Bunker Hill

were fired on from houses and behind trees . . . [and] from all sides,” Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, “but mostly from the rear, where people had hid themselves in houses till we had passed then fired.” What had seemed like just another country road in New England as they marched toward Concord earlier in the morning was now bristling with the muskets of militiamen that the regulars could not even see. Safely hidden behind walls, trees, and rocks, the provincials were revealed only by the telltale cloud of powder smoke as their musket balls rained down on the grenadiers with fatal effect.
    The militiamen used the stone walls to their advantage, but so did the British. These rugged partitions of granite boulders were often chest-high and topped with the trunks and branches of trees, and whenever the regulars marching along the road found themselves besieged on either side, they would, one Woburn militiaman remembered, “stoop for shelter from the stone walls as they ran by the ambush.”
    For the flanking parties, the fighting was less anonymous. Several times, the light infantrymen were able to surprise the militiamen, who were either too inexperienced to anticipate their presence or too preoccupied with firing at the column to notice that the soldiers were coming at them with their bayonets fixed. One New Englander later said it was the sound of the infantrymen running through the fresh spring grass, a predatory “swish, swish,” that he remembered most vividly about that terrible day. Some militiamen were able to escape the flankers with their lives, but others were less lucky. Bedford’s Captain Jonathan Wilson had predicted, “We’ll have every dog of [the British] before night.” Near the Hartwell farm (where a few hours before Mary Hartwell had admired the beauty of the passing column in the early morning light), Wilson was surprised from behind by some flankers and killed, as was Daniel Thompson from Woburn. By the time the fighting reached the Fiske farm outside Lexington, Isaac Davis’s Acton friend James Hayward had fired so many times that he had almost finished off an entire pound of gunpowder. Desperate for something to drink, he ran for a well, only to discover that a regular had the same idea. Both raised their muskets and fired. The regular was killed, but not before his musket ball fractured Hayward’s nearly empty powder horn into deadly splinters that pierced his abdomen and left him mortally wounded.
    It was a ruthless kind of fighting that even the experienced soldiers on both sides found profoundly troubling. Instead of a proper battlefield to contain the horror, they were fighting amid homes and farms. Both sides felt violated, and both sides found it necessary to regard the other as brutal and inhuman. Ever since the atrocity at the North Bridge, the regulars had viewed the provincials as tomahawk-wielding savages. For the New Englanders, this was King Philip’s War redux. “The people say,” the Reverend William Gordon reported, “that the soldiers are worse than the
Indians
.”
    Sergeant John Ford of Chelmsford had fought in the French and Indian War; so had Charles Furbush of Andover. At one point they came upon a regular stealing valuables from a roadside home, and together they rushed into the house and killed the soldier. Ford would kill a total of five regulars that day, but the fighting brought neither him nor Furbush any joy or satisfaction. “Our men seemed maddened with the sight of British blood and infuriated to wreak vengeance on the wounded and helpless,” Furbush later told his grandson. At one point they came upon a fallen grenadier who’d been “stabbed again and again” by passing militiamen. “Remembering the day when they had called these men companions-in-arms,” the two veterans lifted up the dying soldier and gave him a drink of water.
    —
    On a hill outside Lexington, Captain John Parker and the remnants of his militia company waited for the British column. Earlier that morning their town, which had a total of 208 males over the age of sixteen in 1775, had lost 18 to death or injury. By this point, Colonel Smith and his regulars had been reduced to a similar state of suffering. They had just endured a series of ambushes that had killed and wounded more than two dozen men. They had long since given up any hope of reinforcements coming from Gage in Boston. They were running out of ammunition. It was on this hill that