Bunker Hill (8 page)

Feversham
said that he was looking for Dr. Warren, who was staying at the Hunt house in
Watertown.

“That’s
Watertown,” the boy said, pointing, “
and
the Hunt
place is the big house on your right as you ride in.”

With that,
he saluted and trotted away, his grinning fellow artillerymen trotting after
him, and such was their pride and pleasure in what they were and how they
looked that Feversham found himself smiling in response. Certainly they were
the envy of the army, twelve uniforms in twelve thousand.

He rode on
into Watertown, and there was a crowd of more than a hundred men, women, and
children milling in front of the big house on the right, waving their hats and
cheering. Obviously, he
decided,
the Hunt house, and
obviously an occasion of importance. He dismounted and led his horse to the
edge of the crowd.

They were
applauding a man who stood at the front door of the house, looking hesitant and
uncomfortable as he shook hands with one person after another. He was a man in
his mid-thirties, tall, well built, with bright blue eyes and a great head of
sand-colored hair—a very handsome man whose uneasy and embarrassed smile was
most winning. He wore a loose white comfort shirt, black trousers, and white
stockings. Feversham suspected that this was Joseph Warren. After watching him
for a minute or two, he decided that he liked him—and felt that most people
did. There was something totally outgoing and ingenuous about the man.
Feversham had no notion as to why they were congratulating him, but he appeared
to accept their praise with such boyish gratitude that his manner was most
winning.

Bit by
bit, the crowd drifted away. Feversham
remained,
his
arm through the reins of his horse. Still engaged with two men at the front of
the house, the tall blond man noticed Feversham and nodded at him. A few words
more, and then he walked over to Feversham and looked at him inquiringly. “I’m
Dr. Warren,” he said. “And you, sir?”

“Dr.
Feversham. Evan Feversham.”

“Oh, of course, of course.
I knew you would be coming by. General Putnam told me. What a pleasure. Indeed,
what a pleasure.”

He shook
hands with Feversham, and now the two men who had been speaking with Warren
joined them. “You must forgive all this fuss and bother,” Warren went on. “You
see, they’ve just made me a major general, that is, the Congress did, and the
news is just arrived. Incredible, isn’t it? A bit ridiculous, too. It boggles
my mind, and you must forgive me if I make no sense whatsoever. I simply say it
in the way of explanation.”

“Not
ridiculous at all,” said a short, stocky, middle-aged man, bespectacled, his
shirt and hands ink stained.

“This is
Benjamin Edes, who prints the
Boston Gazette
. He’s in exile here, like
the rest of us, chased out of Boston and making the lives of the poor folk in
Watertown utterly wretched, and this”— indicating the second man, stocky,
wide-faced—“is Paul Revere, who’s printing money for us, although heaven knows
what we can buy for it.” And to them: “And this is Dr. Feversham, who worked
and studied with Dr. Suffolk in London when he did away with the hot-oil
nonsense and developed his method of tying off the vessels. That makes no sense
to you two, does it? It does to me. But come inside. You must be dog weary.”

He called
a stable boy, who took Feversham’s horse, and then Edes and Revere left, and
Feversham followed Warren into the house. It was a large house, but all too
small for the population it contained, and Feversham’s first impression was of
unlimited confusion. At two sawbuck tables in the sitting room, half a dozen
men were at work scribbling in record books and on sheets of foolscap paper.
Journals, rolls of paper, and stacks of newspapers were piled everywhere. At
least a dozen shouting children of every age were darting in and out of the
room, chased by women, dodging, playing their own games. At one side of the
sitting room, half a dozen men were in a heated discussion, voice raised over
voice in anger,

despair
, disgust, and frustration.

“No, sir!
No, sir! I will not have you treat me as a fool!”

“When you are a fool.”

“And you,
sir, are a goddamn horse’s ass.”

“Why?
Because
I counsel common sense?”

“What in
hell’s name has common sense to do with it? Do you think these men will
lay
around forever?
No, sir.
They
are going home.”

“A fortnight.”

“He’s right.
A fortnight.”

“No army. Goddamn you, there will be no army.”

“There is no army.”

“I piss on that.”

“You piss where you please, old man.”

“Shit in
your blood. Not you, Prescott.
The others.”

“By God,
even for New England, that’s the foulest mouth I ever heard,” Feversham said to
Warren. “Who is it?”

“Israel
Putnam,” he answered, smiling. “He speaks well of you.”

“What a turn of phrase!”

“He’s contained here.
There’s
women and children about.”

“I’d sooner put a hoe up a pig’s ass!” Putnam shouted.

“What is
he?” asked Feversham.

Warren
smiled. “He’s hard to like. You have to know him. He’s one hell of a soldier,
the only one of us who is born to it, made for it. No fear of man or God or the
devil, no reluctance to kill. It’s a quality I do not comprehend, but God
Almighty, we do need it. What a stupid, bloody business war is, Feversham!”

“How old
is he?” Feversham wondered.

“Fifty-five.
But he’s
vigorous. The tall man next to him is William Prescott. The British wanted to
buy him out, but he stayed with us. Good man. That’s Gridley next to him. The
only engineer we have that’s worth a
fig,
and the
small chap next to him is Artemus Ward. He’s the commander of the Massachusetts
army. That’s Farraday, the fat one. He’s from Rhode Island, and he’ll be back
there soon, he’s that nervous. And the other is Stompton, a shipmaster.”

Feversham
regarded the group with interest and curiosity. In this incredible situation
that had pitted some thousands of New England farmers against the power of the
mightiest empire on earth, these were the men who commanded the rebels: Putnam,
short, stocky, filled with hostility and anger; Prescott, a head taller,
handsome, his eyes almost hypnotically blue—forty-two or forty-three, Feversham
would guess; Gridley, muscular, compact, confident; Ward, aging, tired, his
face creased with pain. And there was Warren beside him, who had just been made
a major general
by a Congress miles
away and totally
unaware of the chaos here at hand.

“Stompton,”
said Warren. “I mean, one wonders, do we need a navy.
So one
calls a committee meeting.
Subject, navy.
Of
course, we don’t know exactly what we are, an army, a rebellion, a state, or
what. I’m a physician, so they make me a major general.
Of
course.
Perfectly natural.
Stompton is a
shipmaster. Should we make him an admiral?”

One of the
men at a table called to Warren to know whether he desired to check the food
figures. Of course, it was only the roughest estimate. The violent argument had
washed out now. Warren said he would get to the figures later, and he
introduced Feversham to Putnam and Prescott and the others. “I heard about
you,” Putnam said. “You saw action in Spain and Germany, if I am not mistaken.”
His words were a challenge, but apparently there was no other level upon which
he could conduct a conversation.

A little
girl of three or four years clung to Feversham’s leg, and by now three more men
had entered the room and were engaged in arguments with the tabulators at the
tables. His fingers in the child’s silky hair, Feversham smiled and wondered
how Putnam knew.

“Damn
little in Connecticut that I don’t know about. You’re from Ridgefìeld, aren’t
you? Married one of the locals?”

“I have a
practice there,” Feversham said. “But action is too strong a word. I’m a
surgeon.”

“And one
of the very best there is,” Warren added. “What was all the heat about?
The hill again.”

“The hill again,” said Gridley.

“How much
have you seen of real war, Doctor?” Prescott asked Feversham. “I don’t mean
what we have here, skirmish and woods fighting—God knows, we all saw enough of
that in the war with the French. I mean the real thing—forts and redoubts and
great armies moving across a field of battle?”

“I’ve seen it,” Feversham said.

“From the inside?”

“At times, yes.”

Feversham
realized that there were no real distinctions of rank here, no levels that made
a thing private to one and public to another. The men at the tables left off or
finished what they were doing to crowd around and listen, and other men entered
and joined the crowd that already packed the sitting room. Women pushed
through, some of them searching out children, grabbing them by the ears and
dragging them away
squalling,
while two giggling
teenage girls pressed through the crowd of men to place fresh candles. While it
was still light outside, the room was darkened by the crowd of people. The
candles would be there when needed, and Feversham decided that somewhere there
were people who lived in the house which had become a public place.

“Never been to Boston before?” Putnam demanded.

“No, sir.”

“Then how the hell would he know?” Putnam said.

“No one asked him anything,” Warren said.

“You know
damn well Gridley’s going to drag him into it.”

“Good
heavens, the man’s just here,” Warren said. “He could be starving, and I
haven’t offered him a crust of bread. You’ve been at this all day, with that
cursed hill of yours. Leave off.”

“Who’s in
command now?” Gridley, the engineer, demanded of Warren. “You, sir, are now a
major general.”

“Enough of
that,” Warren pleaded.

“Goddamn
it, Doctor, look a fact in the face. We’re already so ass-wise confused we
don’t know which side is up. Ward here commands the Massachusetts men—”

“Which
means three-quarters of all the men out there!” someone shouted.

“Goddamn
it, no,” Putnam growled.
“By no means three-quarters.
Say half.”

“Not now,”
Warren begged them.

“Then
when?” Gridley insisted. “You’re major general by an act of Congress—”

“Which
means not one damn thing in Massachusetts,” said Prescott.

“General
Ward is in command,” Warren said firmly. “That’s the way it is, and that’s the
way it remains. Now, suppose we go to our respective places, gentlemen, and
give their home back to the Hunts. It’s been a long day.”

Artemus Ward,
commander of the Massachusetts troops, lingered as the room cleared out. Ward
was pale, dark rings under his eyes, tired, and sick. Feversham decided that he
would leave and find some place to stay the night, but Warren clung to him, and
Feversham recognized in Warren some aching need but argued that he could not
stay there. “They tell me there are twenty people here in Hunt’s house.”

Hunt, a
stout, gray-haired man with a bewildered smile, came into the room and heard
that. He was introduced to Feversham and hastened to add his invitation to
Warren’s.

“But
there’s no house in Watertown in better case,” he assured Feversham. “Where
will you stay, Doctor? The Otises have twenty-two heads under their roof, the
Blakes have almost forty. I’m not offering you a bed. No one offers beds in
Watertown these days. But there’ll be half a dozen men stretched out here on
the rug tonight, and one more makes no difference. And better the rug than the
grass outside, wouldn’t you say? We’ll have food in the kitchen. We make no
attempt to set a table these days—you can understand why—but we have meat and
cheese and pudding, and no one starves. So stay with us, and for heaven’s sake,
if you are as good a doctor as Joseph here says you are, then look at him and
find what ails him. For as God is my witness, if something happens to him, I
don’t know what we should do.”

“I’m
sorry, are you ill?” Feversham asked Warren.

“He makes
too much of a case of it,” Warren said impatiently. “Of course you will stay
here. Hunt, give us just a few minutes with General Ward.”

“Shall I
go?” asked Feversham.

“No, no,”
Artemus Ward put in. “I want your advice. Warren says you know more about
things military than any of us, and unlike him, I want not only for my health
but for my brains as well.” He grimaced with pain.
“Stones.
I stand in agony, sit in agony, and piss in agony. War is for younger men,
believe me.”

Hunt left
the room, and Ward went over to the trestle tables and picked up one of the
ledgers. “This is where we are.
Bookkeepers.
We are
trying to make rosters
—men, guns, gunpowder, food—but it’s
a charade. The plain fact is that we don’t actually have an army, but just a
mess of men strung out around Boston and waiting for the British to do whatever
they are going to do, except for Putnam and Prescott and Gridley. They know
what they want to do, but so help me God, I don’t.”