Bunker Hill

border that results in a bloody clash between Percy and his Scottish counterpart the Earl of Douglas, both of whom are ultimately killed. What had begun as a lighthearted march into the New England countryside had been darkened by the mention of an ancient act of bloodshed. According to the Roxbury minister William Gordon, the boy’s “repartee stuck by his lordship the whole day.”
    —
    Earlier that morning, a messenger arrived at Joseph Warren’s house on Hanover Street and told him of what had happened at Lexington. “His soul beat to arms,” a contemporary remembered, “as soon as he learned the intention of the British troops.” He woke up his medical assistant William Eustis and announced that it was time for him to take over the practice. By eight o’clock Warren had mounted his horse and was on his way out of Boston.
    Instead of going by way of the Neck, Joseph Warren went by boat to Charlestown accompanied by his friend the printer Isaiah Thomas. While boarding the boat, Warren was overheard telling another acquaintance, “Keep up a brave heart! They have begun it—that either party can do; and we’ll end it—that only one can do.”
    A meeting had been scheduled of the Committee of Safety at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy, where earlier that morning committee members Orne, Lee, and Gerry had evaded the British troops by lying in a cornfield. Warren came upon Percy’s brigade in Cambridge as the troops made their way to Menotomy. The provincials had pulled up the planks of the bridge across the Charles in an attempt to prevent the regulars from entering the town. However, they’d left the planks stacked in plain sight, enabling Percy’s soldiers to quickly repair the bridge, and the brigade had marched unhindered into Cambridge.
    The road was filled with British regulars, and after helping drive away two soldiers who were attempting to confiscate a townsman’s horse, Warren managed, with some difficulty, to make his way to the tavern in Menotomy. Also in attendance at the meeting that morning was William Heath, a thirty-eight-year-old farmer from Roxbury. As a boy, Heath had been, in his own words, “remarkably fond of military exercises,” and had subsequently devoted himself to “the
theory
of war,” and had bought and read “every military treatise in the English language which was obtainable.” By 1772 he was colonel of the Suffolk County Militia; by the winter of 1775, he’d been appointed a general in the new provincial “army of observation.”
    There were generals who outranked Heath, but they all lived too far away to reach the scene of the fighting that day, and Heath resolved that he must get himself to Lexington as soon as possible. To avoid the British troops on the road to that town, he took the indirect route via Watertown, and at some point he met up with Joseph Warren. Given Warren’s ambition to one day serve in a “high military capacity,” he’d decided, an early biographer wrote, “that he should share the dangers of the field as a common soldier with his fellow citizens, that his reputation for bravery might be put beyond the possibility of suspicion.” Heath was willing to let Warren accompany him as a volunteer, and over the course of the afternoon to come, the two seem to have been almost inseparable. For both men war was more a theoretical undertaking than a thing of blood and horror, but that was about to change.
    —
    Earlier that morning, the women of Acton had put together provisions for their husbands. It fell to their teenage sons to get the food to Concord. Francis Faulkner, sixteen, was one of these young men, but when he and his friends arrived at the North Bridge, they learned that not only had three of their townsmen been killed, but the British regulars—and the fighting—had moved east toward Boston. So the boys started down the road to Lexington. Not far from Meriam’s Hill, they saw a man, wounded or dead, they couldn’t tell for sure, lying beside a wall in a field. “That is my father!” Francis cried and, slipping off his horse, ran toward the fallen militiaman. “It was,” his grandson later wrote, “a dreadful sight. . . . He had never seen death in such a bloody and ghastly form before. But it was not his father.”
    The boys from Acton continued on. The houses were all deserted. The bodies of dead soldiers littered the road. As the boys approached the town of Lexington they were filled with “fear and