The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (2 page)

Philip turned in another direction, surveying the entire scene. Across the Charles River in Boston town, thousands of people watched from windows and roof-tops as white blooms puffed from the muzzles of the Copp’s Hill battery.

Almost hypnotically, Philip’s eye was drawn back to the lines advancing up the hillside. Someone had said the troops were personally commanded by Major General Sir William Howe, one of the three officers of like rank who’d arrived in mid-May to bolster the command of General Thomas Gage.

“No firing,” an officer shouted from the redoubt’s far side. “Hold fire until you hear the signal. Let the bastards get close enough so your muskets can reach ’em.”

It would take forever,
Philip thought.

He counted ten companies across the broad British front. And ten more immediately behind. Hundreds and hundreds of red-coated men laboring in slow step. A scarlet wall.
Coming on
—

Sweat rivered down his chest under his soggy shirt, so he knew what the British must be feeling, stifled in their red wool and burdened with packs containing full rations, blankets—a staggering weight. Yet they continued to march steadily, breaking cadence only to climb over or go around obstacles. Philip began to discern features. A large scar on a man’s chin. Bushy, copper-colored brows. Sweat-bright cheeks.

“Hold fire,” came the order again. “Prescott will give the word.”

Swallowing, Philip rested his Brown Bess on the lip of the earthwork. The black man, Salem Prince, and the others took up similar positions. Down on the left, Philip glimpsed Prescott in the blowing cannon smoke. The colonel was striding back and forth behind the breastwork, ducking only when a ball whizzed over and crashed.

The drums throbbed. Philip recognized the uniforms of the crack troops marching up to crush the Americans who had been unwise enough to fortify one of the two chief areas overlooking Boston. In addition to regular infantry, the British barges had brought over the pride of their fighting forces—the light infantry and grenadier companies of various regiments. From behind the marching assault troops, small fieldpieces banged occasionally.

What terrified Philip Kent most was the determined, ceaseless forward flow of the soldiers. And, on the ends of their muskets, glittering steel—

The steel of bayonets.

Hardly an American on Breed’s or Bunker’s Hill had that kind of deadly instrument affixed to the end of his weapon. The colonials held the bayonet in contempt. Philip wondered now whether that attitude wasn’t foolish—

After the first outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord in April, Philip had been among the hundreds of militiamen who had harried the shattered, astonished British expeditionary force all the way back to Boston, pinking at the lobsterbacks from behind stone walls, watching them drop one by one, the ranks decimated by a disorganized but deadly attack to which the British were not accustomed. Afterward, the Americans had been jubilant; supremely confident. Who needed precise formations and steel when a colonial’s sharp eye aimed a musket?

Today it might be different. Up the hill came the world’s finest military organization. Orderly. Fully armed and moving steadily, steadily higher toward the redoubt, and across swampy lower ground toward the rail fence, the stone wall—

If we have to go against those bayonets,
Philip thought,
we’re done.

“Godamighty, when they gonna let us shoot?” raged Salem Prince. Philip wondered the same thing. But again the order was passed by the officers:

“Colonel Prescott says no firing until you can look them in the eye and see the white.”

Slowly, inexorably, the grenadiers and light infantry climbed through the long grass. Philip wiped his forehead. For a moment he felt faint.

He hadn’t slept all the long night. He was exhausted; starved. This whole confrontation seemed futile. That the colonies he’d adopted as his homeland would dare to challenge the armed might of the greatest empire the world had known since Rome was—madness. No other word would fit.

He looked out again. Faces took on even greater detail. Fat and thin; sallow or ruddy; young men and old. Clearly now, he could see the whites of nervous eyes—

Down behind the breastwork on the left, muskets erupted in a sheet of oily smoke and fire. All along the British front, men began to fall.

“Fire!”
someone yelled in the redoubt. Philip pointed his Brown Bess—the musket was too inaccurate for precise aiming—and pulled the trigger. A moment later, he watched a light infantryman in his twenties—no older than Philip himself—drop in the grass, writhing.

Like some great leaden scythe, the American fire cut down the lines of the attacking British. But they kept marching. Kept climbing—

Now entire ranks were down, men thrashing and screaming while their comrades from behind marched past them, stepping over them—
on
them when necessary. The men still on their feet fired their muskets and re-loaded as they marched.

Philip heard the British musket balls go hissing through the air over his head and smack the rear earth wall. In the redoubt too, men cried out—but very few compared to the numbers of red-clad grenadiers and light infantrymen dropping all across the peninsula.

The Americans re-loaded as fast as possible, with speed, great speed, and continued firing. Philip had no time to think of anything save the repetitive routine of powder and ball and paper.
Load faster,
the officers kept urging.
Fire, goddamn it! Quickly, quickly
—
!

“Look at that, mister! Looky!” Salem Prince shouted. Philip glanced up.

The British companies had halted their climb. Front lines turned on command, broke, retreated. Went streaming back toward Morton’s Hill where they had eaten a leisurely lunch and smoked their pipes before beginning the assault.

In the redoubt, men started cheering. Philip didn’t join in. He licked his palm, scorched by the hot metal of his musket, then leaned on the inner wall, panting for air.

Again he wished for a drink of water. There was none. Overhead, visible through the smoke that had thickened considerably, the sun broiled. With numbed fingers Philip checked his powder horn.

He’d loaded and fired so often, it was half empty. Others around him were grumbling over a similar lack.

“Hold your places,” came the command. “They won’t give up so easily.”

Philip closed his eyes, tried to rest. He didn’t want to die any more than the others did.

Near him, a Rhode Islander groveled in the dirt, gut-shot by a chance ball. A Massachusetts man was methodically relieving the wounded man of his musket, powder horn and crude wooden cartouche containing the precious wadding and ball.

The drumming had receded. But for how long?

The British would certainly try a new strategy next’ time, he felt. Advancing in perfect order, with perfect discipline, had given them command of the world’s battlefields. Today, that method of fighting had proved disastrous.

But whatever their strategy, if they ever reached the American lines with those bayonets—Philip tried not to think about it.

After Concord, Philip Kent had experienced an almost euphoric joy that lasted several weeks.

The British had run—
run
—back to Boston. And an American army—ragtag, poorly organized, but still an army—had encircled the city where hostile attitudes between Crown and colony had built to the breaking point over a period of some ten years.

Once the siege lines were in place, the small local militia companies of the kind in which Philip had served in Concord were reorganized into larger state regiments. Similar home or state guard units from other colonies arrived, the whole being commanded somewhat haphazardly by old General Artemas Ward. Ward was lying abed in Cambridge this June afternoon, trying to manage the military force while the agony of a stone burned in his flabby body. The Massachusetts men on Breed’s Hill had volunteered to serve in the new regiments until the end of the year. The eight-month army, the officers called it. Not exactly with humor.

Other colonies sent reinforcements to Boston. Rhode Island and New Hampshire and Connecticut—Old Put, the Indian fighter, had brought in three thousand Connecticut men plus a herd of sheep for food. Meantime, matters political were directed from the temporary provincial capitol, Watertown. Cambridge served as army headquarters.

But control resided in Watertown. From there came the orders that sent Colonel Benedict Arnold of Connecticut westward in late April, to raise a new levy of Massachusetts men and join forces in early May with Ethan Allen, a rough-hewn fighting man from the Hampshire Grants. Allen led a contingent whose members styled themselves the Green Mountain Boys.

Continually wrangling over who had command of the expedition, Allen and Arnold still managed to surprise and force the surrender of the small garrison at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. Not much of a victory in military terms, the officers around Boston admitted. Hardly more than forty Britishers captured. The value of Ticonderoga lay in its supply of military stores, the most important being cannon.

No one knew for sure how many cannon. But the prospect of even a few pieces in patriot hands was considered a blessing.

To the accomplishment of routing royal troops at Lexington and Concord—or the crime, depending on a man’s political position—the colonials could now add the seizure of a royal fort and a quantity of royal artillery “in the name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” as Allen put it when presenting the surrender demand. It was doubtful that the second Continental Congress, commencing to sit in Philadelphia in May, was aware that Ticonderoga’s capture had been made in its name until one of the express riders pounding between the north and the Quaker City bore the surprising news. A rider making the return trip reported that the Congress intended to appoint a supreme commander to take charge of the Massachusetts siege.

But something far more important than military developments had contributed to Philip’s happiness that spring. Philip and the girl he’d courted, Anne Ware of Boston, had been married in late April, in a small Congregational church in Watertown. Anne’s father, a pop-eyed little lawyer who had written numerous essays supporting the patriot cause, gave the couple his grudging blessing. After all, Anne was already five months pregnant with Philip’s child.

Like so many young husbands and wives, Philip and Anne faced a cloudy future. Philip’s dream of establishing himself in the printing trade would have to wait until the armed struggle was resolved. It might end soon, in a truce; reconciliation along with redress of colonial grievances. Overtures in that direction were being considered by the Congress, Philip had heard.

But if firebrands like Samuel Adams had their way, the war could go on and on—a titanic struggle whose goal would be Adams’ own: complete independency for the thirteen colonies.

Re-loading his Brown Bess now, Philip could hardly believe that this corpse-littered battleground was the same pastoral peninsula where, back in September of ’73, he had clumsily tried to seduce Anne. It seemed unreal, all that long past with its beginnings in the French province of Auvergne, the trouble in England with the high-born Amberly family, Philip’s emigration to America and his work for the patriot printer, Ben Edes. Philip had come a long way in the rebel cause, from indifference to confusion to firm belief.

Still, a cause was one thing, reality another. He glanced up at the scorching sun behind the smoke, wiped his sticky forehead. He wanted to live. He wanted to see Anne again; see their child born whole and sound—

But he and Anne had agreed that he had to serve. In truth, Philip had been the first to raise the issue—at the same time he announced his decision. He was committed to the cause. Anne had fired him with her own zeal. So when he told her he would henceforth be living in the military barracks hastily converted from buildings at Harvard College, she had nodded and kissed him gently, holding back her tears—

Last night, around six, Reverend Langdon, the president of the college, had prayed for the men who mustered in Harvard Yard, bound for the Charlestown peninsula. The move was designed to counteract a British attempt to fortify the Dorchester Heights, rumored to have been scheduled for Sunday, June eighteenth.

With blankets, one day’s provisions and entrenching tools, the Americans—no more than a thousand, Philip guessed—had marched into the darkness, leaving General Ward groaning in bed, and Reverend Langdon seeing to the loading of wagons that would carry the precious volumes of the Harvard library to safety in Andover. If the British ever stopped hesitating and moved out of Boston in massive numbers, those books could be burned—destroyed—just like Charlestown this afternoon—

On Breed’s Hill, Philip felt none of the exuberant confidence he’d enjoyed in the days following the skirmish at Concord.

Wounded men moaned in the redoubt. Philip looked around as Salem Prince said quietly, “They coming again.”

Philip closed his eyes and drew a deep breath of the fetid air. Prince was right.

He heard the drums.

The second attack was much like the first. Stupid on the part of the British, Philip thought. He and the others fired and fired and fired again. The withering flame that leaped outward from the American muskets devastated the steadily advancing soldiers a second time. Sent the survivors into retreat a second time. Now the colonials had real cause for cheering—

But it was short-lived:

“I’ve only powder for two or three more shots,” Philip said to the black man after the second charge had fallen back. The smoke in the redoubt was thicker than ever.

“You better off ’n I am,” the black said, up-ending his empty powder horn. “Ball almost gone, too.”

A passing officer spun on them. “If you have powder, fire anything you can find. Rocks—or this.” He snatched up a bent nail left over from the erection of the redoubt’s timberwork. He disappeared in the smoke, leaving Philip to stare in dismay at the nail.