Bunker Hill

Parker’s company let forth their own devastating volley. “We were totally surrounded with such an incessant fire,” Lieutenant Barker wrote, “as it’s impossible to conceive.” Captain Parsons, the leader of the battalion that had searched the Barrett farm in Concord, was wounded, as was Colonel Smith, who was shot in the thigh. The regulars eventually cleared the hill, costing fifty-four-year-old militiaman Jedidiah Munroe, who’d been wounded on Lexington Green, his life. But the damage to Colonel Smith’s little army had been done. In the minutes ahead, during which Major Pitcairn was thrown from his horse amid yet another provincial onslaught, the British column fell into serious disarray. Today the rocky rise of land where the company from Lexington helped to initiate the collapse of Smith’s command is known as Parker’s Revenge.
    Soon after, at what was known as Concord Hill and is the last piece of high ground before Lexington Green, the British officers lost control of their men. “Our ammunition began to fail,” Ensign DeBerniere explained, “and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward, made a great confusion.” With Smith and Pitcairn injured and with the bodies of the British dead strewn along the bloody road behind them, the soldiers started to run for the town green. The triangle of grass where the events of this long and disquieting day had begun was now looked to as a possible sanctuary. At least there were no stands of trees out of which yet another ambush might erupt. Perhaps here, on this wide stretch of open grass, they might be able to surrender. “We began to run rather than retreat in order . . . ,” DeBerniere remembered, “[the officers] attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened.”
    Just as Lieutenant Barker, one of the few uninjured officers, resigned himself to either laying “down our arms or [being] picked off by the rebels at their pleasure,” the miraculous occurred. Up ahead, beyond the Lexington Meetinghouse, stretching across the road to Boston, was a long line of British regulars—more than 1,350 members of Hugh Percy’s First Brigade, assembled in what the weary and bleeding Lieutenant Sutherland claimed was “one of the best dispositions ever I saw.” What’s more, they had artillery with them, and as Smith’s ragged and exhausted column made its way toward Percy’s brigade, a cannonball ripped through the walls of the Lexington Meetinghouse and sent the provincials scurrying for cover. Sutherland remembered, “We began to entertain very sanguine hopes of our returning in safety to Boston.”
    But as they were soon to discover, the fighting had just begun.
    —
    Before leaving Boston, Percy’s brigade of almost fifteen hundred men had assembled on Tremont Street. The long line of regulars stretched all the way from the common’s elm-lined mall to the Queen Street Writing School, at least a quarter mile away, where thirteen-year-old Benjamin Russell was in his final year. The entire city, Russell remembered, was “in agitation.” For the boys of the Queen Street School, which was the poor man’s alternative to Boston Latin, these were tremendously exciting times, especially when Master Carter dismissed class that morning with the phrase, “Boys, the war’s begun, and you may run.”
    They were words that Russell and his compatriots took literally. When Percy’s brigade left Boston around nine that morning, the Queen Street boys followed close behind. Once in Roxbury, Percy’s fifers started playing “Yankee Doodle,” a song from the French and Indian War that mocked the provincials’ lack of social sophistication. But as it turned out, the boys would get the last laugh.
    As the British fifers had their fun with “Yankee Doodle,” a boy (who may or may not have been part of Russell’s entourage) began “jumping and laughing” to the point that Percy asked “at what he was laughing so heartily.” “To think,” the boy responded, “how you will dance by and by to ‘Chevy Chase.’” For hundreds of years, “Chevy Chase” had been one of the most popular ballads in Britain, and as it so happened, the song had a disturbing connection to Lord Percy’s family. In the ballad, Percy, Earl of Northumberland, leads an ill-advised hunting trip across the Scottish