Bunker Hill

bodies of the dead, considering what to do next.
    —
    Howe had a decision to make. Should he try it once again—
could
he try it once again? Additional reinforcements must be ordered from Boston. A change of strategy was also required. Instead of a line, he would attack in columns. Instead of focusing on the rail fence, he would direct his energies against the redoubt and breastwork. The fleche-punctuated gap provided the opportunity to position his artillery so that the cannons raked the men behind the breastwork. He must act quickly before the provincial soldiers gathered on Bunker Hill had a chance to reinforce the rebel lines. As a final touch, the regulars were ordered to dispense with their packs and other unnecessary equipment.
    Despite all that they had so far suffered, the British soldiers were impatient for one last try at the provincials. “Push on! Push on!” was the cry among the grenadiers. And so they began once again, with Howe at their head, “distinguished . . . by his figure and gallant bearing.” Instead of a long line across the hillside, they advanced toward the breastwork and redoubt in a column of eight men across. One provincial soldier estimated that there was about twelve feet between each man at the head of the column while behind them the soldiers were “very close after one another in extraordinary deep files.” The depth of the column meant that no matter how many British soldiers the provincials killed, there always seemed to be more to replace them. “As fast as the front man was shot down,” a provincial wrote, “the next stepped forward into place, but our men dropped them so fast they were a long time coming up. It was surprising how they would step over their dead bodies, as though they were logs of wood.”
    The discipline and bravery of the British soldiers—who were heard to shout, “Fight, conquer, or die!”—was a terrifying wonder to behold, but the artillery, repositioned on the right and firing grapeshot, was what began to change the course of the battle. The minister over on the eastern shore of the Mystic River was well placed to see the devastation wreaked by the British cannons on the provincials standing behind the breastwork, who were forced, he wrote, “to retire within their little fort.”
    Prescott’s force inside the redoubt gained by this sudden inflow of desperate men, but as the breastwork was abandoned, the grenadiers were given the toehold they needed to begin to work their way around the fort from the east. Stark at the rail fence was tempted to move his men toward the redoubt in an attempt to thwart this portion of the British advance, but soon realized that given the cannonading of the breastwork, such a move would be virtual suicide. Instead, Stark decided to reposition his men, who had at that moment no British to fight, to help cover what was beginning to look like an inevitable provincial retreat.
    In the meantime, the grenadiers led by General Pigot were working their way toward the other side of the redoubt. Even though they were in danger of becoming surrounded, Prescott’s men remained in high spirits. “The regulars were no longer invincible in their eyes,” Prescott’s son wrote. Their biggest concern was their low supplies of ammunition. Somewhere on the dirt floor of the redoubt someone found an abandoned artillery cartridge. They ripped it open and began distributing the powder to the men positioned at the walls as Prescott exhorted them “not to waste a kernel of it, but to make it certain that every shot should
tell
.” A few of the provincials had bayonets, and Prescott positioned them “where he considered the wall most likely to be scaled.”
    Not until the British were within fifteen yards did Prescott allow his men to fire. “The fire on our left wing was so hot that our troops broke,” a British officer later wrote. But unlike the previous time, there was no wholesale retreat. Once again the officers received the highest losses. One company of grenadiers lost both its captain and a lieutenant. As his men lay on the grass, musket balls blasting the dirt all around them, the sergeant turned to the remaining privates and said, “You now see, my lads, that our brave captain is greatly wounded and the lieutenant killed; now I have the honor to command you; therefore let us get into the trenches as fast as possibly we can, for we must conquer or die.”
    Every officer of any experience said that the rebel fire