Bunker Hill

was the worst they’d ever known. One marine captain turned to Major Pitcairn, the officer who had watched helplessly as the firing had begun on Lexington Green two months before, and said that “of all the actions he had been in this was the hottest: first from the burning of the houses of Charlestown; next the heat of the day, and thirdly from the heat of the enemy’s fire.” Pitcairn told him to quit talking about the heat and to attack the redoubt.
    Pinned down by the provincial fire behind a stone wall and some trees, Adjutant John Waller, “half mad with standing in this situation and doing nothing,” tried to organize his men for a final assault on the redoubt. “We were now in confusion after being broke several times in getting over rails, etc.,” he wrote. He needed to get his men to stop firing their muskets and prepare for a bayonet charge. “I ran from right to left and stopped our men from firing,” he wrote. “[And] when we had got in tolerable order, we rushed on, leaped the ditch, and climbed the parapet, under a most sore and heavy fire.” During this mad dash toward the redoubt Major Pitcairn took a musket ball to the chest. It proved to be a mortal wound, and Waller later wrote of “the irreparable loss of poor Major Pitcairn.”
    Waller wasn’t the only one leading the charge onto the parapet. Captain George Harris of the Fifth Foot had spent much of May and early June tending a vegetable garden he and his servant had planted beside their tent on Boston Common. In just six weeks, the garden had produced what he described to his cousin in England as “such salads.” He was particularly enthusiastic about the “excellent greens the young turnip-tops make. Then the spinach and radishes, with the cucumbers, beans, and peas so promising.” Now Harris was at the base of the fort, trying to get his men to follow him up onto the top of the parapet. After two tries, he finally succeeded in getting them to come with him as he mounted the wall, only to be met by the muzzle of a musket. “The ball grazed the top of my head,” he wrote, “and I fell deprived of sense and motion into the arms of Lord Rawdon.” Lieutenant Rawdon, twenty, an Irish lord dressed in a circular cap made of cat fur, ordered four soldiers to carry their commander to safety despite Harris’s mumbled plea to “let me die in peace.” As soon as the soldiers carrying Harris ventured beyond the wall of the redoubt, they found themselves back in the provincials’ line of fire, and three of them were wounded (one mortally) by the time they’d carried their captain down the hill.
    Repeating the mantra “Conquer or die,” the grenadiers continued to climb up onto the redoubt. “At the first onset,” Henry Dearborn wrote, “every man that mounted the parapet was cut down by the troops within who had formed on the opposite side not being prepared with bayonets to meet a charge.” For the regulars it was a terrible and very personal loss of life. “Archy Campbell . . . fell,” John Waller wrote, “poor Ellis also on this fatal spot . . . Shea received also his mortal wound here and Chudleigh Ragg and Dyer were also wounded.” Only after the fighting did Waller begin to grieve; “In the heat of the action,” he wrote, “I thought nothing of the matter.” Lieutenant Rawdon had difficulty believing that the Yankees had not yet begun to retreat. “There are few instances of regular troops defending a redoubt till the enemy were in the very ditch of it,” he wrote, “and [yet] I can assure you that I myself saw several pop their heads up and fire even after some of our men were upon the berm,” the point between the ditch and the rampart.
    Eventually, however, Prescott’s men ran out of powder. “We fired till our ammunition began to fail,” one provincial remembered, “then our firing began to slacken—and at last it went out like an old candle.” The floor of the redoubt was filled with stones, which the men took up and hurled at the regulars, who were now coming over the rampart, one provincial remembered, “with their guns in their left hand and their swords in their right.” Ebenezer Bancroft had a single charge left, but before he could get off what he estimated to be his twenty-seventh shot, “an officer sprang over the breastwork and presented his piece.” Bancroft had just finished loading his musket. He threw away the rammer and, in his own words, “instantly placed the