warren. “You, sir, are now a major general.”

  “Enough of that,” Warren pleaded.

  “Goddamn it, Doctor, look a fact in the face. We’re already so ass-wise confused we don’t know which side is up. Ward here commands the Massachusetts men—”

  “Which means three-quarters of all the men out there!” someone shouted.

  “Goddamn it, no,” Putnam growled. “By no means three-quarters. Say half.”

  “Not now,” Warren begged them.

  “Then when?” Gridley insisted. “You’re major general by an act of Congress—”

  “Which means not one damn thing in Massachusetts,” said Prescott.

  “General Ward is in command,” Warren said firmly. “That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it remains. Now, suppose we go to our respective places, gentlemen, and give their home back to the Hunts. It’s been a long day.”

  Artemus Ward, commander of the Massachusetts troops, lingered as the room cleared out. Ward was pale, dark rings under his eyes, tired, and sick. Feversham decided that he would leave and find some place to stay the night, but Warren clung to him, and Feversham recognized in Warren some aching need but argued that he could not stay there. “They tell me there are twenty people here in Hunt’s house.”

  Hunt, a stout, gray-haired man with a bewildered smile, came into the room and heard that. He was introduced to Feversham and hastened to add his invitation to Warren’s.

  “But there’s no house in Watertown in better case,” he assured Feversham. “Where will you stay, Doctor? The Otises have twenty-two heads under their roof, the Blakes have almost forty. I’m not offering you a bed. No one offers beds in Watertown these days. But there’ll be half a dozen men stretched out here on the rug tonight, and one more makes no difference. And better the rug than the grass outside, wouldn’t you say? We’ll have food in the kitchen. We make no attempt to set a table these days—you can understand why—but we have meat and cheese and pudding, and no one starves. So stay with us, and for heaven’s sake, if you are as good a doctor as Joseph here says you are, then look at him and find what ails him. For as God is my witness, if something happens to him, I don’t know what we should do.”

  “I’m sorry, are you ill?” Feversham asked Warren.

  “He makes too much of a c
ase of it,” Warren said impatiently. “Of course you will stay here. Hunt, give us just a few minutes with General Ward.”

  “Shall I go?” asked Feversham.

  “No, no,” Artemus Ward put in. “I want your advice. Warren says you know more about things military than any of us, and unlike him, I want not only for my health but for my brains as well.” He grimaced with pain. “Stones. I stand in agony, sit in agony, and piss in agony. War is for younger men, believe me.”

  Hunt left the room, and Ward went over to the trestle tables and picked up one of the ledgers. “This is where we are. Bookkeepers. We are trying to make rosters—men, guns, gunpowder, food—but it’s a charade. The plain fact is that we don’t actually have an army, but just a mess of men strung out around Boston and waiting for the British to do whatever they are going to do, except for Putnam and Prescott and Gridley. They know what they want to do, but so help me God, I don’t.”

  “What do they want to do?” Feversham asked.

  “Warren, get the map.”

  Warren left the room and returned a moment later and unrolled a large map of Boston and its environs. The three men huddled over it.

  “You’ve been to Boston before? Or is this your first visit, Feversham?”

  “My first time, I’m afraid.”

  “Then you’ll follow me. Here are two islands in the harbor, Boston and Charlestown. Properly speaking, neither is an island, because each of them has a neck of land connecting with the main. Then again, both are islands, because in each case the neck is narrow and of no consequence. Now here is the spread of our men—” His finger moved north in a circle. “From Roxbury here up the bank of the Charles River, where we have built some defenses around the Great Bridge across the Charles. Then our lines go past Harvard College, through Cambridge to the Charlestown Neck. We are on both sides of the Mystic River, here and here, and we have men in Chelsea and men in Maiden.”

  “How many men all told?” Feversham asked.

  “Thirteen thousand, we think.”

  “It’s always in flux,” Warren explained. “You must understand, Feversham, they are all volunteers, just ordinary men and boys. No one is paid. There are no enlistment papers, no controls.”

  “You mean there are no regular troops anywhere?”

  “Good heavens, man, from where? These are New Englanders. We have no army. Oh, yes, you’ll find a company in uniform here and there, local militia, made uniforms, marched a little. But it was a game, like a turkey shoot or a clambake. No, we haven’t any soldiers as such.”

  “Do the British know all this?”

  “We must presume that they know as much about us as we know about them.”

  “And what do the British have in Boston?”

  “Well over three thousand men if you include the marines. The Fifth and Fifty-second of light infantry, the Forty-third and Thirty-eighth, and the grenadiers. They have a fleet of warships in the harbor, and I suppose they could arm and put ashore a thousand sailors if they wanted to.” Warren looked up at Feversham and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “They’re as good as any troops in the world.”

  “They don’t have to be that good,” Ward said.

  “If they have the warships,” Feversham said, “they can come ashore anywhere. How can you stop them?”

  “We can’t.”

  “Not the way you’re spread out. I rode through Cambridge. I saw the encampment.”

  “What are we to do?” Ward asked plaintively. “Suppose we fortify one spot. All they have to do is to land in another place and walk around us. Then it would be panic. It’s one thing to be a soldier. It’s another thing to be a seventeen-year-old kid with a fowling piece and off you go to fight the British because everyone else is doing so. We don’t even have a command they’ll listen to. I’m in command of the Massachusetts men, when they listen. And if they say, ‘Shut your yap, old man, and I’ll do it may own way,’ there’s nothing I can do but let them. Putnam’s in command of the Connecticut men, except when they tell him he’s not, and today, Warren here is put in command of everyone by the Congress, who are in Philadelphia and don’t have a notion of things. But he doesn’t want any command and—forgive me, Joseph—damned if he knows one blessed thing about war.”

  “It’s as senseless as everything else,” Warren admitted. “Why me? I’m a physician, not a soldier.” He turned to Ward and demanded querulously, “Feversham would have made more damn sense. He’s been on half a dozen battlefields in Europe. Even Putnam says he knows the lousy game better than any of us.”

  “I’m British,” Feversham said, “and I’m a physician, and I am no commander.”

  “Lee is British, and so is Gates, and no one holds that against them.”

  “What is—well, it is,” Feversham said. “The point at hand is this: What will happen when the British attack?”

  “If they attack,” Ward said.

  “They must attack. Otherwise, they’ll starve, and Boston will starve.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” said Warren. “The question is whether we are at war or who is at war. Massachusetts against the empire? Does that make sense, Feversham?”

  “And the Connecticut men and the others?”

  “It’s a matter of emotion. We don’t truly know whether any of the colonies will support us. They don’t know, either, but if they attack, well, it’s a war then, isn’t it? That’s how the whole question of the hill comes into it, the question of Charlestown.”

  He pointed to the map. “As I said before, there are two islands. They have causeways to the main, but to all effects they are islands. The British hold Boston. We have a perimeter around them, and it’s not worth two damns. But no one holds this island, Charlestown and Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. That’s the argument now, Feversham. Putnam and Prescott and Gridley—yes, and Ward, too—they say, occupy Bunker Hill and hold the Charlestown island and we force the British hand.”

  “How do you force the British hand?” Feversham asked.

  “We mount cannon there. Then we can blow them out of the city and their stinking ships out of the bay.”

  “I saw no cannon,” Feversham said.

  For the first time, Ward smiled. “We got the cannon, Doctor. Just a matter of getting them here. We took them at Ticonderoga, seventy-eight cannon, every kind you can think of—howitzers, mortars. By God, we even got twenty-four-pounders that can throw a ball for a mile—more balls and gunpowder than you can shake a stick at.”

  “Still, that’s at Ticonderoga, and how far away? A hundred miles, two hundred miles? How do you bring them here? If I remember, there’s not even a road.”

  “We sent Harry Knox up there,” Warren said. “He’s a very solid young fellow, a bookseller, but then he’s read every book on artillery that’s been published. It’s just our good luck that it’s been a hobby of his.”

  Feversham could hardly believe his ears. “How old is this Harry Knox?”

  “How old is Harry, Artemus?”

  “Twenty-two?”

  “No, he must be older than that. Twenty-three at least.”

  “Then he never fought with guns.”

  “Now look here, Feversham,” Warren said a bit testily. “We are not an army. Good heavens, we have to make out, don’t we? Well, we do what we can. We do have two cannon, small ones, and Harry Knox has been drilling with those guns for two months now. He’s a hardheaded young man with guts, and if he says he’ll bring those guns here, by God he will.”

  “When?”

  “In two weeks, three weeks at the most.”

  Feversham said, “Then how in hell’s name can you hold that Charlestown island for two or three weeks without guns? And when he brings the guns, how are you going to get them there? There’s only the narrow neck of land connecting it, and the British would be a pack of bloody fools if they didn’t bring their ships in and cover the causeway.”

  “The water’s too shallow for their big ships,” Warren
protested. “Then they’ll use gun floats and flatboats. I have seen that operation. They can put a twenty-four-pound cannon where there’s a

  foot of water, and they can blow that causeway to pieces. If you try to hold Bunker Hill or Breed’s Hill, they’ll bring up their guns and blow you off without ever coming into musket range.”

  “Gridley says he can build a redoubt,” Warren explained.

  “In full sight of the British?”

  “In one night, he says.”

  “Gridley is a good engineer,” Warren said. “Try to see our position, Feversham. You’re from the outside, and we appreciate that. You can be objective. But we have to do something.”

  “Why?”

  Both men stared at Feversham in silence for a while before answering, and then Warren shook his head and said that it would wash out.

  “Just wash out, Feversham. We can’t hold fifteen thousand men around Boston here. We can’t pay them, and we can’t feed them, and now it’s time for the first cutting of the meadow grass, and then it’s the first crops, and meanwhile, the wives are bitching like mad. I suppose you could ask why not let it wash out, but we’re committed, and the people down in Philadelphia know that we’re committed, and if it ends here, it does so down the line. We have our dead, and we had our bloodletting. At Lexington, they shot us down like dogs, and then we fought them, and there’s more dead to pay for that. We’re a close-knit lot, and it’s a cousin here and a nephew there and a son and a husband. So we don’t just let it wash out. There’s no way we could do that.”

  “If this were a meeting of the Committee of Safety,” Ward said almost sadly, “you’d hear us rave and rant. We make great orations to each other, and I suppose we do it to keep up our nerve. But I am a sick and tired old man, Feversham, and tonight I feel it in every bone. The God’s truth is that it makes me want to say, ‘Give up and go home.’ But we can’t. We have been here for a hundred and fifty years, and this is our place. They must go home, and here we must sit until they do.”

  “What about the other colonies—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the South?” Feversham asked. “Will they send men to help?”