Bunker Hill

light infantry were served up in companies against the grass fence, without being able to penetrate—indeed how could we penetrate? Most of our grenadier and light infantry, the moment of presenting themselves lost three-quarter and many nine-tenths of their men. Some had only eight and nine men a company left; some only three, four, and five.” One provincial soldier claimed that the regulars were reduced to piling the bodies of their dead compatriots “into a horrid breastwork to fire from.” A British officer ruefully wrote, “We may say with Falstaff . . . that ‘They make us here but food for gunpowder.’ ”
    The fire from the three arrow-shaped fleches between the breastwork and the rail fence proved particularly lethal to the grenadiers, especially since Captain Trevett, the only American artillery officer to distinguish himself that day, was there with a cannon. Several Connecticut soldiers insisted that at one point General Putnam was also in the vicinity with a cannon of his own. Having watched in outrage as two artillery officers abandoned their fieldpieces on Bunker Hill, Putnam convinced Captain John Ford, the same officer who had killed five regulars on the Battle Road on April 19, to help haul one of the cannons down to the front lines. There, Putnam assisted in firing the fieldpiece, using a ladle to jam powder from the oversize cartridge down the barrel. When a particularly effective shot tore into the regulars’ ranks, one provincial soldier was heard to shout, “You have made a furrow through them!”
    Up until this point, the fighting at the redoubt had been relatively light. The provincial sharpshooters who had formerly occupied houses in Charlestown had moved to a stone barn farther up the hill, and not until General Pigot had eliminated this annoying threat on his left could he turn his full attention to the redoubt. However, Prescott’s men, standing behind the fort’s earthen walls, had already fired enough times to cause deep concern about the supply of gunpowder. Prescott resolved that the next time the regulars attacked, he would wait until they were within just thirty yards before he allowed his men to fire.
    As the muskets inside the redoubt ceased firing, Pigot may have become convinced that Prescott’s men had abandoned the fortification, an impression that was reinforced the closer his soldiers approached without any enemy fire. Inside the redoubt, the tension mounted as the regulars threatened to surround them in an annihilating rush. According to one account, Prescott and his officers ran across the top of the redoubt, knocking up the muzzles of the men’s muskets to prevent them from firing too early. “[The regulars] advanced toward us in order to swallow us up,” Peter Brown wrote, “[but] they found a choky mouthful of us.”
    When Prescott finally gave the order to fire, the regulars were almost upon them. “We gave them such a hot fire,” he wrote, “that they were obliged to retire nearly 150 yards before they could rally and come again to the attack.” A British officer put it another way: “On the left Pigot was staggered and actually retreated.”
    But it was Howe, standing all alone at the rail fence, who felt the full devastating brunt of what had just transpired in the hills overlooking the still raging flames of Charlestown. His aide-de-camp had been killed at his side; by the time he reached the provincial line, every member of his staff was either dead or wounded; even the bottle of wine held by his servant had been shattered by a musket ball. Both the provincials and Howe’s own regulars looked on in astonishment as he stood there, resplendent in his scarlet uniform, a seemingly unmissable target for the rebel sharpshooters. Given the effectiveness of the provincial fire, one can only wonder how the British leader managed to remain unhurt. “For a near minute,” one of his officers marveled, “he was quite alone.”
    Surrounded by the dead and the dying, having learned that the light infantry who were to have assured him of a victory had been, in his own words, “repulsed,” Howe experienced what proved to be a life-altering sensation. Writing to a friend in England, he admitted, “There was a moment I have never felt before.”
    For an officer of Howe’s experience and temperament, it was a startling revelation. Staggered by grief, anger, shock, and embarrassment, he turned and started down the hill, picking his way through the