The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest fights ever fought by men. On the one side were some hundreds of simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something that might pass for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and wilder Indian. On the other side were some thousands of the finest troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose banners the names of famous battles blazed. They were well trained, well armed, well equipped. They moved at the word of command with the monotonous precision and perfection of 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