When the British were within thirty paces of the Americans there was a simultaneous discharge. The slaughter was awful. Every bullet hit its mark. Still the British troops, with disciplined valor characteristic of the nation, continued to advance notwithstanding an incessant stream of fire, which mowed down whole ranks. But soon the carnage became too deadly to be endured. The whole body broke and rushed precipitately down the hill in utter confusion. Thousand of spectators in Boston crowded the roofs, the heights, the steeples, watching this sublime spectacle with varying emotions. The British soldiers were astonished, and could hardly believe the testimony of their eye-sight, when they beheld the British regulars retreating in confusion before the American militia. But who can describe or imagine the emotions which agitated the bosoms of American wives and daughters, as they gazed upon the surges of the dreadful conflict, where their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers were struggling in the midst of the awful carnage. At the bottom of the hill, the troops were again marshalled in line, and, with reinforcements, commenced another ascent of the hill to storm the works. When within pistol-shot another series of volleys, flash following flash, was opened upon them. The ground was instantly covered with the dying and the dead. Again the bleeding, panic-stricken regulars, assailed by such a storm of bullets as they never had encountered before, recoiled and fled. Charlestown was now in flames, and a spectacle of horror was presented, such as even the veterans in European warfare were appalled to contemplate. The case was becoming desperate. The British general, Burgoyne, was watching the scene, from one of the batteries in Boston, with mingled emotions of astonishment and anxiety. He wrote to a friend in London: “Sure I am, nothing ever has or ever can be more dreadfully terrible than what was to be seen or heard at this time. The most incessant discharge of guns that ever was heard by mortal ears; straight before, a large and noble town all in one great blaze, and the church steeples, being timber, were great pyramids of fire; the roar of cannon, mortars, and muskets to fill the ear, the storm of the redoubts to fill the eye; and the reflection that perhaps a defeat was a final loss of the British Empire in America, to fill the mind, made the whole a picture and a complication of horror and importance, beyond anything that ever came to my lot to witness.”[85]