The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ iron scrap to inflict maximum damage. Some had also fired pebbles, but only because they had no more bullets. By one tally, only half of the more than eight hundred wounded regulars would ultimately be declared “cured, fit for service.” Many in the coming months would also be tormented, sometimes fatally, by “the Yanky”—dysentery, in British slang.

      A few miles away, the Yankees also suffered. A New Hampshire surgeon who rushed to Cambridge with a bullet extractor of his own design reported, “I amputated several limbs and extracted many balls the first night.” American casualties approached 450, including 138 dead. More than thirty American prisoners, many of them wounded, were dumped at Long Wharf under guard on Saturday night, then jailed the next day; most would be dead by September, foreshadowing the treatment captured Americans could expect in British custody. A surgeon who packed up his instruments in Andover and galloped to Cambridge wrote of the terrible uncertainty besetting a hundred New England towns: “It was not known who were among the slain or living, the wounded or the well.” Those who learned the worst soon submitted sad claims for restitution, like Mary Pierce of Pepperell, the widow of a private in Prescott’s regiment. She requested compensation of five pounds, twelve shillings for his lost coat, trousers, stockings, shoes, buckles, silk handkerchief, knife, and tobacco box.

      To many American fighters, the battle now called Bunker Hill felt like defeat. Ground had been given, the peninsula lost. Many were furious at what a Connecticut captain called a “shameful and scandalous” retreat. Rumors spread of betrayal, of treacherous officers, of gunpowder adulterated with sand, “all of which creates great uneasiness in the camp,” a former Boston selectman told his diary. Three artillery companies had performed dismally. Several timid commanders faced court-martial and dismissal from the service. American generalship had been muddled and indecisive, leaving the force “commanded without order and God knows by whom,” a senior officer wrote. Although the Essex Gazette claimed Putnam was “inspired by God Almighty with a military genius,” Colonel Stark denounced him as “a poltroon.” Much blame fell on Artemas Ward, “a general destitute of all military ability,” in the opinion of the new president of the provincial congress, James Warren.

      The incineration of Charlestown, the first of several American towns to be obliterated during the war, stirred both sorrow and rage. A survey found that 232 houses, 95 barns, 76 shops, 25 warehouses, a dozen mills, 81 miscellaneous buildings, and 17 wharves had burned, with losses exceeding £100,000. Of 450 eventual claims, some came from Bostonians who had moved their household goods to Charlestown for safekeeping, like Sarah Hunstable, who lost nine feather beds, six mahogany chairs, three looking glasses, and more. A church census calculated that two thousand residents had been consigned to “the most aggravated exile.”

      Yet the battle would soon be seen as a triumph of patriot moxie. “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price,” observed a new brigadier general from Rhode Island named Nathanael Greene. The lawyer William Tudor wrote John Adams on June 26, “The ministerial troops gained the hill, but were victorious losers. A few more such victories, and they are undone.” Even if Prescott and his comrades were not “supported in a proper manner,” wrote Samuel Gray from Roxbury, “this battle has been of infinite service to us—made us more vigilant, watchful, and cautious.” Bunker Hill also reinforced the conviction that inflamed citizen soldiers, summoned to battle from field or shop, could hold their own against professional legions, a charming myth that took deep root and would nearly prove the undoing of America. Cheeky rebels soon appropriated a scornful British ditty to serve as a defiant American anthem. “‘Yankee Doodle’ is now their paean, a favorite of favorites,” a British officer said, “esteemed as warlike as ‘The Grenadiers’ March.’”

      For days, Yankees with spyglasses in Roxbury and on Dorchester Heights watched the regulars dig graves. With so many dead men to bury, Gage ordered the mourning bells in Boston silenced. Fallen officers like Major Pitcairn found graves in sanctified ground at Old North or in other churchyards. Their effects were quickly auctioned off in officers’ messes or, as in the case of Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, at “the large tree in front of the encampment of the 22nd Regiment”: swords, pistols, silk waistcoats, fancy hats, mattresses, spurs, all sold to the highest bidder. Page after page of new promotion announcements soon appeared; there was nothing like a bloodletting to advance careers.

      Privates were laid in a common pit on the marshy ground between Breed’s and Bunker Hills, then dusted with twenty barrels of quicklime. Many who died of their wounds were consigned to trenches on Boston Common. The American dead on the peninsula were dumped without ceremony into mass graves or hasty bury holes, including Joseph Warren, interred with an anonymous companion in a farmer’s frock. Captain Walter Laurie, who had commanded the star-crossed detachment at Concord Bridge, told London that his burial detail had found Warren’s body and “stuffed the scoundrel with another rebel into one hole, and there he & his seditious principles may remain.” Grave robbing became so pernicious on the peninsula that Howe threatened severe punishment for malefactors. “Added to the meanness of such a practice,” he warned, “a pestilence from the infection of the putrefied bodies might reach the camp.”

      Midsummer gloom pervaded that camp, despite efforts to depict the battle as a triumph. “Another such,” Clinton said, “would have ruined us.” A cynical officer suggested that the rebels should plan “to lose a battle every week ’til the British army was reduced to nothing.” On June 23, Gage ordered an assault on Dorchester Heights, then quickly canceled the attack, convincing himself that he could command the heights with artillery if necessary. Resentments festered among his officers, at the combat shortcomings of their rank and file—“discipline, not to say courage, was wanting,” Burgoyne sniffed—and at the high command. “From an absurd and destructive confidence, carelessness, or ignorance, we have lost a thousand of our best men and officers,” a seething officer wrote. “We were all wrong at the head.”

      Gage waited eight days to tell London of Bunker Hill, in a nineteen-sentence dispatch that was spare to the point of duplicity. “This action,” he asserted, “has shown the superiority of the king’s troops who … defeated above three times their own number.” An oversized casualty chart with perfectly lined columns contained delicate calligraphic flourishes on the k’s and w’s that at least gave ornamentation to the killed and wounded. But in a private note to Lord Dartmouth, Gage conceded that casualties were “greater than our force can afford to lose.… The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be.… Your Lordship will perceive that the conquest of this country is not easy.” In a letter to Barrington on June 26, Gage added, “These people … are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of.” He continued:

      You must proceed in earnest or give the business up. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies can’t afford such losses.… I wish this cursed place was burned.

      The news stunned England. Newspapers promptly published maps of Bunker Hill, which were studied intently by fretful readers. “The ministers now saw America was lost, or not to be recovered but by long time and expense,” Walpole told his journal. “Yet, not daring to own their miscarriage, pushed on.” Rumors circulated that fratricide had caused half of all British losses, that regulars had thrown down their arms rather than fight, that a disgraced General Gage had returned to England dressed as his wife. In fact, Margaret Kemble Gage came home dressed as herself aboard the three-masted Charming Nancy, accompanying sixty widows and orphans, plus 170 badly wounded soldiers. Correspondents who met the ship in Plymouth described “a most shocking spectacle,” including “some without legs, and others without arms, and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown.” Many were said to be “in a state of complete alcoholic dependence.” The Plymouth guildhall collected donations for the widows—sixteen shillings each. One writer, upon viewing this homecoming, concluded that “60,000 men would not be able to bring the Americans under subjection.” William Eden wrote Lord North, “If we have eight more such victories, there will be nobody left to bring the news of them.”

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