Bunker Hill

of the head of the column. But as they discovered, “the fire was nearly as severe [there] as in the rear.”
    Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, the wounded officer who’d been given Colonel Smith’s horse, soon learned that a saddle was also not the best place to be. “I found the balls whistled so smartly around my ears,” he wrote, “I thought it more prudent to dismount.” Lister then used the horse as a shield, shifting from side to side so as to put the animal between him and the militiamen’s fire. When a nearby horse with one wounded man on the saddle and three men cowering beside it was shot dead, Lister offered his horse to the now defenseless soldiers and decided to take his chances with the rest of the column. Other wounded soldiers hitched rides on the two fieldpieces, which were towed by horses. Whenever Percy ordered the cannons to be put to use, the soldiers who had been clinging to the weapons were sent tumbling to the ground as the fieldpieces were turned toward the column’s rear and fired.
    Some have claimed that, based on Heath’s own account of his activities, he provided important tactical leadership during this portion of the fighting. However, given the chaotic realities of that afternoon, the effectiveness of the provincial fire had more to do with there being close to four thousand militiamen on the field that day than anything else. If an organizational element was responsible for the success of the provincials, it had been provided that winter by the Committee of Safety. What was happening that afternoon on what came to be known as the Battle Road was, for the most part, highly fluid and spontaneous. It also didn’t hurt that many of the militia companies contained veterans of the French and Indian War who, unlike Heath, had experience in just this kind of guerilla-style fighting.
    “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob,” Percy later begrudgingly admitted, “will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having [been] employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians and this country being much covered with wood and hills is very advantageous for their method of fighting.” But what most impressed Percy was the personal courage these militiamen demonstrated as they methodically hunted the British officers in the column. Unlike the enlisted men, whose cheaply dyed red coats quickly faded to a pinkish orange, the officers’ coats were made with a more expensive and long-lasting crimson dye and were easily distinguished from the washed-out uniforms of the rank and file. For the militiamen, the vivid red of the officers’ coats presented a target that was too tempting to resist. “Many of [the provincials] . . . advanced within ten yards to fire at me and the other officers,” Percy marveled, “though they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.”
    Lieutenant Mackenzie of the Welch Fusiliers made special note of those provincials who used horses to increase their effectiveness against the British column. “Numbers of them were mounted,” he wrote, “and when they had fastened their horses at some little distance from the road, they crept down near enough to have a shot. As soon as the column had passed, they mounted again, and rode round until they got ahead of the column and found some convenient place from whence they might fire again.” Just as the colonial veterans of the French and Indian War were relying on their own considerable experience and judgment as they joined in on the fighting, so were these lone riders acting on their own initiative.
    What Heath provided that afternoon and evening was not tactical and strategic brilliance but legitimacy. Simply by being there, he, as a general in the provincial army, made what happened along the road to Boston something more than a backyard skirmish between some irate farmers and the regulars of the British Empire. With Heath and his companion Dr. Joseph Warren standing there on the hip of the column’s rear guard, the provincials were beginning to have, in a very crude and inchoate form, the trappings of a command structure.
    They were a most unlikely pair. Heath was fat and bald. Warren was tallish and handsome, his hair pinned up on the sides of his head in stylish horizontal rolls. There is no mention of Heath taking any extraordinary risks that day, but Warren was, according to one contemporary, “perhaps the most active