The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

courthouse and the Three Cranes Tavern. North of the market, on Town Hill, more houses and another distillery caught fire. The light breeze shifted from southwest to east, as it often did on fine summer days, and flames drove lengthwise through Charlestown. Fire ignited more wharves and a ship chandlery. Ebony smoke rose in a column as wide as the town, then “hung like a thunder cloud over the contending armies,” an American officer reported. Rebel musketmen scurried from the burning buildings to hide behind stone walls on Breed’s Hill and in a nearby barn.

      “The church steeples, being made of timber, were great pyramids of fire above the rest,” wrote Burgoyne, who had a way with words. “The roar of cannon, mortars, musketry, the crash of churches, ships upon the stocks, the whole streets falling together in ruin, to fill the ear.” All in all, the conflagration was “one of the greatest scenes of war that can be conceived.”

      Gawkers and gapers now climbed not only Boston rooftops and hillsides, but “the masts of such ships as were unemployed in the harbor, all crowded with spectators, friends and foes, alike in anxious suspense. It was great, it was high-spirited.”

      They, too, looked because they could not look away.

      The rebels waited, now killing mad. At four p.m., well over two thousand regulars ascended the slope in two distinct corps. Swallows swooped above the hills, and the stench of a cremated town filled the nose. Many militiamen had loaded “buck and ball”—a lead bullet and two or three buckshot, known as “Yankee peas.” “Fire low,” officers told the men. “Aim at their waistbands.” Again noting the brighter tint of the British officers’ tunics—vibrant from more expensive dyes—they added, “Aim at the handsome coats. Pick off the commanders.” In the redoubt, Prescott angrily waved his sword to rebuke several musketmen who were firing at impossible ranges; they were to wait until the enemy was danger close, within six rods or so—a hundred feet. “Aim at their hips,” Prescott ordered. “Waste no powder.” Five hundred yards to the north, at the far end of the rail fence, Stark told his men to hang fire until they could see the regulars’ half-gaiters below their knees. Someone may also have urged waiting till the whites of the enemy’s eyes were visible, an order that had been issued to Austrians, Prussians, and possibly other warring armies earlier in the century.

      Howe’s corps, on the British right, found marching through the thigh-high grass difficult: fence after damnable fence forced the lines to stop and dismantle the rails or climb over them. As planned, light infantrymen angled through a shallow dell that led to the Mystic beach, now screened from the broader battlefield by the riverbank. Eleven companies with more than three hundred men funneled into a tight column, four or five men abreast. Beyond a slight curve in the shoreline stood the newly built fieldstone wall, defended by a few dozen rebel musketmen, some kneeling with their gun barrels resting on the stones. Closing at a dog trot to within fifty yards, redcoats from the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers in the vanguard of the column lowered their bayonets and prepared to charge.

      A stupendous, searing volley ripped into the British ranks, blowing the fusiliers from their feet. Gunsmoke rolled down a beach upholstered with dying regulars as their comrades stepped over them only to also be shot down. With a third of the Welch Fusiliers wounded, mortally or otherwise, the King’s Own Light Infantry behind them surged forward; they, too, were slaughtered, followed by the 10th Foot, the 52nd Foot, and other light companies trailing them. “It was like pushing a wax candle against a red-hot plate,” the historian Christopher Ward would write. “The head of the column simply melted away.” A man five feet, eight inches tall and weighing 168 pounds had an exterior surface of 2,550 square inches, of which a thousand were exposed to gunfire when he was facing an enemy frontally at close range. Rebel musket balls seemed to fill every square inch of that Mystic corridor, blasting enormous entry wounds into enemies panting for the fieldstone wall. Among the British officers shot, “few had less than three or four wounds,” a captain later wrote home. Men miraculously unharmed by bullets or buckshot were spattered with wedges of tissue, dislodged teeth, and skull fragments. After a final, futile surge, the regulars turned and ran “in a very great disorder,” a witness reported. They left behind ninety-six comrades, dead as mutton.

      Howe heard the commotion below the riverbank to his right, but the rail fence just ahead, stiff with hundreds of American gunmen, drew his full attention. As he and the grenadiers took another stride, the top rail erupted in flame and filthy smoke, quickly followed by a volley from the rebel second rank. “The whole line was one blaze,” a young Sudbury militiaman named Needham Maynard later recalled. “They fell in heaps, actually in heaps.… The bodies lay there very thick.” Howe was unhurt, but men on either side of him crumpled. Disemboweled grenadiers, some screaming, some silent, tumbled one atop another. “I discharged my gun three times at the British, taking deliberate aim as if at a squirrel,” wrote Simon Fobes, a nineteen-year-old private from Bridgewater. “I had become calm as a clock.”

      Regulars from two trailing regiments hurried forward to fill gaps in the grenadier line only to be gunned down. A crackle of musketry from the three flèches to Howe’s left swept his corps with cross fire. Wounded redcoats dragged themselves through the grass amid shrieks, curses, and plaintive wails for mother. The British return fire tended to fly high: a stand of apple trees behind the American line had few enemy balls embedded in the trunks, but the “branches above were literally cut to pieces,” Captain Henry Dearborn reported. A few lightly wounded rebels reloaded muskets for their upright comrades, trimmed lead bullets to fit odd-sized barrels, or acted as spotters: “There. See that officer?”

      Howe pulled his men back briefly to regroup—“long enough for us to clean our guns,” Maynard, the Sudbury militiaman, noted—then heaved forward again only to be smashed once more. “Their officers were shot down,” Maynard added. “There seemed to be nobody to command ’em.” The British wounded included Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie, the grenadier commander, shot in the thigh by jittery light infantrymen who had joined the rail-fence fight after the carnage on the beach. Before he died, a week later, Abercrombie would tell London that his own army “gave me a plumper”—a volley—“and killed two officers and three privates,” while wounding twenty others in fratricidal mayhem. The undisciplined light companies, he suggested, “must be drilled before they are carried to action again.” A jeering rebel who recognized the crippled man being helped from the field shouted, “Colonel Abercrombie, are the Yankees cowards?”

      A dozen men in Howe’s command retinue were now dead or wounded. “For near a minute,” an officer observed, “he was quite alone.” At last Howe turned and trudged down the hill, unscathed, though his white stockings were slick with British blood. “There was a moment,” he subsequently told General Harvey, “that I never felt before.”

      Brigadier Pigot had suffered few casualties in feinting toward the redoubt—cannonballs from the 24-pounders on Copp’s Hill kept defenders crouched beneath their parapet. But now the weight of the British assault necessarily shifted to his corps. Marines, three regiments, and various detached companies pressed toward the crest of Breed’s Hill, bedeviled by fences, stone walls, and what Burgoyne called “a thousand impediments.” Approaching the redoubt, the line was “stopped by some brick kilns and enclosures, and exposed for some time to the whole of its fire,” a British ensign wrote. “And it was here that so many men were lost.”

      Volley upon volley crashed from the redoubt and the protruding breastwork so that “the enemy fell like grass when mowed,” a rebel fifer said. Ebenezer Bancroft, the militia captain from Dunstable, observed, “Our first fire was shockingly fatal.” When a well-aimed fusillade ripped into the regulars, a militiaman bellowed, “You have made a furrow through them!” A diarist in the 47th Foot wrote that “for about fifty minutes it resembled rather a continual sheet of lightning and an uninterrupted peal of thunder than the explosion of firearms.” Some regulars used dead redcoats to build their own breastworks. An American captain reported that he fired all thirty-five rounds in his ammunition pouch, and then threw stones.

      Among the fallen was Major John Pitcairn, the conqueror of Lexington Common, now dying in the grass from at least one ball in the chest. A major in the 52nd Regiment was described by a subordinate as “lying about ten yards from the redoubt in great agony” from five wounds; three dead captains