a machine. They were led by
officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp
experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar
as the thought of fear. The contrast between the two opposing forces
was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents. The men
who were massed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of
uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring,
innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if
the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who
were in command and the men who were commanded. The soldiers who were
massed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and
sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it,
glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army.
Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle shining, every
belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the
little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in
the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre
as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and
warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from
their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as
they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among
them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or
counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array.
Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon,
familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service
further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf. Some of
the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed
extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like
an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of
firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives
the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The assailants carried the latest
weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the
faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the
compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the top of the
hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined
sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare.
At the bottom of