Bunker Hill

men would have nowhere to fall back to in the event of a British attack. What Putnam did not have, however, were entrenching tools.
    By about noon, it seemed as if Prescott had finally finished his redoubt and breastwork. Putnam decided it was time that he and some of Prescott’s men carry the tools up to Bunker Hill. But Prescott would have none of it. Already, he had lost a significant number of men to desertion. The British cannon fire had been unremitting. In fact, one of his most trusted officers, Captain Ebenezer Bancroft, a fellow French and Indian War veteran, had been blinded in one eye by the shock wave of a cannonball that had narrowly missed his head. Prescott told Putnam that “if he sent any of the men away with the tools, not one of them would return.” Putnam assured him that “every man [shall] return” and left with the tools and a considerable number of soldiers, none of whom, it turned out, ever made their way back to Breed’s Hill.
    —
    Not long after Putnam’s departure, an artillery captain belatedly arrived at the redoubt with several fieldpieces. Unfortunately, Colonel Gridley had made no provision for cannons in the redoubt. Normal procedure was to build embrasures—openings for cannons in the fort’s earthen walls—but that had apparently escaped Gridley’s attention during the tense discussions the night before. Making it even worse, they were now without any digging tools.
    Prescott ordered Captain Bancroft and his men to dig an embrasure by hand. They went at it with a will, but soon realized that their bleeding fingers were not up to the task. But Bancroft had an idea. He ordered the artillery captain to load his fieldpiece and blast a hole through the wall of the redoubt, and soon enough a cannon could be seen protruding from the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.
    —
    By 1:30 p.m., the first wave of British boats had been loaded with regulars at Long Wharf and the North Battery and had begun to row across the harbor toward the Charlestown peninsula. Generals Clinton and Burgoyne had positioned themselves at the battery on Copp’s Hill. They were not the only spectators that day. All around them, on the top of every hill, roof, and steeple, the inhabitants of Boston looked to the north.
    They were a community in the sky, their eyes trained across a quiet and, except for the warships, empty harbor in the boiling sun, looking toward a hilly peninsula and an unoccupied town that was almost the mirror image of their own. Cannons boomed from the battery and the surrounding ships, and now they could see the boats, twenty-eight of them, rowing across in two parallel lines of fourteen each, with brass fieldpieces in the forwardmost boats and between thirty and forty regulars in each one of the others, their musket barrels glittering in the sun.
    The fighting at Lexington and Concord had been fierce, but one could claim, as Timothy Pickering Jr. had done, that April 19 amounted to nothing more than yet another misunderstanding between Britain and her American colonies that had gotten out of hand. The fighting at Lexington and Concord had occurred, by and large, offstage, only visible to the Bostonians as a distant cloud of dust and powder smoke moving across the countryside to Charlestown. But the fighting today was going to be different. Already the big guns of the warships and the battery on Copp’s Hill had been filling the air with sound and smoke, but that was just a prelude. Much more than a skirmish, this was going to be a true battle, unfolding with a painstaking deliberation before their very eyes as Howe’s red-clad army rowed slowly across the blue and sparkling harbor toward a green hill where the provincials were, the Reverend Andrew Eliot wrote, “up to their chins entrenched.”
    Colonel Jones of the Fifty-Second Regiment appears to have been standing with Clinton and Burgoyne on Copp’s Hill. “I have seen many actions,” he wrote, “but the solemn procession preparative to this, in embarking the troops in the boats, the order in which they rowed across the harbor, their alertness in making good their landing, their instantly forming in front of the enemy and marching to action, was a grand sight to all concerned.”
    Hovering over the awful beauty of the scene was a most disturbing question. What if Howe and his regulars were defeated? The question would have seemed laughable just a few months before, but after the humiliation of April 19 and the equally