Bunker Hill
Authors: Howard Fast
1.
Title Page
2.
Copyright
3.
Contents
4.
BUNKER HILL: AN INTRODUCTION
5.
Intro
9.
June 12
10.
June 13
11.
June 14
12.
June 15
13.
June 16
14.
June 17
21.
Afterword
23.
Back Cover
unker
h
ill
For my wonderful wife, Bette Fast
Copyright © 1977, 2000 by Howard
Fast.
Introduction
copyright © 2000 by Howard Fast.
Copyright renewed.
Reprinted
by arrangement with the Howard Fast Literary Trust.
Cover and internal
design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc. Cover design by Kirk DouPonce/Dog Earred
Design Cover images © Kirk DouPonce
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including
information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in
writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any
similarity to real persons, living or
dead,
is purely
coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published
by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Library of Congress CIP data is on file with the
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Printed and bound in the United States of America. VP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ontents
Bunker Hill: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .
.v
The Major
Characters................................
ix
June 12 ...........................................1
June 13 ...........................................3 June 14
..........................................39 June 15
..........................................65 June 16
..........................................79 June 17 ..........................................95
June 17, 9:00 A.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . 119 June 17, 11:00 A.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 135 June 17, 2:00 P.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . 159 June 17, 4:00 P.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 June 17, 5:00 P.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 June 18, 8:00 A.M.. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Afterword
.......................................221
HILL: AN INTRODUCTION
V
ery little history enters the history books as it
really happened; and in the thousand or so legends and stories of what happened
on Bunker Hill during a week in June of 1775, there are only shadows of the
truth. For one thing, the battle known as “Bunker Hill” did not happen on
Bunker Hill. It took place on Breed’s Hill, half a mile away. But if I called
it Breed’s Hill, no one would connect it with the incident in our history
books.
Also, the
commanders of the American forces (this being before Washington took command),
either through stupidity or cowardice, refused to allow any of the fifteen
thousand American troops in Boston to support the handful of men and boys who
were defending Breed’s Hill.
All that
is remembered is an American officer saying, “Hold your fire until you see the
whites of their eyes,” probably an invention by the same writer who described
it as a great victory.
It was no
victory. In terms of the small number of Americans involved, it was a
defeat—perhaps the most heartbreaking defeat of the coming war. The historians
called it a victory because of the terrible damage this handful of American
volunteers inflicted on the best troops in the British
empire
.
It was also the first evidence of the superiority of riflemen over men with
muskets under certain conditions.
Above all,
in this reconstruction of history, I have attempted to show the brutal horror
of war, even when men fight for what they believe to be a holy cause. It also
says a good deal about the military physicians of the time, something that has
been ignored in most other accounts.
Like any book of fiction, it can only try to give the
reader an approximation of what had really occurred. Howard Fast March 2001
O
n April 19, 1775, the first military encounter of the
American Revolution took place on the village green at Lexington,
Massachusetts, where a group of armed farmers contested the right of passage of
British troops. The British regulars were on their way to Concord, a few miles
distant, to destroy military supplies the Americans had stored there. A second
battle took place at Concord, followed by a running fight as the British
retreated to Boston, which they had occupied. For the next six weeks, American
armed civilians and militiamen crowded the roads to Boston, until presently a
loosely organized army of about fourteen thousand men held Boston under close
siege.
CHARACTERS
Committee of Safety
Organized in October of 1774, by the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress.
This was a leadership group for the anticipated military conflict.
Dr. Joseph Warren (later appointed commander in chief
of the militia) John Hancock Dr. Benjamin Church Richard Devins Benjamin White
Artemus Ward (later general of the army) Abraham Watson Joseph Palmer Azor Orne
John Pigeon Thomas Gardner William Heath (Not all of the above play a part in
the story)
American Officers
General Israel Putnam,
commander of the Connecticut militia.
Colonel William
Prescott, in command at Breed’s Hill.
Major Thomas
Knowlton, commanding the center at Breed’s Hill.
Colonel John Stark,
frontiersman, hero of the French and Indian
War, commander of the New Hampshire
Riflemen, in command of the left flank at Breed’s Hill.
Major General Richard Gridley, engineer, in command
of the redoubt. Captain Abel Nutting, forward post at Breed’s Hill. Colonel
Moses
Little
, in command of the Ipswich volunteers.
American Physicians
Dr. Joseph Warren Dr. Albert Bones Dr. Joseph Gonzales Dr. Evan
Feversham
British Officers
General Thomas Gage, nominally in command of the
British forces in Boston, but in fact superseded by William Howe. General Sir
William Howe, darling of the British Crown, asserting command over Thomas Gage.
Major General Sir Henry Clinton Major General John Burgoyne Admiral Thomas
Graves Major John Pitcairn Brigadier General Robert Pigot Captain Joshua Loring
Major Leeroy Atkins
Ladies
Prudence Hallsbury Elizabeth
Loring, wife of Joshua Loring.
F
or those readers who may express surprise at the
coarse language used in some of the dialogue, may I explain that the
expressions used here were common in the eighteenth century, and are to be
found in any number of letters and manuscripts I have
examined.
I use them to heighten the reality of what has been bowdlerized in most writing
of the time.
M
erton knew the rat; the rat knew Merton. For five
months they had lived together in the stinking hold of the frigate, and during
those five months they had measured and developed a healthy respect for each
other. Merton had a commendable and profound knowledge of rats. They had shared
living space with him since his memory began, on land as well as at sea. And
the rat had also developed a commendable knowledge of Merton. The rat was very
large, and Merton was small, only five feet two inches in height; they were
both intelligent
, ingenious, and agile. Merton simply had
the advantage in being a man. As a man, he was determined to kill the rat. The
rat, being a rat, was only determined to remain alive.
The rat
was gray, with a white face and white paws, which identified him specifically
and was finally his undoing, since it turned Merton’s animosity against all
rats into a single direction. Merton devised traps, poisoned bait, and laid
ambushes, and all of it failed.
Finally, on the twelfth of
June, in the year 1775, luck and the mysterious workings of doom coincided.
The rat ventured onto the gun deck. Merton happened to have a marlinspike in
his hand. He let go with the spike and caught the rat squarely and stunned him,
which gave Merton a chance to bash in the rat’s head.
Dancing a
small dance of victory, Merton held up the enormous rat for his shipmates to
see. “Now if this ain’t the biggest bleeding son of a bitch that ever lived,
then I am a dick’s udder! I said I’d get the bastard, and I got him!”
“You
bloody well got him,” they agreed.
“Weighs three pounds if he weighs an ounce.”
“And what
are you going to do with the little bastard, Merton?”
Merton
smirked and stared from face to face at his grinning shipmates. “Now what am I
going to do with him? And wouldn’t you like to know?”
Out
with his knife.
He gutted the animal, tore out its entrails, and flung
them over the side into the water of Boston Harbor. Then, quickly and expertly,
disregarding the pool of blood at his feet, he beheaded the rat and skinned it.
“Looks
like a bleeding hare, don’t it?”
“Looks like a rat to me.”
“Cook it up and eat it, Merton. It’ll taste better
than rotten salt pork.”
Merton
wiped his knife on his pants and grinned.
“And get a
bucket of water and wash down the deck,” said the bosun.
“Ah, that I will, bosun.
That I will.”
His mates
lost interest and wandered away. After he had washed down the deck, Merton took
the rat’s body into the galley. The cooks were at the bow fishing, the galley
was empty except for a scullery boy, and Merton told him to keep a still tongue
in his head. Grinning and chuckling, the scullery boy watched Merton butcher
the rat and drop it into a pot of soup that was simmering for the officers’
mess.
Few enough
liked Merton. He had a mean, tortured, shrunken soul, and he lived a mean,
tortured, shrunken life. The scullery boy hated him, and the captain’s coxswain
hated him, but since the scullery boy hated the captain as well, he waited
until after the captain’s dinner before he informed the coxswain of Merton’s
addition to the soup pot.
The
coxswain communicated the news to the first officer, and Merton was duly
reprimanded. He was bound to a mast to receive fifty lashes across his skinny
back.