First Blood
Shadows scuttled beneath the elm and linden trees along Boston Common. Hoarse whispers carried on the night air, along with the creak of leather and the clatter of a stone kicked down a lane. It would later be reported that a barking dog was bayoneted to enforce the silence. Not until the moon rose at ten p.m. on Tuesday, April 18, 1775, three nights past full but still radiant, did shape and color emerge from the hurrying gray figures to reveal hundreds of men in blood-red coats congregating on the beach near the town magazine. Moonglow glinted off metal buttons and silvered grenadiers’ tall bearskin caps. The soldiers reeked of damp wool and sweat, mingled with the tang of the brick dust and pipe clay used to scour brass and leather. Their hair had been greased, powdered, and clubbed into queues held with leather straps. The moon also gave tint to the facings on their uniform coats—purple or green, buff or royal blue, depending on the regiment from which each man had been plucked for the march to Concord.
The navy had collected only 20 longboats and would need two lifts to shuttle all 800 men to marshy Lechmere Point, a mile across Back Bay. Sailors bent to their ash oars against the tide, and with every stroke the standing soldiers swayed. Each man’s kit included the 11-lb. Brown Bess musket, three dozen rounds of ammunition in a cartridge box, and a haversack to carry bread and salt pork. Beneath heavy coats and crossbelts the men wore wool waistcoats, white linen shirts, breeches buckled at the knee, and canvas or linen gaiters to keep pebbles from their low-topped brogans. Most wore black leather caps or felt hats with the brim stitched up to give a forepeak and two comers. By neck cords at officers’ throats hung gorgets—small silver or gilt crescents worn as an emblem of rank, a last remnant of medieval armor. Loading was haphazard, and as the soldiers clambered from the boats to wade through the reeds on the far shore, sergeants hissed and clucked to reassemble the ten discomposed companies of light infantry and 11 of grenadiers. “We were wet up to the knees,” a Lieutenant Barker later reported. Midnight had passed by the time the second lift arrived, and further delays followed as navy provisions in the boats were handed out—supplies that, Barker added, “most of the men threw away.” Fording a shallow inlet on the edge of Cambridge further wetted each shivering man to his waistcoat, but at last the troops reached the wide road leading west, unpaved except for napped stones and gravel shoveled into mud holes.
Few knew their destination. Two a.m. had come and gone as they put on speed. With their wet shoes squelching at more than 100 steps per minute, their pace approached four miles an hour. Past apple and plum orchards they tramped, past smokehouses and cider mills and oblique driftways that led into cow pastures. The heavy footfall rattled pewter dishes on dressers and in cupboards, and an eight-year-old boy later recalled a wondrous sight on the road outside his window: a long bobbing column of red, “like a flowing river,” sweeping northwest beneath the gibbous moon.
A brigade of armed men tiptoeing through Boston in the middle of the night had not gone unnoticed. “The town,” a British fusilier acknowledged, ‘‘was a good deal agitated.” Joseph Warren may have watched the mustering troops;
