Bunker Hill

confidence would not be increased by the result of the battle.” The Americans had lost 115 killed and had 305 wounded, with most of the casualties occurring during the retreat. Of the approximately 2,200 British soldiers in the battle, close to half—1,054—had been killed or wounded. The British had been victorious, but as Howe wrote, “The success is too dearly bought.”
    Despite the heavy losses, Howe’s men still held their leader in high esteem. “All the soldiers are charmed with General Howe’s gallant behavior,” an officer wrote. Only slightly injured in the foot, he somehow managed to survive a battle that by all rights should have killed him. And yet he had not emerged unscathed from the bloody carnage on Breed’s Hill. As Charles Lee later wrote, “The sad and impressive experience of this murderous day sunk deep into the mind of Sir William Howe.”
    When he learned on the morning of June 18 that Joseph Warren had been killed, Howe expressed disbelief that a man of Warren’s political stature had dared to subject himself to the risks of this terrible battle. He asked John Jeffries, the doctor who had met with Warren on the docks of the North End just a week before, to verify that the body, which had been stripped of its beautiful clothes, did indeed belong to Warren. Jeffries remembered that Warren had “lost a fingernail and wore a false tooth,” and after examining the body, he confirmed that this was indeed Joseph Warren. Howe shook his head in wonder and said that “this victim was worth five hundred of their men.” For a general who had just suffered more than a thousand casualties in less than an hour and a half, this was high praise indeed.

Part III
    THE SIEGE

    In sieges, as in all undertakings, it is necessary [and] timely to consider every . . . circumstance that may happen during the execution of the design, and to provide in the best manner against every seeming obstacle. Not only the general’s character, the reputation of the army, and the glory of his country are concerned, but a prodigious expense must unavoidably attend such an enterprise, all [of] which are entirely lost in case of a miscarriage, besides the lives of a number of men, a more sensible loss to the nation.
    —John Muller,
The Attack and Defense of Fortified Places
, 1757
    It is a military maxim that “fortune may fail us, but a prudent conduct never will.” At the same time, some of the most brilliant victories have been obtained by a daring stroke.
    —William Heath, 1798
    The history of this war down to the present day . . . will be little else than a detail of marvelous interpositions of providence.
    —the Reverend William Gordon, April 1, 1776

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    The Fiercest Man
    E ven before the end of the battle, boats filled with British casualties began arriving at the wharves of Boston. All that night and well into Sunday morning the town’s streets were crowded with “coaches, chariots, single-horse chaises, and even handbarrows” full of bleeding soldiers. “To see the carts loaded with those unfortunate men,” the loyalist Peter Oliver wrote, “and to hear the piercing groans of the dying . . . extorted the sigh from the firmest mind.”
    At one point Oliver saw an officer he knew “advancing towards me, his white waistcoat, breeches and stockings being very much dyed of a scarlet hue.” Oliver called out, “My friend, are you wounded?” “Yes, sir!” he replied. “I have three bullets through me.” “He then told me the places where,” Oliver remembered, “one of them being a mortal wound. He then with a philosophical calmness began to relate the history of the battle, and in all probability would have talked till he died, had I not begged him to walk off to the hospital, which he did in as sedate a manner as if he had been walking for his pleasure.”
    Typically, the church bells tolled during a funeral. So many soldiers were dying from their wounds in the days following the battle—the army had suffered casualties approaching fifty percent—that Gage ordered that the bells be stilled. Otherwise they would be tolling all day. But it wasn’t just wounded soldiers who were dying. Many of the city’s inhabitants, especially the poor and elderly, had been weakened by months without fresh meat and vegetables and were beginning to die in startling numbers. The Bostonian Rufus Greene had a relative with the inauspicious name of Coffin. When Coffin died in early