At half past eleven the men of Gerry’s company paraded on the Common, splendid in scarlet and white and brass, equipped with full kit, blankets, and three days’ rations, and drawn up beside them were fifteen hundred more. The ships’ guns still roared away, and every now and then a terrible blast let go from the battery on Copp’s Hill.
“They say it’s only a handful of farmers,” muttered Jack Higgs. “I’d not think they could stand such punishment for long.”
Gerry looked at Boston Common, the rambling field that had become so familiar to him in the past year: the crooked cowpaths, and the little pond, and the thick clumps of juniper and steeplebush, so handy to come upon when you were walking in the moonlight with a girl; the gravel strip where the officers still raced their horses, in spite of all the town fathers could do. He looked at the gabled mansions and quaint, crooked houses round, as if he never expected to see them any more.
“The Yankees’ll take more punishment than you’d think for,” he said.
Once on the water, the barges from Long Wharf joined with the barges from the North Battery, twenty-eight of them moving in two long parallel lines, filled with scarlet-coated men. In the leading boats were two polished brass field pieces, and the noonday sun struck everywhere on colorful banners and gleaming arms. For the Tories in Boston, it must have been a splendid sight, but Gerry turned his eyes toward the Charlestown peninsula as the troops were rowed across the blue bay.
Smoke and flame and awful sound kept pouring forth from the great guns of the fleet—the Somerset, the Falcon, the Lively. Dimly through the barrage he could see the little village where he had gone drinking at the Bay and Beagle and courting in the graveyard under the spring moon. On the hill above it, grown up overnight like a mushroom, stood a small square earthworks, silent, except for one erratic cannon that spoke now and then. Black dots of men moved about the earthworks, but no columns issued forth drawn up in battle array, no reinforcements poured in from any side.
Gerry’s spirits rose and he cleared his throat. “Is that,” he asked the sergeant, “the great fortification we’re all ordered out to tear down?”
The sergeant laughed grimly. “Don’t look very fearsome, does it?” he agreed. “But after the way they run us back through Lexington, I don’t trust them devils.”
“And I thought it was Bunker Hill instead of Breed’s they’d be likely to fortify,” went on Gerry. “That’s how we would have chosen. But that’s Bunker Hill, standing up behind there, bare as a plate. The little dugout is on Breed’s Hill, below.”
“Breed’s or Bunker makes no difference now,” said Sergeant Higgs. “Keep your cartridges dry in the landing. We’re headed in towards shore.”