Free Bunker Hill by Howard Fast Page A

hobby of his.”
    Feversham
could hardly believe his ears. “How old is this Harry Knox?”
    “How old
is Harry, Artemus?”
    “Twenty-two?”
    “No, he must be older than that. Twenty-three
at least.”
    “Then he
never fought with guns.”
    “Now look
here, Feversham,” Warren said a bit testily. “We are not an army. Good heavens,
we have to make out, don’t we? Well, we do what we can. We do have two cannon,
small ones, and Harry Knox has been drilling with those guns for two months
now. He’s a hardheaded young man with guts, and if he says he’ll bring those
guns here, by God he will.”
    “When?”
    “In two
weeks, three weeks at the most.”
    Feversham
said, “Then how in hell’s name can you hold that Charlestown island for two or three weeks without guns? And when he brings the guns, how are you
going to get them there? There’s only the narrow neck of land connecting it,
and the British would be a pack of bloody fools if they didn’t bring their
ships in and cover the causeway.”
    “The water’s too shallow for their big ships,” Warren
protested. “Then they’ll use gun floats and flatboats. I have seen that
operation. They can put a twenty-four-pound cannon where there’s a
    foot of water, and they can blow that causeway to pieces.
If you try to hold Bunker Hill or Breed’s Hill, they’ll bring up their guns and
blow you off without ever coming into musket range.”
    “Gridley
says he can build a redoubt,” Warren explained.
    “In full sight of the British?”
    “In one
night, he says.”
    “Gridley
is a good engineer,” Warren said. “Try to see our position, Feversham. You’re
from the outside, and we appreciate that. You can be objective. But we have to
do something.”
    “Why?”
    Both men
stared at Feversham in silence for a while before answering, and then Warren
shook his head and said that it would wash out.
    “Just wash out, Feversham. We can’t hold fifteen thousand men around Boston here. We can’t pay them, and
we can’t feed them, and now it’s time for the first cutting of the meadow grass,
and then it’s the first crops, and meanwhile, the wives are bitching like mad.
I suppose you could ask why not let it wash out, but we’re committed, and the
people down in Philadelphia know that we’re committed, and if it ends here, it
does so down the line. We have our dead, and we had our bloodletting. At
Lexington, they shot us down like dogs, and then we fought them, and there’s more dead to pay for that. We’re a close-knit lot, and it’s
a cousin here and a nephew there and a son and a husband. So we don’t just let
it wash out. There’s no way we could do that.”
    “If this
were a meeting of the Committee of Safety,” Ward said almost sadly, “you’d hear
us rave and rant. We make great orations to each other, and I suppose we do it
to keep up our nerve. But I am a sick and tired old man, Feversham, and tonight
I feel it in every bone. The God’s truth is that it makes me want to say, ‘Give
up and go home.’ But we can’t. We have been here for a hundred and fifty years,
and this is our place. They must go home, and here we must sit until they do.”
    “What about the other colonies—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the
South?” Feversham asked. “Will
they send men to help?”
    “God
knows.”
    “And if
they do, it will be next month or next year,” Warren said.
    “Then you
have to make a move,” Feversham agreed. “But why
Charlestown?”
    “What
else?”
    “Boston.
Seize the causeway at night. You have fifteen thousand men. The British have
less than four thousand. Pour into the city and take it back.”
    Ward shook
his head. “We have farm boys. They have soldiers.”
    “We can’t
attack,” Warren said hopelessly. “We don’t know how. It’s as simple as that.
Our men won’t go up against the regulars. They won’t go up against bayonets.”
    Staring at
the map, Feversham said, “The hill is a death trap. Surely you