Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 11

Sutherland or one of the men who were with him on the left may have fired the first shot-what seems to have been a warning shot that skipped across the surface of the river. Two more shots were fired, and then came the British volley.

In an engraving based on the testimony of eyewitnesses collected within weeks of the fighting, gray-brown powder smoke billows from the muskets of the regulars bunched on the narrow road to the right. To the left, on the west side of the river, are the militiamen, who have just reached the other side of the bridge, a crude hundred-foot arch of posts and boards. Beneath the bridge, the river flows past, a tranquil strip of blue between the two opposing columns.

The regulars' muskets had a muzzle velocity of approximately a thousand feet per second, meaning that the ball left the barrel at less than a third the speed of a bullet fired by a modern rifle. In an effort to offset the effects of gravity and increase the musket's range, the regulars tended to fire high. At the North Bridge, many of them fired too high.

Militiaman Amos Barrett of Concord remembered that "their b.a.l.l.s whistled well." Isaac Davis's brother Ezekiel's head was grazed when a bullet pa.s.sed through his hat. Virtually the same thing happened to Joshua Brooks of Lincoln. The many high, slashing wounds prompted one militiaman to conclude that "the British were firing jack-knives."

But some of the regulars had better aim. A ball that pa.s.sed under the arm of Lieutenant Colonel Robinson grazed the side of fifer Luther Blanchard before it hit the Concord minuteman Jonas Brown. Acton private Abner Hosmer was shot through the face and killed instantly. Captain Isaac Davis, marching in the front row beside Major b.u.t.trick and Lieutenant Colonel Robinson, was. .h.i.t in the chest, and the musket ball, which may have driven a shirt b.u.t.ton through an artery and out his back, opened up a gush of blood that extended at least ten feet behind him, drenching David Forbush and Thomas Thorp and covering the stones in front of the North Bridge with a slick of gore.

Captain David Brown had never uttered a profanity in his life, but when he realized that the regulars were firing with deadly intent, he could not help himself. "G.o.d d.a.m.n them," he cried, "they are firing b.a.l.l.s!"

Reverend William Emerson's house was on the east side of the river and overlooked the bridge. Just as Punkata.s.set Hill had become a gathering point for the women and children of Concord, so had his parsonage attracted a large number of the town's inhabitants. He'd spent much of the morning attending to these people-until his wife had huffily tapped on the windowpane and motioned for him to come inside and pay attention to her.

By the time the militiamen began to march toward the North Bridge, Emerson had walked from his house toward the river. When the first shots were fired, he was closer to the regulars than the nearest provincials, which meant that he had a clear view of the devastating volley that killed Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer.

A month before, on March 13, Emerson had delivered a sermon in which he a.s.sured his parishioners that "a consciousness of having acted up to the principles of our religion ... when we go forth to battle will be a most comfortable antidote against fear and cowardice, and serve to stimulate us to the most heroic actions." He believed every word of that sermon but still could not help but wonder how these farmers and artisans would respond to the volley. Later, he admitted to his fellow clergyman William Gordon that he was "very uneasy until he found that the fire was returned."

Major John b.u.t.trick leaped into the air and cried, "Fire, fellow soldiers, for G.o.d's sake fire!" According to Thaddeus Blood, "The cry of fire, fire was made from front to rear. The fire was almost simultaneous with the cry."

Lieutenant Sutherland and the men on the British left flank soon discovered that they were dreadfully exposed to the militiamen's musket b.a.l.l.s. Sutherland got spun around by a hit to the chest, and two privates fell beside him dead or mortally wounded. Captain Laurie's attempts to maintain a blistering rate of fire were stymied by the almost immediate loss of four of eight officers. As the militia and minutemen made their way across the bridge, those in front kneeling so that those behind could fire over their heads, British resistance crumbled, and the regulars, despite Laurie's protestations, turned and fled. "The weight of their fire was such," Lieutenant Jeremy Lister wrote, "that we was obliged to give way, then run with the greatest precipitance." According to militiaman Amos Barrett, "There were eight or ten that were wounded and a running and a hobbling about, looking back to see if we were after them."

The provincials streamed across the bridge but seemed unwilling to continue the fighting. Part of the problem was that the regulars' commanding officer, Colonel Smith, had arrived from the center of Concord with reinforcements. The militiamen may have also realized by this point that Concord was not in fact burning. The shocking loss of Captain Isaac Davis could have also contributed to the sudden absence of resolve. But perhaps the biggest reason the militia stopped firing on the British was the realization that something truly momentous had just occurred. They had done much more than fire on British troops; they had forced three companies of light infantry to retreat. It was a victory, of sorts, but for what purpose? The town, it turned out, was not in flames. The British had fired the first shot, but the provincials had clearly forced the issue by marching on the bridge, and people had died on both sides. The only directive the Provincial Congress had provided was the necessity of not firing the first shot. Now that the shot had been fired, should the militiamen continue to fight? Or should they return to waiting for the other side to make the next move? Instead of iron resolve, hesitation and confusion reigned in the aftermath of the confrontation at the North Bridge.

Colonel James Barrett and roughly half his force backtracked to the other side of the river and eventually returned to Punkata.s.set Hill. Major b.u.t.trick and a few hundred minutemen continued across the bridge and climbed into the ridge of hills that overlooked the road leading into Concord, where they took up a position behind a stone wall. Below them on the road, about 250 yards away, Colonel Smith and the grenadiers met up with the remnants of Captain Laurie's three companies. "There we lay," the militiaman Amos Barrett remembered, "behind the wall, about 200 of us, with our guns c.o.c.ked expecting every minute to have the word-fire; ... if we had fired, I believe we would have killed almost every officer there was in front... . They stayed there about 10 minutes and then marched back and we after them."

No provincial officer seemed willing to take charge after the fighting at the North Bridge. According to Thaddeus Blood, "everyone appeared to be his own commander." In this vacuum of leadership, Private Ammi White, in his early twenties, came upon one of the infantrymen who had fallen on the British left flank. Like several others, the regular had been left behind in the chaotic retreat from the North Bridge. Exactly what happened next is difficult to determine. The soldier was injured but still very much alive, and he may have tried to defend himself with his bayonet. Whether it was out of anger or fear, Ammi took up his hatchet and struck the wounded soldier repeatedly in the head. The Reverend Emerson watched the attack and seems to have been more disturbed by the incident than Ammi, who years later confided that he simply did what he thought was expected of a soldier in the midst of battle.

Unfortunately, Ammi did not succeed in immediately killing the infantryman. For more than an hour the soldier lay on the ground, his head chopped into a mess of splintered bone and brains, as both the British and the provincials waited for the return of Captain Parsons from Barrett Farm. Neither side knew what to do next. Smith apparently feared that any attempt on his part to cover Parsons's retreat across the bridge might incite yet another attack from the provincials. So he returned to Concord's village center and did nothing, which meant that Colonel Barrett on Punkata.s.set Hill was free to annihilate the British detachment when it returned to the North Bridge. But would Barrett be willing to resume hostilities?

In this strange netherworld of paralysis and doubt, Parsons and his men finally made their way back toward the river. They knew nothing of what had occurred just an hour or so before and were disturbed to see that there were no longer any British troops at the bridge. As Parsons and his men glanced worriedly from hill to militia-covered hill, they inevitably picked up the pace until they were virtually running by the time they crossed over the river. The speed of their retreat did not prevent them from noticing, however, the horribly injured soldier, whom they a.s.sumed had been scalped.

By noon, when Colonel Smith finally ordered the regulars to begin the march back to Boston, a rumor was working its way up and down the column: instead of just one, four soldiers had been "scalped, their eyes gouged, their noses and ears cut off." What's more, the colonists were likely to do the same to anyone else "they get alive, that are wounded and cannot get off the ground."

As far as the regulars were concerned, the militiamen were no longer fellow Englishmen. By butchering the soldiers' fallen comrade beside the North Bridge, the provincials had revealed themselves to be anything but civilized members of the British Empire; they were, one soldier angrily insisted, "full as bad as the Indians."

Gone was the uncertainty of the morning's march to Concord. From here on in, this was war.

Throughout what proved to be a very long, if only six-mile, march back to Lexington, Colonel Smith made use of flank guards-groups of between eighty and one hundred light infantrymen-who were sent out on either side of the road in an attempt to rid the countryside of militiamen who might threaten the column. As long as the country was relatively open, the flank guards proved quite effective. The trouble came when stone walls, swamps, rocky hills, and especially woodlands hindered the flank guards' pa.s.sage even as these natural features provided their enemies with the cover they needed to fire upon the column. Houses were both a threat and a lure. Not only could the provincials use them for cover but they were also a source of temptation for the flank guards, since each house contained food and drink as well as valuables that could be p.a.w.ned in Boston to augment the soldiers' meager pay.

About a mile outside Concord, the British troops were approaching Meriam's Hill, the same hill from which the local militia had watched them in the morning. So far the flanking parties had succeeded in keeping the surrounding countryside fairly free of snipers. At Meriam's Hill, however, an intervening brook required that the light infantrymen on the left flank temporarily return to the road so that they could pa.s.s over a bridge.

By this time, militia companies from several nearby towns, including Billerica (the home of Thomas Ditson, who had been tarred and feathered by the regulars back in March and was there that day, eager for revenge), Tewksbury, and Reading had recently arrived and taken up positions overlooking the road.

Unlike the morning, when the regulars had arrived in Concord accompanied by fife and drum, no music was played that afternoon. Edmund Foster was serving as a volunteer with a minuteman company from Reading, and he remembered how "silence reigned on both sides" as the light infantrymen of the left flank guard returned to the road "without music or word being spoken that could be heard."

The regulars marched across the bridge. Somewhere a musket fired. The soldiers wheeled to their left and unleashed a volley. Their muskets fired high and missed their mark. The militiamen, having had time to take up positions behind stone walls and rocks, fired with more effectiveness, and Foster watched as "two British soldiers fell dead at a little distance from each other, in the road near the brook." Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, one of the handful of officers to remain unscathed during the encounter at the North Bridge, took a musket ball in the right elbow. "The battle now began," Foster remembered, "and was carried on with little or no military discipline and order, on the part of the Americans."

The provincials may have been improvising as they took up positions along the sometimes winding road to Lexington, but that did not prevent them from maintaining a deadly volume of fire. "We were fired on from houses and behind trees ... [and] from all sides," Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, "but mostly from the rear, where people had hid themselves in houses till we had pa.s.sed then fired." What had seemed like just another country road in New England as they marched toward Concord earlier in the morning was now bristling with the muskets of militiamen that the regulars could not even see. Safely hidden behind walls, trees, and rocks, the provincials were revealed only by the telltale cloud of powder smoke as their musket b.a.l.l.s rained down on the grenadiers with fatal effect.

The militiamen used the stone walls to their advantage, but so did the British. These rugged part.i.tions of granite boulders were often chest-high and topped with the trunks and branches of trees, and whenever the regulars marching along the road found themselves besieged on either side, they would, one Woburn militiaman remembered, "stoop for shelter from the stone walls as they ran by the ambush."

For the flanking parties, the fighting was less anonymous. Several times, the light infantrymen were able to surprise the militiamen, who were either too inexperienced to antic.i.p.ate their presence or too preoccupied with firing at the column to notice that the soldiers were coming at them with their bayonets fixed. One New Englander later said it was the sound of the infantrymen running through the fresh spring gra.s.s, a predatory "swish, swish," that he remembered most vividly about that terrible day. Some militiamen were able to escape the flankers with their lives, but others were less lucky. Bedford's Captain Jonathan Wilson had predicted, "We'll have every dog of [the British] before night." Near the Hartwell farm (where a few hours before Mary Hartwell had admired the beauty of the pa.s.sing column in the early morning light), Wilson was surprised from behind by some flankers and killed, as was Daniel Thompson from Woburn. By the time the fighting reached the Fiske farm outside Lexington, Isaac Davis's Acton friend James Hayward had fired so many times that he had almost finished off an entire pound of gunpowder. Desperate for something to drink, he ran for a well, only to discover that a regular had the same idea. Both raised their muskets and fired. The regular was killed, but not before his musket ball fractured Hayward's nearly empty powder horn into deadly splinters that pierced his abdomen and left him mortally wounded.

It was a ruthless kind of fighting that even the experienced soldiers on both sides found profoundly troubling. Instead of a proper battlefield to contain the horror, they were fighting amid homes and farms. Both sides felt violated, and both sides found it necessary to regard the other as brutal and inhuman. Ever since the atrocity at the North Bridge, the regulars had viewed the provincials as tomahawk-wielding savages. For the New Englanders, this was King Philip's War redux. "The people say," the Reverend William Gordon reported, "that the soldiers are worse than the Indians."

Sergeant John Ford of Chelmsford had fought in the French and Indian War; so had Charles Furbush of Andover. At one point they came upon a regular stealing valuables from a roadside home, and together they rushed into the house and killed the soldier. Ford would kill a total of five regulars that day, but the fighting brought neither him nor Furbush any joy or satisfaction. "Our men seemed maddened with the sight of British blood and infuriated to wreak vengeance on the wounded and helpless," Furbush later told his grandson. At one point they came upon a fallen grenadier who'd been "stabbed again and again" by pa.s.sing militiamen. "Remembering the day when they had called these men companions-in-arms," the two veterans lifted up the dying soldier and gave him a drink of water.

On a hill outside Lexington, Captain John Parker and the remnants of his militia company waited for the British column. Earlier that morning their town, which had a total of 208 males over the age of sixteen in 1775, had lost 18 to death or injury. By this point, Colonel Smith and his regulars had been reduced to a similar state of suffering. They had just endured a series of ambushes that had killed and wounded more than two dozen men. They had long since given up any hope of reinforcements coming from Gage in Boston. They were running out of ammunition. It was on this hill that Parker's company let forth their own devastating volley. "We were totally surrounded with such an incessant fire," Lieutenant Barker wrote, "as it's impossible to conceive." Captain Parsons, the leader of the battalion that had searched the Barrett farm in Concord, was wounded, as was Colonel Smith, who was shot in the thigh. The regulars eventually cleared the hill, costing fifty-four-year-old militiaman Jedidiah Munroe, who'd been wounded on Lexington Green, his life. But the damage to Colonel Smith's little army had been done. In the minutes ahead, during which Major Pitcairn was thrown from his horse amid yet another provincial onslaught, the British column fell into serious disarray. Today the rocky rise of land where the company from Lexington helped to initiate the collapse of Smith's command is known as Parker's Revenge.

Soon after, at what was known as Concord Hill and is the last piece of high ground before Lexington Green, the British officers lost control of their men. "Our ammunition began to fail," Ensign DeBerniere explained, "and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward, made a great confusion." With Smith and Pitcairn injured and with the bodies of the British dead strewn along the b.l.o.o.d.y road behind them, the soldiers started to run for the town green. The triangle of gra.s.s where the events of this long and disquieting day had begun was now looked to as a possible sanctuary. At least there were no stands of trees out of which yet another ambush might erupt. Perhaps here, on this wide stretch of open gra.s.s, they might be able to surrender. "We began to run rather than retreat in order ... ," DeBerniere remembered, "[the officers] attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened."

Just as Lieutenant Barker, one of the few uninjured officers, resigned himself to either laying "down our arms or [being] picked off by the rebels at their pleasure," the miraculous occurred. Up ahead, beyond the Lexington Meetinghouse, stretching across the road to Boston, was a long line of British regulars-more than 1,350 members of Hugh Percy's First Brigade, a.s.sembled in what the weary and bleeding Lieutenant Sutherland claimed was "one of the best dispositions ever I saw." What's more, they had artillery with them, and as Smith's ragged and exhausted column made its way toward Percy's brigade, a cannonball ripped through the walls of the Lexington Meetinghouse and sent the provincials scurrying for cover. Sutherland remembered, "We began to entertain very sanguine hopes of our returning in safety to Boston."

But as they were soon to discover, the fighting had just begun.

Before leaving Boston, Percy's brigade of almost fifteen hundred men had a.s.sembled on Tremont Street. The long line of regulars stretched all the way from the common's elm-lined mall to the Queen Street Writing School, at least a quarter mile away, where thirteen-year-old Benjamin Russell was in his final year. The entire city, Russell remembered, was "in agitation." For the boys of the Queen Street School, which was the poor man's alternative to Boston Latin, these were tremendously exciting times, especially when Master Carter dismissed cla.s.s that morning with the phrase, "Boys, the war's begun, and you may run."

They were words that Russell and his compatriots took literally. When Percy's brigade left Boston around nine that morning, the Queen Street boys followed close behind. Once in Roxbury, Percy's fifers started playing "Yankee Doodle," a song from the French and Indian War that mocked the provincials' lack of social sophistication. But as it turned out, the boys would get the last laugh.

As the British fifers had their fun with "Yankee Doodle," a boy (who may or may not have been part of Russell's entourage) began "jumping and laughing" to the point that Percy asked "at what he was laughing so heartily." "To think," the boy responded, "how you will dance by and by to 'Chevy Chase.'" For hundreds of years, "Chevy Chase" had been one of the most popular ballads in Britain, and as it so happened, the song had a disturbing connection to Lord Percy's family. In the ballad, Percy, Earl of Northumberland, leads an ill-advised hunting trip across the Scottish border that results in a b.l.o.o.d.y clash between Percy and his Scottish counterpart the Earl of Douglas, both of whom are ultimately killed. What had begun as a lighthearted march into the New England countryside had been darkened by the mention of an ancient act of bloodshed. According to the Roxbury minister William Gordon, the boy's "repartee stuck by his lordship the whole day."

Earlier that morning, a messenger arrived at Joseph Warren's house on Hanover Street and told him of what had happened at Lexington. "His soul beat to arms," a contemporary remembered, "as soon as he learned the intention of the British troops." He woke up his medical a.s.sistant William Eustis and announced that it was time for him to take over the practice. By eight o'clock Warren had mounted his horse and was on his way out of Boston.

Instead of going by way of the Neck, Joseph Warren went by boat to Charlestown accompanied by his friend the printer Isaiah Thomas. While boarding the boat, Warren was overheard telling another acquaintance, "Keep up a brave heart! They have begun it-that either party can do; and we'll end it-that only one can do."

A meeting had been scheduled of the Committee of Safety at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy, where earlier that morning committee members Orne, Lee, and Gerry had evaded the British troops by lying in a cornfield. Warren came upon Percy's brigade in Cambridge as the troops made their way to Menotomy. The provincials had pulled up the planks of the bridge across the Charles in an attempt to prevent the regulars from entering the town. However, they'd left the planks stacked in plain sight, enabling Percy's soldiers to quickly repair the bridge, and the brigade had marched unhindered into Cambridge.

The road was filled with British regulars, and after helping drive away two soldiers who were attempting to confiscate a townsman's horse, Warren managed, with some difficulty, to make his way to the tavern in Menotomy. Also in attendance at the meeting that morning was William Heath, a thirty-eight-year-old farmer from Roxbury. As a boy, Heath had been, in his own words, "remarkably fond of military exercises," and had subsequently devoted himself to "the theory of war," and had bought and read "every military treatise in the English language which was obtainable." By 1772 he was colonel of the Suffolk County Militia; by the winter of 1775, he'd been appointed a general in the new provincial "army of observation."

There were generals who outranked Heath, but they all lived too far away to reach the scene of the fighting that day, and Heath resolved that he must get himself to Lexington as soon as possible. To avoid the British troops on the road to that town, he took the indirect route via Watertown, and at some point he met up with Joseph Warren. Given Warren's ambition to one day serve in a "high military capacity," he'd decided, an early biographer wrote, "that he should share the dangers of the field as a common soldier with his fellow citizens, that his reputation for bravery might be put beyond the possibility of suspicion." Heath was willing to let Warren accompany him as a volunteer, and over the course of the afternoon to come, the two seem to have been almost inseparable. For both men war was more a theoretical undertaking than a thing of blood and horror, but that was about to change.

Earlier that morning, the women of Acton had put together provisions for their husbands. It fell to their teenage sons to get the food to Concord. Francis Faulkner, sixteen, was one of these young men, but when he and his friends arrived at the North Bridge, they learned that not only had three of their townsmen been killed, but the British regulars-and the fighting-had moved east toward Boston. So the boys started down the road to Lexington. Not far from Meriam's Hill, they saw a man, wounded or dead, they couldn't tell for sure, lying beside a wall in a field. "That is my father!" Francis cried and, slipping off his horse, ran toward the fallen militiaman. "It was," his grandson later wrote, "a dreadful sight... . He had never seen death in such a b.l.o.o.d.y and ghastly form before. But it was not his father."

The boys from Acton continued on. The houses were all deserted. The bodies of dead soldiers littered the road. As the boys approached the town of Lexington they were filled with "fear and trembling." And then they heard the boom of a cannon.

Militiamen from towns all over New England had gathered on Lexington Green, their sweaty faces blackened by powder blasts, their knees and elbows stained by the mud and gra.s.s. The boys went from group to group, looking for their fathers, and finally they found them. To their astonishment, the Acton men were "in the highest spirits." They proudly informed their sons that they had avenged the deaths of their fellow Acton men "tenfold and would destroy all [the regulars] before they could get to Boston." Instead of being terrorized, these middle-aged husbands and fathers were having the time of their lives. Faulkner was relieved, in a way, to see his father so "full of confidence and fight." But he was also troubled by the determination of the Acton men. "Indignation," Faulkner remembered, "filled every heart."

Not content with sending a cannon ball through the Lexington meetinghouse, General Percy ordered that several houses just to the east of the green be set on fire. The militiamen were shooting at his regulars from those houses, and the structures must be destroyed. "We set [the houses] on fire," one soldier wrote, "and they ran to the woods like devils." The stone walls were also harboring militiamen, and during the next hour the regulars pushed over more than one thousand yards of Deacon Joseph Loring's wall.

About a quarter mile behind Percy's front line was the Munroe Tavern, which in addition to providing the officers with food and drink served as a hospital. It was here that surgeon's mate Simms extracted a musket ball from Lieutenant Jeremy Lister's elbow. By the time the brigade began to head back to Boston, Lister was suffering from both a loss of blood and a lack of food. Too faint to walk, he asked Colonel Smith if he might borrow his horse. The previous night on Boston Common, when one of Smith's officers claimed to be too sick to partic.i.p.ate in the expedition, Lister had volunteered to take his place. Back then, Smith had urged Lister to "return to town ... and not go into danger for others," but Lister had felt that the honor of the regiment depended on his partic.i.p.ation. Now that Lister's life appeared to be in the balance, Smith gladly gave him his horse, even though the colonel was suffering from a painful leg wound and was, in the words of Lieutenant Barker, "a very fat heavy man." A soldier offered Lister a bit of biscuit; another offered him a hatful of water from a horse pond. Feeling much better, Lister and the approximately two thousand men under General Percy's command left Lexington at about three in the afternoon. Now that the column stretched for almost half a mile, it took a full thirty minutes before they were all under way. The march back to Boston would take all the discipline and courage the British regulars could muster. About two miles to the southeast lay the town of Menotomy.

Heath and Warren arrived at Lexington just about the same time as Percy's brigade. Heath did what he could to pull together the scattered companies of militia into the makings of a proper regiment. The plan-if it could be called a plan-was to surround the British column with what Percy later described as "a moving circle ... of incessant fire [that] followed us wherever we went." Given the danger of the flank guards, the best place for the militiamen to hara.s.s the column was from behind, and in antic.i.p.ation of this, Percy appointed a battalion from one of his most experienced regiments, the Welch Fusiliers, to be the rear guard. Adding to the difficulties encountered by the rear guard as they turned to defend the column from the militiamen gathered behind was the direction of the ever-increasing wind. Since it was blowing out of the west and they were headed east toward Boston, the regulars were continually blanketed in the powder smoke generated by their own muskets, "covering them," one colonist wrote, "with such a cloud that blinded them yet [still left them] ... a plain mark for the militia."

As the fighting raged on and the fusiliers ran out of ammunition and men, Percy was forced to replace them with another battalion; over the course of the next fifteen miles, three different battalions served as the rear guard. In the meantime, the exhausted men of Colonel Smith's original expeditionary force marched in what was supposed to be the relative safety of the head of the column. But as they discovered, "the fire was nearly as severe [there] as in the rear."

Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, the wounded officer who'd been given Colonel Smith's horse, soon learned that a saddle was also not the best place to be. "I found the b.a.l.l.s whistled so smartly around my ears," he wrote, "I thought it more prudent to dismount." Lister then used the horse as a shield, shifting from side to side so as to put the animal between him and the militiamen's fire. When a nearby horse with one wounded man on the saddle and three men cowering beside it was shot dead, Lister offered his horse to the now defenseless soldiers and decided to take his chances with the rest of the column. Other wounded soldiers. .h.i.tched rides on the two fieldpieces, which were towed by horses. Whenever Percy ordered the cannons to be put to use, the soldiers who had been clinging to the weapons were sent tumbling to the ground as the fieldpieces were turned toward the column's rear and fired.