Bunker Hill

trembling.” And then they heard the boom of a cannon.
    Militiamen from towns all over New England had gathered on Lexington Green, their sweaty faces blackened by powder blasts, their knees and elbows stained by the mud and grass. The boys went from group to group, looking for their fathers, and finally they found them. To their astonishment, the Acton men were “in the highest spirits.” They proudly informed their sons that they had avenged the deaths of their fellow Acton men “tenfold and would destroy all [the regulars] before they could get to Boston.” Instead of being terrorized, these middle-aged husbands and fathers were having the time of their lives. Faulkner was relieved, in a way, to see his father so “full of confidence and fight.” But he was also troubled by the determination of the Acton men. “Indignation,” Faulkner remembered, “filled every heart.”
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    Not content with sending a cannon ball through the Lexington meetinghouse, General Percy ordered that several houses just to the east of the green be set on fire. The militiamen were shooting at his regulars from those houses, and the structures must be destroyed. “We set [the houses] on fire,” one soldier wrote, “and they ran to the woods like devils.” The stone walls were also harboring militiamen, and during the next hour the regulars pushed over more than one thousand yards of Deacon Joseph Loring’s wall.
    About a quarter mile behind Percy’s front line was the Munroe Tavern, which in addition to providing the officers with food and drink served as a hospital. It was here that surgeon’s mate Simms extracted a musket ball from Lieutenant Jeremy Lister’s elbow. By the time the brigade began to head back to Boston, Lister was suffering from both a loss of blood and a lack of food. Too faint to walk, he asked Colonel Smith if he might borrow his horse. The previous night on Boston Common, when one of Smith’s officers claimed to be too sick to participate in the expedition, Lister had volunteered to take his place. Back then, Smith had urged Lister to “return to town . . . and not go into danger for others,” but Lister had felt that the honor of the regiment depended on his participation. Now that Lister’s life appeared to be in the balance, Smith gladly gave him his horse, even though the colonel was suffering from a painful leg wound and was, in the words of Lieutenant Barker, “a very fat heavy man.” A soldier offered Lister a bit of biscuit; another offered him a hatful of water from a horse pond. Feeling much better, Lister and the approximately two thousand men under General Percy’s command left Lexington at about three in the afternoon. Now that the column stretched for almost half a mile, it took a full thirty minutes before they were all under way. The march back to Boston would take all the discipline and courage the British regulars could muster. About two miles to the southeast lay the town of Menotomy.

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    Heath and Warren arrived at Lexington just about the same time as Percy’s brigade. Heath did what he could to pull together the scattered companies of militia into the makings of a proper regiment. The plan—if it could be called a plan—was to surround the British column with what Percy later described as “a moving circle . . . of incessant fire [that] followed us wherever we went.” Given the danger of the flank guards, the best place for the militiamen to harass the column was from behind, and in anticipation of this, Percy appointed a battalion from one of his most experienced regiments, the Welch Fusiliers, to be the rear guard. Adding to the difficulties encountered by the rear guard as they turned to defend the column from the militiamen gathered behind was the direction of the ever-increasing wind. Since it was blowing out of the west and they were headed east toward Boston, the regulars were continually blanketed in the powder smoke generated by their own muskets, “covering them,” one colonist wrote, “with such a cloud that blinded them yet [still left them] . . . a plain mark for the militia.”
    As the fighting raged on and the fusiliers ran out of ammunition and men, Percy was forced to replace them with another battalion; over the course of the next fifteen miles, three different battalions served as the rear guard. In the meantime, the exhausted men of Colonel Smith’s original expeditionary force marched in what was supposed to be the relative safety