Bunker Hill

British detachment when it returned to the North Bridge. But would Barrett be willing to resume hostilities?
    In this strange netherworld of paralysis and doubt, Parsons and his men finally made their way back toward the river. They knew nothing of what had occurred just an hour or so before and were disturbed to see that there were no longer any British troops at the bridge. As Parsons and his men glanced worriedly from hill to militia-covered hill, they inevitably picked up the pace until they were virtually running by the time they crossed over the river. The speed of their retreat did not prevent them from noticing, however, the horribly injured soldier, whom they assumed had been scalped.
    By noon, when Colonel Smith finally ordered the regulars to begin the march back to Boston, a rumor was working its way up and down the column: instead of just one, four soldiers had been “scalped, their eyes gouged, their noses and ears cut off.” What’s more, the colonists were likely to do the same to anyone else “they get alive, that are wounded and cannot get off the ground.”
    As far as the regulars were concerned, the militiamen were no longer fellow Englishmen. By butchering the soldiers’ fallen comrade beside the North Bridge, the provincials had revealed themselves to be anything but civilized members of the British Empire; they were, one soldier angrily insisted, “full as bad as the Indians.”
    Gone was the uncertainty of the morning’s march to Concord. From here on in, this was war.
    —
    Throughout what proved to be a very long, if only six-mile, march back to Lexington, Colonel Smith made use of flank guards—groups of between eighty and one hundred light infantrymen—who were sent out on either side of the road in an attempt to rid the countryside of militiamen who might threaten the column. As long as the country was relatively open, the flank guards proved quite effective. The trouble came when stone walls, swamps, rocky hills, and especially woodlands hindered the flank guards’ passage even as these natural features provided their enemies with the cover they needed to fire upon the column. Houses were both a threat and a lure. Not only could the provincials use them for cover but they were also a source of temptation for the flank guards, since each house contained food and drink as well as valuables that could be pawned in Boston to augment the soldiers’ meager pay.
    About a mile outside Concord, the British troops were approaching Meriam’s Hill, the same hill from which the local militia had watched them in the morning. So far the flanking parties had succeeded in keeping the surrounding countryside fairly free of snipers. At Meriam’s Hill, however, an intervening brook required that the light infantrymen on the left flank temporarily return to the road so that they could pass over a bridge.
    By this time, militia companies from several nearby towns, including Billerica (the home of Thomas Ditson, who had been tarred and feathered by the regulars back in March and was there that day, eager for revenge), Tewksbury, and Reading had recently arrived and taken up positions overlooking the road.
    Unlike the morning, when the regulars had arrived in Concord accompanied by fife and drum, no music was played that afternoon. Edmund Foster was serving as a volunteer with a minuteman company from Reading, and he remembered how “silence reigned on both sides” as the light infantrymen of the left flank guard returned to the road “without music or word being spoken that could be heard.”
    The regulars marched across the bridge. Somewhere a musket fired. The soldiers wheeled to their left and unleashed a volley. Their muskets fired high and missed their mark. The militiamen, having had time to take up positions behind stone walls and rocks, fired with more effectiveness, and Foster watched as “two British soldiers fell dead at a little distance from each other, in the road near the brook.” Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, one of the handful of officers to remain unscathed during the encounter at the North Bridge, took a musket ball in the right elbow. “The battle now began,” Foster remembered, “and was carried on with little or no military discipline and order, on the part of the Americans.”
    The provincials may have been improvising as they took up positions along the sometimes winding road to Lexington, but that did not prevent them from maintaining a deadly volume of fire. “We