supported, left
all day without food or water, and now at the end without powder. As the
troops climbed the hill a few artillery cartridges were opened and their
powder distributed among the provincials. Some of the men thus had
three or four charges to their guns, some had only one; besides this,
there were few bayonets among them. The wonder is that the men awaited
the assault.

This time the regulars came within twenty yards of the redoubt before
the word was given to fire. The heads of the columns were swept away,
but the rest came on, and mounted the parapet. The first who topped it
were shot down, among them Pitcairn. But then the American powder was
spent, and from three sides the British swarmed into the redoubt.
Reluctantly Prescott gave his men the word to retreat.

For a few moments the fighting was fierce. Some of the provincials were
unwilling to run, and fought till they were killed. Some used stones,
and some their clubbed muskets, retiring unwillingly. It might be
supposed that the slaughter was great. But the British, for the very
reason that they had entered from three sides, were afraid to fire on
the farmers for the sake of their own men; the dust rose up in clouds,
and so in the confusion most of the defenders escaped, like Peter
Brown, who wrote his mother: "I was not suffered to be touched, although
I was in the front when the enemy came in, and jumped over the walls,
and ran half a mile, where balls flew like hailstones, and cannon roared
like thunder."[100]

Prescott came off unhurt. Those who saw him said that he "stepped long,
with his sword up." He saved his life by parrying the bayonets which
were thrust at him, although some of them pierced his clothes.

That more were not killed in the pursuit was due to two factors. The
first was the exhaustion of the soldiers, who, tired with carrying heavy
loads in the unwonted heat (and an American summer is like the tropics
to an Englishman), were winded with their last charge up the hill. They
were therefore in no good condition to follow up their victory, and the
fugitives were soon away beyond Bunker Hill. Yet that the pursuit was so
poor was due partly to the defenders of the rail fence. These men, more
like veteran regiments than fragments of many commands, withdrew in a
body, continually threatening those who offered to close in from behind.
The end of the fight was as honorable to them as its beginning.

But there was much loss. A number w