The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson

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had taken post on Punkatasset Hill, a gentle but insistent slope half a mile north of the bridge. Two Lincoln companies and two more from Bedford joined them, along with Captain Davis’s minute company from Acton, bringing their numbers to perhaps 450, a preponderance evident to the hundred or so redcoats peering up from the causeway; one uneasy British officer estimated the rebel force at fifteen hundred. On order, the Americans loaded their muskets and rambled downhill to within three hundred yards of the enemy. A militia captain admitted feeling “as solemn as if I was going to church.”

      Solemnity turned to fury at the sight of black smoke spiraling above the village: the small pyre of confiscated military supplies was mistaken for British arson. Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer, a hog reeve and furniture maker, was described as “the most dangerous man in Concord” because young men would follow wherever he led. Now Hosmer was ready to lead them back across the bridge. “Will you let them burn the town down?” he cried.

      Colonel Barrett agreed. They had waited long enough. Captain Davis was ordered to move his Acton minutemen to the head of the column—“I haven’t a man who’s afraid to go,” Davis replied—followed by the two Concord minute companies; their bayonets would help repel any British counterattack. The column surged forward in two files. Some later claimed that fifers tootled “The White Cockade,” a Scottish dance air celebrating the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Others recalled only silence but for footfall and Barrett’s command “not to fire first.” The militia, a British soldier reported, advanced “with the greatest regularity.”

      Captain Walter Laurie, commanding the three light infantry companies, ordered his men to scramble back to the east side of the bridge and into “street-firing” positions, a complex formation designed for a constricted field of fire. Confusion followed, as a stranger again commanded strangers. Some redcoats braced themselves near the abutments. Others spilled into an adjacent field or tried to pull up planks from the bridge deck.

      Without orders, a British soldier fired into the river. The white splash rose as if from a thrown stone. More shots followed, a spatter of musketry that built into a ragged volley. Much of the British fire flew high—common among nervous or ill-trained troops—but not all. Captain Davis of Acton pitched over dead, blood from a gaping chest wound spattering the men next to him. Private Abner Hosmer also fell dead, killed by a ball that hit below his left eye and blew through the back of his neck. Three others were wounded, including a young fifer and Private Joshua Brooks of Lincoln, grazed in the forehead so cleanly that another private concluded that the British, improbably, were “firing jackknives.” Others knew better. Captain David Brown, who lived with his wife, Abigail, and ten children two hundred yards uphill from the bridge, shouted, “God damn them, they are firing balls! Fire, men, fire!” The cry became an echo, sweeping the ranks: “Fire! For God’s sake, fire!” The crash of muskets rose to a roar.

      “A general popping from them ensued,” Captain Laurie later told General Gage. One of his lieutenants had reloaded when a bullet slammed into his chest, spinning him around. Three other lieutenants were wounded in quick succession, making casualties of half the British officers at the bridge and ending Laurie’s fragile control over his detachment. Redcoats began leaking to the rear, and soon all three companies broke toward Concord, abandoning some of their wounded. “We was obliged to give way,” an ensign acknowledged, “then run with the greatest precipitance.” Amos Barrett reported that the British were “running and hobbling about, looking back to see if we was after them.”

      Battle smoke draped the river. Three minutes of gunplay had cost five American casualties, including two dead. For the British, eight were wounded and two killed, but another badly hurt soldier, trying to regain his feet, was mortally insulted by minuteman Ammi White, who crushed his skull with a hatchet.

      A peculiar quiet descended over what the poet James Russell Lowell would call “that era-parting bridge,” across which the old world passed into the new. Some militiamen began to pursue the fleeing British into Concord, but then veered from the road to shelter behind a stone wall. Most wandered back toward Punkatasset Hill, bearing the corpses of Davis and Abner Hosmer. “After the fire,” a private recalled, “everyone appeared to be his own commander.”

      Colonel Smith had started toward the river with grenadier reinforcements, then thought better of it and trooped back into Concord. The four companies previously sent with Captain Parsons to Barrett’s farm now trotted unhindered across the bridge, only to find the dying comrade mutilated by White’s ax, his brains uncapped. The atrocity grew in the retelling: soon enraged British soldiers claimed that he and others had been scalped, their noses and ears sliced off, their eyes gouged out.

      As Noah Parkhurst from Lincoln observed moments after the shooting stopped, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

      No fifes and drums would play the British back to Boston. From his command post in Wright Tavern, Smith, described by one of his lieutenants as “a very fat heavy man,” moved with unwonted agility in organizing the retreat. Badly wounded privates would be left to rebel mercy, but horse-drawn chaises for injured officers were wheeled out from Concord’s barns and stables. Troops filled their canteens, companies again arranged themselves in march order, and a final round of food and brandy was tossed back. Before noon the red procession headed east, silent and somber, every man aware that eighteen miles of danger lay ahead.

      The first mile proved almost tranquil. The road here was wide enough—four rods, or sixty-six feet—for the troops to march eight abreast, in a column stretching three hundred yards or more. Using tactics honed during years of combat in North American woodlands, scores of light infantry flankers swept through the tilled fields and apple orchards, stumbling over frost-heaved rocks while searching for rebel ambushers. “The country was an amazing strong one, full of hills, woods, stone walls, &c.,” Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own would tell his diary. “They were so concealed there was hardly any seeing them.”

      But the rebels were there. Arrowhead Ridge loomed above the north side of the road, offering a sheltered corridor through the Great Fields for hundreds of militiamen hurrying from North Bridge to Meriam’s Corner. Here the road narrowed to a causeway across boggy ground, canalizing and slowing the column. Skirmishers in slouch hats could be seen loping behind outbuildings and across the pastures and meadows. British soldiers wheeled and fired, but again threw their shot high. “This ineffectual fire gave the rebels more confidence,” one officer observed. A return volley killed two redcoats and wounded several more. Some officers dismounted to be less conspicuous; the morning had demonstrated how American marksmen—“with the most unmanly barbarity,” a redcoat complained—already had begun targeting those with shiny gorgets at their necks and the bright vermilion coats commonly worn by the higher ranks.

      Now the running gun battle began in earnest, with crackling musketry and spurts of smoke and flame. The provincial ranks swelled to a thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, more by the hour—“monstrous numerous,” a British soldier would write to his mother. The road—Battle Road, as it would be remembered—angled past Joshua Brooks’s tannery; the smell of tannins rose from the pits, drying racks, and currier shop, and a sharper odor wafted from the nearby slaughterhouse that sluiced offal into Elm Brook. Just to the east, past where the wetlands had been ditched and drained to create a hay meadow, the road began to climb through a cut made in the brow of a wooded hill, then nearly doubled back on itself in a hairpin loop soon known as the Bloody Curve. Here was “a young growth of wood well-filled with Americans,” a minuteman wrote. “The enemy was now completely between two fires.”

      Plunging fire gashed the column; grazing fire raked it. Men primed, loaded, and shot as fast as their fumbling hands allowed. A great nimbus of smoke rolled across the crest of the hill. Bullets nickered and pinged, and some hit flesh with the dull thump of a club beating a heavy rug. Militiamen darted from behind stone walls to snatch muskets and cartridge boxes from eight dead redcoats and several wounded who lay writhing in the Bloody Curve. One regular later acknowledged in a letter home that the rebels “fought like bears.” An American private reported seeing a wounded grenadier stabbed repeatedly by passing militiamen so that “blood was flowing from many holes in his waistcoat.” He later reflected, “Our men seemed maddened with the sight of British blood, and infuriated

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