The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [6]
The British agreed. One British lieutenant said that “the oldest officers say they never saw sharper action” and General John Burgoyne, watching the action from Boston, scoffed at the suggestion of a cowardly pullback. He noted that “the retreat was no flight; it was covered even with bravery and military skill.” General Henry Clinton, who would be in America for six years, was glad to take the hills and get back to Boston without worse losses. He called it “a dear bought victory” and added that “another such would have ruined us.”11
One of those at Bunker Hill that day was young John Greenwood, fifteen, a fifer who had returned to town to rejoin his family, whom he had not seen in two years. The Greenwoods were still in Boston, prevented from leaving by the British. Unable to see them, Greenwood had joined the army a few weeks before as a musician for the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment. Captain T. T. Bliss had given him a pass to visit his aunt fifteen miles outside of Boston two days previously but, halfway there, his fife stuck in his pocket and sword dangling from his waist, the teenaged fifer had a premonition that something was going to happen in Boston. He alternately walked and ran back to the camp, sleeping at a farmhouse on the way.
“At dawn I heard the firing of great guns,” he wrote in his memoirs of June 17, “which caused me to quicken my pace. I thought it was my duty to be there.”
The fifer arrived at Cambridge Common, a mile from Breed’s and Bunker Hill, amid unbridled chaos. “Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail,” he wrote. Greenwood headed through the scattered crowds of frantic, shouting residents, some on foot, some in carriages, and some reigning in their horses, and all of the wounded soldiers stumbling toward the common. Greenwood ran toward the slope of Breed’s Hill while the battle was still in progress. He passed an African American soldier who had been badly wounded. “His collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back,” Greenwood wrote.
Greenwood asked the soldier if his wound hurt, and the man said that it did not and that once he had a bandage wrapped around his neck to stem the bleeding he would go back to the battle. The teenager had been frightened, but now a remarkable calm came over him. He wrote, “I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.”
Greenwood left the wounded man and hurried toward Breed’s Hill, looking for his regiment. In the tumult of the morning, he ran directly into his mother, who had been racing around the commons looking for him. His mother, who left Boston with a pass, begged him to return to his uncle’s home on Cape Cod. “Don’t go there,” she said, looking toward Bunker and Breed’s Hills. “You’ll be killed!” Her son told her that he had to find his regiment and left.
Halfway to Breed’s, he located the regiment, stationed on a road with two cannon. Captain Bliss, his commander, was surprised that the boy had returned. Greenwood explained that he had raced toward the action when he heard the sound of the guns in the early morning. The officer smiled down at him.
“I was much caressed by my captain and my company, who regarded me as a brave little fellow,” wrote the teenager, whose morning amid the carnage at Bunker Hill began his long and dangerous journey as a soldier in the first American army.
Chapter Two
THE SIEGE OF BOSTON, 1775–1776:
Private Greenwood Joins an Armed Camp
Private John Greenwood, one of the youngest enlisted men in the Continental Army, heard his first fife and saw his first British soldier at the same time. Like many Bostonians, he watched the arrival of two regiments of immaculately uniformed British regulars, the Fourteenth West Yorks and