Bunker Hill

carriages, which they burned on the road near the corn barn after Mrs. Barrett insisted that they move them away from the larger barn near her house.
    Tired, frustrated, and hungry, Captain Parsons requested something to eat. Mrs. Barrett obliged, and the soldiers enjoyed a meal of brown bread and milk in the same large room the colonel used to muster and organize the Concord militia. When the soldiers insisted she take some coins as payment, Mrs. Barrett replied, “This is the price of blood.”
    —
    By the time Colonel Barrett returned to Punkatasset Hill, the number of militiamen had increased significantly as companies continued to arrive from towns to the west and north of Concord. At the beginning of the morning, the British column of seven hundred men had possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage, but now with the arrival of additional militia companies and with the division of Smith’s force into several isolated battalions, the situation had changed dramatically. At present only about a hundred regulars were at or near the North Bridge, waiting for Captain Parsons’s return from the Barrett house. The militia leaders assembled on Punkatasset Hill began to contemplate moving their force of somewhere between three and four hundred men closer to the regulars near the bridge.
    Accompanying Colonel Barrett were Major John Buttrick, forty-three, leader of the local regiment of minutemen, as well as five Concord company captains, three of whom were related by blood or marriage to Colonel Barrett. Not all the officers present that morning were inclined to agree with Colonel Barrett; for example, Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer, thirty-nine, already had a well-established reputation for making the lives of the town elders uncomfortable. Instead of deferring to rank when making decisions, these New Englanders followed, in the tradition of the town meeting, a more consensual approach. Eventually they decided that the time was right to make a move toward the North Bridge.
    About three hundred yards to the northwest of the bridge was a low, flat-topped hill on which one of the companies of British troops was positioned. Leaving the women and children and dogs on Punkatasset Hill, the American militiamen began marching toward the British position, about a thousand yards away. The New Englanders were relieved to watch the company of regulars hurriedly abandon their initial position and join the other company closer to the bridge.
    For the next hour, the American militia and the British regulars stood at ease watching each other, with only a few hundred yards between them. The Concord River flooded each spring, and the road leading down to the North Bridge had to curve around an inlet of seasonal marshland, where a causeway connected the road to the bridge. A cool westerly breeze surged across the surrounding meadow. According to tradition, the militia company from nearby Bedford carried a crimson flag (which still exists) depicting an armored arm reaching out of the clouds with a sword clenched in its fist. The Latin phrase “Vince aut Morire” (Conquer or Die) was emblazoned around this forbidding, celestial-looking appendage, which, thanks to the wind direction, would have been clearly visible to the regulars on the bridge, especially if one of the officers had a spyglass.
    Flags such as this had been carried into battle during the English Civil War; they’d also accompanied the militiamen’s forefathers during King Philip’s War, when the region’s Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts had been reviled by the English as the literal children of Satan. Now that New England’s original inhabitants had been defeated, this most recent generation of colonists looked back on the struggles of the past with some nostalgia. Rather than despise the foes of their ancestors, they had begun to invoke and even honor their memory. Whether they disguised themselves as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party or had come to recognize the tactical advantages of what their forefathers had once dismissed as the Indians’ “skulking way of war,” these men had moved in directions that would have been inconceivable to the Puritans of the past. After generations of adapting to their surroundings, they had become a people who were profoundly different from the British regulars watching them tensely from the North Bridge.
    At least one militiaman, however, was a relative newcomer to Massachusetts. At some point, James Nichols, the owner