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Israel thought he had never seen such a sight as when the British came out of Boston. He had seen professional soldiers and their weapons before, but never had he witnessed the full pomp of war. The uniforms of the enemy were brilliant, as bright and ruddy as blood, and there were many of them, so many. More than thirty barges moved across the channel in orderly rows, oars flashing to a steady beat, as everything moved to that beat. In the bows were bright brass cannon and bright jagged stacks of bayonets that reflected every fragment of the noonday sun. This was a juggernaut, an unbelievable machine designed for harm, and it was coming to embrace them in battle.

Until then the greatest danger on the hill had been the cannon from the ships in the river that were augmented by big fieldpieces that began to boom from the heights of the town. They kept up a steady pounding throughout the morning hours that increased to a frenzy as the barges moved across the water.

When the British troops reached the shore, forty men to a boat, they disembarked by the inlet near the point, dropping in close ranks along the slope of Moulton's Hill.

That was when the American cannon should have answered, carving up those gaudy uniforms like candy, but there was no artillery on Breed's Hill. Some six pieces arrived in the late morning. The artillerists fired a few rounds into Boston, most landing short, then with their cannon and horses began to withdraw.

Prescott went into a rage at the retreat—he threatened to shoot the artillery major—but when it was clear he would not take that last step, the company packed up and went, leaving nothing between the enemy and the works but the good aim of Minutemen.

The only soldiers who paid the colonel any mind were his own men and the ones who had come to respect him. Prescott sent back to Cambridge by every means, including General Putnam on a horse, demanding supplies, reinforcements, powder and ball. But nothing came. Hour after hour saw less men on the hill and less of every necessity. It was as if everyone but the enemy had forgotten them.

And for a time it seemed even the British did not care. After forming up on the plain, the redcoats settled down in place while their barges went back across the channel to find more men in Boston. They undid their big packs and sat down in company formation as if they were on an outing in the country.

"Look," said Elias. "They're stopping for bloody luncheon."

From what Israel could see Elias was right. "How do you think they can eat at a time like this?"

"Orders."

Nor did it matter if they were swallowing and throwing the food back up. What they were saying was they were about a job, and nothing would interfere with it.

At least the British had something to put under those wide crossbelts. The men on the hill had seen no food—and very little liquid—for hours. Elias and Israel had just returned from digging at the breastwork when a cannonball with fate written all over it blew apart the last two barrels of drinking water.

The blast also blew apart a lieutenant as he helped two men lift the barrels over the wall. It was accounted a miracle the others went unharmed, a fact that was discovered when they stopped screaming and scraped the pieces of the lieutenant away. The ones who survived had all been within arm's length of him, but that distance was the thickness of the dirt walls.

So Putnam had been right: the works protected the men. Most of the cannonballs plowed harmlessly into the hill, or the walls, or went overhead through the trees, landing well beyond the redoubt.

The only thing missing was Putnam himself, and shortly that changed when the general, in company with a man in a pale blue coat, rode up to the redoubt on horseback. The men who had the best view sent up cheers at their arrival, though they were not calling for "Old Put!" Instead, they were saying: "It's Warren! Joseph Warren's here!"

Israel harkened to the call, for he knew of the man. Warren was the head of the Committee of Safety and the President of the Massachusetts Congress. He was the physician who said they would have to wade in blood to gain their freedom—the man of words who formed the network that sent Paul Revere riding into the night with the warning.

And he looked like an angel of the host. His fair hair and blue eyes matched the color of his coat and its yellow fringe. His carriage was as perfectly cast as the sword at his side and his cordovan boots. Standing beside Putnam and Prescott, two harried warriors, he seemed out of place, yet his presence did not diminish those around him.

Israel did not understand why the great man was on the hill with the British in sight less than a mile away. Disbelief turned to wonder when Warren accepted a musket by its butt from Prescott and took up a position at the fire-steps on the leading edge of the redoubt.

Soon a captain came along with the word that Warren had no further plans for the day. "He's staying on the hill," said the captain. "Warren's with us! He's the ranking general of the Massachusetts militia, but he's put himself under Prescott's command, like all of us!"

Elias looked at Israel, smiling. "Well, we can't say he's just another gun."

"No. But we could use a few more like him."

"It could be we'll get them." Elias shook the head of red hair that was dirt-brown now. "They wouldn't let the doctor come out if they weren't going to send us help."

The man next at the wall was Jonathan Andrews. Although he was looking away when he spoke, they heard the cutting edge in his voice. "I hope you're right, Elias. Meanwhile, you better look at this."

Elias followed Jonathan's eyes to the British on the plain. The enemy had not moved from the circles of their last supper, but beyond their ranks a second wave of troops came from Boston in barges that nearly filled the channel. The sight moved Elias to silence.

By and bye it moved Israel to a stranger place. He felt the bird-walk in his stomach and the tingling in his scalp and the way the two came together in his hands. He did not imagine it could be worse—that he could feel more without dying—when a tremendous cry went up at his back, and he almost did it—died—because his heart splashed so in his chest.

The men in the redoubt were moving toward the rear wall. They were screaming and cheering. By the time Israel and Elias and Jonathan fought to a place where they could see, the news had passed along the line. Whole companies of Minutemen were reeling up the road from the Neck at quick march, a hundred, two hundred, perhaps more.

"Here's New Hampshire!" said someone in front. "It's General Stark come with reinforcements!"

Men were crowding Israel from behind, forcing him against the rear of the works. He did not realize until someone stepped on his foot that the man to his right was Colonel Prescott. The bald warrior looked like he had already been in a fight. His yellow duster was a doggy brown, streaked with dirt and probably blood.

"I want a volunteer!" shouted Prescott. "One man!"

"Take me, sir!"

Elias said that. He grasped Prescott by the arm, jerking it twice.

"Private Scott, you will go to General Stark at once and tell him in my name that he's to occupy the low ground between the breastworks and the water. He's to fortify as best he's able. And quickly."

"Yes, sir!"

In a trice, Elias was gone, bolting through the sally port at the back of the redoubt, running hunched over, veering toward the regiment of New Hampshire men who were streaming down the ridge from Bunker's Hill.

Elias had not said goodbye. He had not looked back.

When William Howe came across with the second detachment of troops, he walked to the top of Moulton's Hill. With his glass, he saw a mass of rebel troops descending the eastern slope of Breed's Hill and knew his plan to skirt the flank would find opposition where none had been anticipated. The rebels had not only put up further works on the hill, but were fortifying a rail fence that carried down to a shelf of land near the Mystic River.

Yet Howe saw no reason to give up his plan. The rebel left should still be carried. To counter their deployment, he dispatched eleven companies of light infantry to within a quarter-mile of the rebel position along the Mystic. These were picked men, the best, led by companies of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the very best. There would be no firing. The flank would be taken in a bayonet charge—a swift moving wall of steel.

Rolling up the flank was the key, but Howe assigned General Pigot with thirty-seven companies to go against the rebel right and the redoubt. The attack on the rail fence would be led by Howe with thirty-eight companies. As the light infantry broke the rebel left and moved to an encirclement, the assault would carry the hill.

But shortly after Pigot's wing was in place at the foot of the hill, Major Pitcairn of the marines appeared with an urgent message.

"Sir, General Pigot wishes to inform General Howe that his men are taking sniper fire from the village."

"Accurate fire?"

"Three men killed, sir, a dozen wounded. The general feels that his advance must be retarded by the fire."

Howe returned his glass of claret to Evans, his batman. He gestured with his loose glove to Lieutenant Page, his aide.

"Send a message to Admiral Graves." Howe pointed again with the glove, so useless in the heat, to the left, where Charlestown stood below the high bluffs. "Tell him I should like that town burnt."

"With all speed, sir!"

But Howe was unconcerned with speed. The British Army did not depend for success on communications, weapons, or even competence. The fifty-pound packs each man carried guaranteed no advance would be swift. The lack of proper sights meant no musket could be aimed to proper effect. Only discipline—the fusion of will through every mind and body—would see them clear.

Toward that end, Howe had the deserters brought forward by Sergeant-Major Follens. Follens, imported specially from England by Howe, was the nature of the beast. Six feet three inches plus his bearskin cap, nearly that broad in his grenadier shoulder-wings, festooned with a matchbox, bayonet and hanger, his appearance had been known to cause rigid panic in the ranks.

"Sir!" said Follens at the head of the small wretched column. "These are the men captured while trying to desert to the enemy."

Howe spoke to the men with no emphasis. "Were you aware of the order given before we left Boston that deserters would be executed?"

None of the men answered. For most of them, the army had been their last chance and the means of their release from prison. So it was that this American campaign called forth the worst from the common people.

Howe turned and scanned the area surrounding the short apron of Moulton's Hill. To the left was an area of significant vegetation. On the edge of the scabrous marshland near the head of the inlet and in full view of the troops stood a broad, heavy-boughed tree. An oak. The Tree of England.

He turned to the deserters and pointed absolutely at random. "Hang these two, Sergeant-Major. Return the rest to the ranks. You will then call the guard to arms."

When Elias reached General Stark with the message from Prescott, he found the sum of it unnecessary. Stark, a man of fifty years with eyebrows as black and bushy as his hair, had already ordered his men to the rail fence on the left. He said he could damned well see—"with no help from a Massachusetts colonel"—where the men were wanted.

The need was clear. The only troops occupying the ground toward the river were a few Connecticut militia under a flag that said: "An Appeal to Heaven." Even with the fence and three small fleches that had been thrown up, the Connecticut men were spread so thin that any attack would dislodge them and collapse the flank.

"Get those haycocks up against the fence!" said Stark in a booming voice. "I want the biggest scarecrow in New England right here! And I want every damned rock you can lay your hands on piled here, too!"

Elias could not have named the moment when he decided to stay on with Stark at the fence, because he really never thought about it. He was caught up in the activity. A Rhode Island private joined the New Hampshire men gathering new-mown hay, carrying rocks from the other fences and unearthing more, piling them against the rail fence until it looked like a real bulwark from any distance.

They were still engaged to the task when Stark took his sword from its scabbard and pointed into the distance toward the narrow shore of sand and rock that ran from a few yards beyond the rail fence.

"There they are, boys! Behold! Satan assumes his color and form!"

And there they were only five hundred yards away. The British marched up the shore as if on parade. Black in the shoes and spatterdashes, white in the stockings and breeches, bright red in the coats, they seemed to be hundreds, and they were moving quickly. If they had kept coming up the beach, everything might have been lost in that moment.

But the column stopped suddenly and stood down less than a quarter of a mile away. That was unbelievable, and would be unbelievable for as long as Elias lived. Relief soughed along the rail fence like a soft wind only to find its end in Stark.

"Every fourth man!" he shouted. "I want every fourth down on the beach!"

A captain named McClary, the biggest human being that Elias had ever seen, more than six-and-a-half feet tall, went along the fence tapping every fourth man on the shoulder. Elias felt the tap, looked back at that man as big as an ox-cart, and moved down the slope to a small cliff, where he dropped onto the shingle shore that clicked and tocked with each step. Directly ahead was the massed column of redcoats.

A moment later, rocks were coming from all directions, some from the ledge above and some from further along the shore. McClary picked up boulders from the shallow water, eighty pounds apiece, flinging them like cow-pies in a heap. Stark scrambled down the ledge, hectoring everyone in sight.

"Every stone is a life for us! Every stone is a grave for them! Pile them high! All the way to the water! Higher! Higher!"

Elias worked feverishly, lifting, carrying, knowing for the first time that the bane of New England—the filthy rocks arising from its nearly useless soil—had finally become a simple good. The wall grew to his knees, then to his navel, and finally to his chest and the arms that ached so badly so quickly.

As he worked, Elias kept watch for the British down the beach. They did not advance. They must have seen the activity, yet still they did not budge.

"Now, you scab-eating pox-ridden bastards!" screamed Stark. "Come hither! Come meet your widow-maker!"

Stark waded out into the water around the wall and began to walk up the stony beach toward the enemy. He took ten paces, twenty, and thirty, until Elias thought the White Mountain general had gone mad.

Stark stopped as if he faced a sudden drop from a height. He took his sword in one hand, a long stick in the other, and cursed into the wind at the British holding to their posts. Stark drove the stick into the beach between two rocks about forty yards from the wall before he turned and walked back at parade march, daring the enemy's aim until he reached safety behind the wall again.

"That stick is your mark!" he said. "When they pass it, fire! And not before! Patience wins the day!"

So they waited. Stark formed them up three lines deep and they waited.

Charlestown was burning.

The guns from the ships in the river poured red-hot shot into the town, and afterward some of the sailors came ashore and set fire to the buildings that had escaped the bombardment. Word said that the fire was set because of snipers, but Israel did not believe an entire town and the lifetime possessions of its inhabitants would be destroyed over a few stray musket balls. No, the fires had been set for another reason. The British were telling America that the whole country would be put to the torch unless the rebellion ended. That they would all burn for their freedom.

Meanwhile, the flames gathered force faster than a sound mind could imagine, leaping the sides of the shops and houses, moving as strangely as all things unseen and jumping from the crown of one wooden building to the next, climbing everything including itself. As Israel watched in anger and in awe, he saw the tall steeple of the church rising, trying to free itself of the terror that tore at its sides.

That could not have happened as it came to his eyes, but as Israel watched the growing conflagration he saw something more incredible—a piece of it flew off. He could not be sure what he had seen at such a distance, but it seemed that pieces of flames and smoke were moving at a quickening pace from the outskirts of the town into an open field. Therefore: the pieces were alive.

And burning. Israel felt the force that had gripped his belly for the last hour tighten and yes, burn. Was it a horse he had seen? Or a man? That seemed important to know. It seemed even more important to know if that thing was screaming in the tongue of horse or man.

Suddenly, the rolling flames went out, down, doused in the field of green. A new and booming cloud of smoke obliterated every edge, reaching into the field like hell's dirty squall. Israel's vision collapsed. Smoke from the town boomed in dense clouds that did not scatter in the afternoon heat but rose and drifted darker across the hills. The smoke reached the redoubt like the ashes of a dreamy fire. It was so thick it obscured the sight of the army gathered on the plain.

For the British had come out. One light column moved down the beach toward the left flank of the American lines and halted. Another column skirted the bottom of the hill and hid in a hollow. Then the whole body that was left mustered in long red rows facing the hill. They seemed to be waiting for God knows what.

When nothing more was to be done, Howe decided to commence the assault. He would have liked the gunboats in the river to support the infantry on the beach, but the current could not be breasted. He would have liked the support of his fieldpieces, but was told that the side-boxes had been filled with twelve-pound balls instead of the proper six.

Yet in spite of miscalculations the numbers were sufficient. Rank-and-file near sixteen hundred. Drawn up in a perfect line, with no artillery fire from the hill, the idea that these soldiers might fail to take their objective was unthinkable.

All that remained was for Howe to give the order of battle to his officers. "The Light infantry will move in a flying column along the beach. Theirs will be the first engagement. The Forty-Fifth and Forty-Seventh against the fleches on the right. My Fifth and Fifty-Second to carry the rail fence. Gentlemen, you have your orders."

As his officers dispersed to their positions, Howe moved to the head of the double line of men that covered half the peninsula in full battle array. He turned to them for the traditional address.

"Gentlemen, I am proud to have the honor to lead so fine a body of men. I know you will do your duty as loyal subjects of the king. And I promise you will not go one step farther than I go myself!"

Howe wheeled to face the enemy. As the drums beat "To Arms," he took the first step on the march that would bring George III his first victory of the American war.

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