Bunker Hill

soldier had a cartridge box full of paper-wrapped charges of powder and ball. After ripping open one of the cartridges with his teeth and pouring the contents into the barrel of his musket, each man threw away the top of the cartridge. Later that day, William Munroe counted approximately two hundred scraps of cartridge paper scattered on the road.

    They could hear a drum beating the militiamen to arms. Around a slight bend in the road they got their first glimpse of the Lexington Green. Immediately ahead was the three-story-high meetinghouse, with the belfry beside it, clanging away. Buckman’s Tavern was on their right, and in the distance, partly obscured by the meetinghouse, were two lines of militiamen. They estimated there were two hundred, possibly three hundred men ahead of them.
    —
    In reality, there were barely seventy militiamen on Lexington Green. After three hours of waiting, they had assembled in a poorly organized, possibly alcohol-debilitated rush. Those who hadn’t yet gotten their powder were in the meetinghouse filling their powder horns. Men were still filtering in from all sides of the common. At the moment the British appeared, Paul Revere and Hancock’s secretary John Lowell staggered past the militiamen with Hancock’s trunk of official papers, which they had just retrieved from the attic of Buckman’s Tavern and were now trying to conceal before the marauding British could get hold of it. Revere heard Parker say to his men, “Let the troops pass by. Don’t molest them, without they being first.” As had been said over and over again in instructions from the Committee of Safety, the militiamen were not to fire the first shot.
    Pitcairn’s six companies amounted to about 250 men, but to these callow militiamen in the half-light of dawn, they looked more like a brigade of 1,500. One man said, “There are so few of us it is folly to stand here.” Parker was later reported to have responded, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they want to have a war let it begin here.”
    Soon the regulars were advancing rapidly toward the militiamen and beginning to shout. At the head of the infantrymen was Lieutenant Adair and Major Mitchell, still seething with anger and humiliation after his earlier encounter with Revere. Just before they reached the meetinghouse there was a fork, with the road to Concord going left, the road to Bedford going right. The most direct route toward the militia was to swing right of the meetinghouse, and that’s the way Adair, Mitchell, and the six companies of light infantry went. Pitcairn, who was behind them, swung to the left of the meeting and momentarily lost sight of the companies ahead. For some reason, four of the companies halted beside an oak tree near the meetinghouse, but Adair and Mitchell and two companies of about thirty men each charged on toward the militiamen.
    For many months now, the regulars had endured the taunts and outright maliciousness of not just the Bostonians but also country people just like these. It was the country people who had refused to allow the barracks to be built that might have saved the lives of the soldiers’ comrades and loved ones who were now buried at the edge of Boston Common. For the regulars this was personal, not political. If any of these farmers dared to fire their muskets, a British volley was sure to follow.
    One officer, perhaps Mitchell, shouted, “Damn them, we will have them!” About seventy-five yards from the militiamen, the two companies were ordered to form a line of battle, an interlocking formation of three lines, staggered in such a way that the men behind were able to fire over the shoulders of those ahead of them. Crying “Huzza! Huzza!,” the regulars shouted so loud that orders were impossible to hear. There were three officers on horses positioned just ahead of the regulars, and at least one of them was having a virtual tantrum, shouting “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels, damn you, disperse!”
    With dozens of British muskets pointed in their direction, Parker decided that they had no choice but to do exactly as the officer was telling them to do, so he ordered his men to disperse. Some of the militiamen were immediately on the move; others, perhaps not able to hear Parker, stood either stubbornly or in catatonic fear and held their ground. Some of the militia claimed one of the mounted officers fired his pistol. The British regulars claimed that it was