Bunker Hill

by Howard Fast

  “Why?” Clinton wanted to know.

  “Two reasons,” Gage said. “First of all, they’re led by a cold-blooded and nasty son of a bitch named Israel Putnam. We trained the old bastard ourselves, back in the French wars, and now he’s giving it back to us. He’s hard and heartless, and I offered to make him a rich man if he’d come over to us. Second reason—do any of you know what the levelers are?”

  “Half a notion,” said Howe. “Back in Cromwell’s time, wasn’t it? A daft set of loonies, if I remember right.”

  “Well, it’s a current disease in Connecticut. Pure and simple hatred of anyone who has more than two shillings. No proper New Englander, mind you. A Boston man will sell his mother, if you can only make the price right, and there’s nobody worships money and rank like these Yankees, with all their talk of equality. But these levelers are something else indeed. They have a thing about equality.

  No rich, no poor. Or put it all poor. Every man on the same level. Every piece of property the same. It’s a madness with them.”

  “And when you face muskets in the hands of those,” said Clinton, “it will be no ruffle of drums to send them running. You mark my words.”

  “Who else is there?” Burgoyne asked.

  “Over here,” Gage said. “Stark and six or seven hundred men out of New Hampshire Grants. They put them back a few miles because maybe old Artemas Ward don’t know what to do with them. They are a most peculiar lot, you know, some of them just riffraff, but most of them a crazy Presbyterian lot, and they don’t rightly hold their land with any clear title. That, by the way, is the crux of it with half the men out there—a deadly fear of losing their land with the shaky title they have, and so help me God, if we could guarantee title to all their holdings, you could go home and drink your port in peace. But these men from the Grants with Stark are riflemen and bloody good marksmen, and I have seen them pop the head off a turkey at a hundred paces. They are an ignorant, bigoted lot out of the woods, buckskin men who live half like animals, but if they were on that road back from Concord, not one of my men would have returned from Boston.”

  “I am not bugged by riflemen,” Howe said. “They have to reload, and that’s the business of ramming down the lead. Give them a touch of cold steel and they’ll run like bloody rabbits.”

  “Well, let me tell you this,” Clinton interjected. “I have seen them at it. They’ll make a line of the hundred best marksmen, and the rest will simply load. That means they will fire every ten seconds, and there is nothing like it.”

  “I have seen that,” Gage agreed, “but they will not stand in an open field. You know, that’s the maxim of that old bastard Putnam, that the Yankee, having an empty head, don’t give two damns for it, so if you put him behind a stone wall or a log of wood he’s brave as a lion. But his legs and belly are another matter, and he will not have them shot at. They were lined up across the field at Lexington, and at the first shots they ran like rabbits, but coming back, they were behind the walls, and that was a horse of another color.”

  “Did you try to buy John Stark?” Howe wondered. “He’s a good man, you know.”

  “I sent him a letter,” Thomas Gage said, “offering him a hundred golden guineas and his own ranger commission. I told him that if he raised a company of five hundred men, I would uniform them and pay them. He replied in two words.”

  Burgoyne raised a brow. “Two words?”

  “‘Fuck you.’ It’s standard King’s English with them, and they suffer a paucity of vocabulary. Do you know old Putnam’s order to his men? It has become a sort of slogan with them. Let me quote him: ‘If one of you fuckin’ shitheads shows his ass to the enemy, I will slice his balls off personally.’ And they love it. The old man has the reputation of the foulest mouth in the colonies.”

  “I wouldn’t call it paucity of vocabulary,” Burgoyne said.

  “Perhaps not,” Gage continued. “Still, it always strikes me as an odd concomitant of their Puritanism. They say Boston has the highest percentage of whores of any city in the empire, and while that may be an exaggeration, it is a most peculiar element of their holiness. That about does it,” he said, pointing to the map. “Over here, to the north of Willis Creek, there’s a chap called Reed, with another band of New Hampshire men, facing this little neck of land to Charlestown.”

  “What’s in Charlestown, Thomas?” Clinton asked.

  “It’s a deserted village. It was a rebel stronghold, and they all cleared out of it. I suppose the houses are empty now. They were last week when I sent a company through it.”

  “Why didn’t you occupy it?” Howe asked.

  “Because I don’t want to loot it.” Gage explained. “You can’t put soldiers into an empty town and expect them not to loot it. Hell, you couldn’t put saints into an empty town and ask them to keep hands off, and these people are insane on the subject of looting. With all their fine talk of liberty, it’s property they worship. Take a piece of silver or china and they go mad.”

  “Why don’t they occupy it?”

  “It’s all wood, shingle, and siding. One broadside of hot shot and it goes up in flames. So we leave it alone.”

  They stared at the map in silence for a while, and then Clinton pointed to the delicate topographical swirls beyond the village of Charlestown. “This hill?”

  “Breed’s Hill. And just beyond it, Bunker Hill.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why don’t we occupy it?”

  “Never occurred to me,” Gage admitted. “I mean, what for?”

  “Then the whole harbor is ours.”

  “Interesting,” Howe said.

  “It’s a question of what we intend to do here and how long we stay here,” Gage said, “and I’m damned if I know the answer to either question. We have three thousand men. They have fifteen thousand. If we split up and go into the Charlestown Neck, we’re no better off and a lot thinner.”

  “With the marines we muster better than three thousand,” Howe said. “Suppose they occupy Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill. That would be sticky, wouldn’t it?”

  Staring at the map, Clinton said, “That would be the answer to our prayers, Sir William. We would cut them off and let them starve, and your whole bloody rebellion would collapse like a bag of wind.”

  “What makes you think they would sit there and starve?” Howe asked.

  “What else could they do? We put our ordnance here on Copp’s Hill, bring up ships and barges, cut them off by water, and turn that little bridge of land into pure hellfire.” He glanced at Burgoyne. “Not to your taste, is it, Johnny?”

  “You don’t win wars that way.”

  “You win a war any bloody way you can.”

  “I’m afraid I agree with Johnny,” Howe said. “They have a vision, which I suppose we gave them.” He turned to Gage. “I don’t speak in criticism. Heaven knows, you could not have anticipated what happened at Concord, but the plain fact of the matter is that they ran our asses off. We have the best damn army in the world, and that is not boasting or vainglory. It’s a matter of plain fact, which the world knows, and as far as I am concerned, the world must continue to know. I never wanted this rotten mess. My sentiments are with the colonies, and I have never made a secret of that, gentlemen. But the fact remains that they have a vision of a British army running like a pack of beaten dogs, and all Europe knows and all Europe is farting with delight. What if we starve a few thousand of them into surrender? What will it change? No, sir! We must see these bleeding bastards face-to-face.”

  “Hear! Hear!” cried Burgoyne.

  “Does that finish it, or does that start it?” Clinton wondered.

  “Devil only knows,” Gage said hopelessly. “It’s inconceivable that they want to make a war with us. There’s no reason for war. Their complaints are petty, and we’ve given into one demand after another. Except land,” he added hopelessly. “God knows, there’s enough land out there for everyone. Most of it never touch
ed or explored. They want it, and the Crown wants it. They are a stiff-necked, ignorant, and vulgar people—and righteous. They are the most righteous folk on the face of this earth. I know, gentlemen.” He sighed. “I married one of them. I’m sure you know that my wife is a Kemble, out of New Jersey, and while they are not this devilish Puritan strain down there, they share the arrogance.”

  Margaret Gage came into the room in time to hear the last of this conversation. Clinton saw her enter and noticed how her face tightened and her body stiffened.

  “General Gage,” she said very formally to her husband.

  He reddened and rose with the others to face her.

  “I have no desire to interrupt important councils, and I know your distinguished companions speak of nothing but matters of the greatest import, still, we are all of us to be at dinner with Reverend Hallsbury at eight o’clock. There is only time to change.”

  “Of course, my dear. I had forgotten.”

  She turned and left the room. Howe wanted to know who Reverend Hallsbury was.

  “Very important High Church. He’s the grandson of Lord Hallsbury, the old man in Suffolk who died a few years ago. He’s it with the handful who are totally loyal.”

  “Also,” Burgoyne added, “a young wife whose fire he stokes poorly. By God, she’s a beauty—gifted as the fairies are, and with a magnificent pair of tits.”

  Clinton noticed how uncomfortable Gage had become. Too long among the Presbyterians and too long away from London. The disgraceful, running reteat from Concord only two months ago, a British army chivied and torn to shreds by a pack of loutish farmers, had broken his ego. The empire’s response to his disgrace was to send to his aid the three brightest lights in the British military, all of them men who had fought in America during the French and Indian Wars. Gage would not cross Burgoyne, or any of them, and this was a pity, Clinton thought, since he was the only one among them who had any real knowledge of the situation.

  Gage saw them to the door. Howe had a house of his own, as befitting his ranking position; Clinton and Burgoyne were quartered together in a fine brick house that had belonged to a cousin of James Otis’s and which he had vacated some weeks before. They walked there together, followed by four grenadiers—a fact that irked Burgoyne.

  “It’s a pain in the ass, Sir Henry,” Burgoyne remarked. “I’ll talk to Gage about it. He’s an old woman. It’s utterly ridiculous, walking around this city and trailing a military guard.”

  Clinton agreed with him. “Of course you could simply take off, the way Sir William does.” “We’re none of us Sir William, are we?” Burgoyne smiled. “I was a bit of an ass before, wasn’t I?”

  “I’ve forgotten the whole matter,” Clinton replied.

  “That’s jolly good of you.”

  “I think we’re a bit tight underneath, aren’t we? It’s the strangest damn place. I grew up in the colonies, but that gave me no intimacy. I was the governor’s son, and that set me apart.” “It’s the emptiness of the place that does it,” Burgoyne com

  mented. “Ever been in a half-empty town before?”

  “In Germany,” Clinton remembered. “Bizarre.”

  “Notice the damn bloody dogs. Always slinking around.”

  They were at their quarters now, and each went to his rooms. Clinton’s quarters, on the second floor of the house, were hot and airless. He began to sweat the moment he entered his sitting room. Where the devil was O’Brian? Why hadn’t he aired the place? Why weren’t his clothes laid out? He was irritable, tired, and then it occurred to him that he experienced this state of mind whenever there was a portend of disaster. But what conceivable disaster? Out in the harbor lay a mighty British fleet. The three generals had brought with them from England fifteen hundred of the best troops in the world. Add that to the fifteen hundred troops already at Gage’s disposal and there were better than three thousand.

  He tore himself out of his reverie and shouted for O’Brian, and when there was no response, he stormed out of the room and down the stairs two at a time. He felt some relief in the use of his body and his muscles. He was forty-five years old and going to fat, but a look in his mirror pleased him, with its reflection of blond hair and a boyish face. Outside the scullery, he heard the shrill voice of O’Brian’s wife.

  “Devil take you, me boyo! You sit on your bloody ass, and here I am with five shirts and twelve singlets and all the stinking lace that adorns the high and the mighty and you tell me I am a slut not to have it finished. Call me a slut once more and as sure as Mary is the mother of God, I’ll cut your bleeding heart out.”

  “It was a loose word came from me lips.”

  “Loose words and loose britches. Ah, ye make me sick.”

  “And what are you, me lass? Some shining inspiration?”

  “O’Brian!” Clinton shouted, and then entered the room, reflecting on the curious madness of the British military that allowed wives to accompany their husbands overseas. Mary O’Brian sputtered her apologies. She was a large, stout woman, quite comely but with most of her teeth missing. Her husband was lean, fox-faced, and given to stealing anything he could. Yet he was a good servant and a good soldier, with a sergeant’s rank and twenty years of military experience behind him.

  “Sure, and what the devil was I thinking?” O’Brian said. “It’s the time that does me an injustice, and me thinking it’s no more than noon and at least two hours before Your Excellency would be coming.”

  “It is six o’clock in the afternoon,” said Clinton. “I want hot water and my dress uniform and clean linen, and so help me, I will break you if it is not ready and waiting in half an hour.”

  He turned on his heel and mounted the stairs again. In his bedroom, he stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes and looked at himself in the mirror. The roll of fat around his belly was fast becoming a paunch. He kneaded the belly fat with his hands and regarded himself with disgust and despair.

  O’Brian entered with a tub of hot water and began to rub down Clinton’s back and buttocks with a hot towel. Suddenly, Clinton found himself staring at the rug and at the spreading pool of dampness. It was a Chinese rug, a pale blue background decorated with intertwining dragons, a thousand pounds in the best London carpet shop and probably brought from China by one of those incredible Yankee square riggers that roamed the whole world as if it were theirs without doubt or question; and suddenly he was aware of the seat of his disquiet and misgiving—the arrogance of these people, not guts or gallantry but simply an astonishing and righteous arrogance that he alone among the four generals appeared to sense and respond to.

  “Goddamn you,” he exploded at O’Brian, “we are not in a stable, you stupid Irish sot! See what you are doing to the rug—if you know what a rug is! Get me a towel to put under my feet and stop slopping the bloody water.”

  “Yes, sir, Your Excellency. Goddamn me for a pig, and not knowing even the smell of the finer things,” he said, leaping into the next room and returning with a thick towel for Clinton to stand on. “There ye are, me lord. Sure as there is a God in heaven, ye’ll be giving me thirty lashes for the stupidity of me behavior.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Clinton said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He washed Clinton expertly. Lost in his own thoughts, Clinton stood there while O’Brian parted his buttocks, lifted the testicles and penis, washing and currying him as a mother washes a child. His wife came into the room, carrying the freshly ironed linen, paying no more attention to the naked general than she might have given a piece of furniture. But suddenly Clinton was aroused, not only conscious of her but hot with desire.

  “Get me my robe!” he snapped at O’Brian.

  As if O’Brian had a map of every nerve in his body, he grinned as he handed the robe to Clinton, and Mary O’Brian, laying out the linen, watched the general covertly as he covered himself. O’Brian went after her as she left the room, and at the door out of the sitting room, he whispered to her, “Now there’s a bit of humping would make me a
master sergeant before ye could say Paddy’s pig, and it ain’t no small thing, me love, to have a bastard out of the nobility.”

  “You’re a dirty louse, O’Brian.” She swept off, grinning out of her toothless mouth.

  As for Clinton, he had been dead for weeks, and now he was wonderfully alive, his blood coursing through his veins, his sex throbbing, his mind filled with pictures of taking the great, fat Irish woman to bed. Watching him, O’Brian read his thoughts and made his own plans. Clinton did not dwell upon what had happened to him. He simply allowed himself to fall into the fact that it had happened, and reserving Mary O’Brian and thoughts of her for the future, he began to dwell on Reverend Hallsbury’s wife. His pique faded. It would be an exciting evening. By and large, he had found no pleasure in Boston women. They were dull, narrow, obsessed with their own tiny class structure.

  He was almost dressed, O’Brian hovering over him, when Lieutenant Parker, Burgoyne’s aide, entered and told him that the general was waiting. Parker was a pink-cheeked, handsome, ebullient lad of twenty. He took the occasion to observe to Clinton how positively splendid he looked, as indeed he did in his scarlet coat, his white linen and lace, powdered wig, white silk trousers, and fine boots.

  “Well, Parker, an old man does his best, doesn’t he?”

  “My good fortune to look like you someday, sir.”

  “Well said.” Clinton smiled. “You’ll do, Parker.”

  Clinton and Burgoyne were the last of the guests to arrive, and even as the servant ushered them into Reverend Hallsbury’s rather splendid sitting room, Clinton noticed Howe deep in conversation with one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, a tall, slender, but full-breasted blonde with bright blue eyes and exquisite features. Unquestionably, Clinton decided, she was the reverend’s wife. Nor was he at all disturbed by Howe’s initial place on the starting line. He had no small opinion of himself in that direction when it came to William Howe, or to Johnny Burgoyne, for that matter. The reverend himself was a gray-haired, turning-white gentleman in his middle sixties. He had his own money from his family, and it was reflected in the imported furniture, the rugs, the silver, the great chandelier, which held at least a hundred candles, the diamond set in the cross that hung on a gold chain from his neck, and the simple string of priceless pearls his wife wore.