Gerry’s spirits rose and he cleared his throat. “Is that,” he asked the sergeant, “the great fortification we’re all ordered out to tear down?” The sergeant laughed grimly. “Don’t look very fearsome, does it?” he agreed. “But after the way they run us back through Lexington, I don’t trust them devils.” “And I thought it was Bunker Hill instead of Breed’s they’d be likely to fortify,” went on Gerry. “That’s how we would have chosen. But that’s Bunker Hill, standing up behind there, bare as a plate. The little dugout is on Breed’s Hill, below.” “Breed’s or Bunker makes no difference now,” said Sergeant Higgs. “Keep your cartridges dry in the landing. We’re headed in towards shore.” A few minutes later they were all drawn up in a low-lying field where Charlestown peninsula extended, pear-shaped, into the sea. Gerry found himself in the front line, far to the right, with the light infantry of the Twenty-third and the King’s Own. To the left stood the grenadiers, and behind him the Fifty-second and the Fifth. He was feeling cheerful and brave now, and as safe as London Tower. It reassured him even more when the order came to break ranks and dine on the rations in their knapsacks before going farther along. Sprawled in the hot sun, chewing his beef and biscuit, he eyed the landscape round him: the green, sloping fields, some cocked hay, and some standing grass; the swamp and brick kilns to the left; Breed’s Hill above, where the black dots still crawled around the tiny redoubt. He talked with the other men. All the young lads, he found, were in their glory that the attack was to be made straight on, that this detachment of the British Army would pound forward full force and set the Americans running, or beat them down into their native clay. But the old wise sergeants shook their heads and said it was a pity Gage hadn’t ordered them to land at the Neck. They could have bottled up the Yankees in Charlestown then, and starved them out, and not had to fire a shot. No, somebody else said, for to do that would have meant sending a force between two wings of its enemy, and that was a tactic frowned upon long before Caesar marched through Gaul. In the end they all agreed that they were well enough satisfied with the way things had fallen out. They’d march up that hill in double-quick time, drive the cowardly Yankees out of their burrow, and be back drinking beer in Boston before the sun went down. They were beginning to take out packs of dog-eared playing cards when the word passed among them that reinforcements were disembarking on the fields to the left; that Howe had sent for the reinforcements because the Americans were bringing in more troops, the earthworks had been extended far to the left, and he didn’t like the looks of things at all.