Chapter 5

After the fight on Breed’s Hill, that everyone called “The Battle of Bunker Hill”, the British Army regulars were moving around all over the countryside outside of Boston.

It was like a hornet’s nest had been knocked off a tree limb and smashed open on the ground. The red-coated patrols were poking here and there looking for armed patriots to round up and blame for the more than a thousand deaths of King’s soldiers in less than two hours on a dirt hill in the Godforsaken colonies.

General Washington was suddenly the smartest military mind since Alexander the Great and some of the British high-ranking officers were nervously sending home for more funds to bolster their meagre military pay in a foreign land.

I had set up a neat little spot in a corner of that barn we had escaped to for my survivors and I to blend into the farming community like rural peasants uninterested in the conflict between King and commoner.

Even in the atmosphere of the moment, it didn’t matter that the upstart Americans had lost the battle, the important thing was it sent a message to Parliament that the rebel leaders intended to pursue this uprising until the bitter end and were no longer seeking either pardon or a negotiation short of complete independence from the rule of the King.

Some of the less inhibited military types took the opportunity to settle the score against innocent civilian hosts and they looted, burned and murdered countless supporters of the patriot cause without any sense of guilt or wrongdoing.

Countless females of the colonial masses were stripped of their attire and raped right out in the open in front of their husbands and children as an example of how the British Army would deal with the traitors that dared to test the mettle of a rightful King.

We blended into the farm worker society with our weapons hidden in a haystack and pretended ignorance to all questions about the location of suspected armed patriots in the area.

Most of the survivors of the battle had already made it back to Washington’s lines to support his intentions to remove the British from the Boston region before they had a chance to reinforce his presence with additional troops from Europe.

We were just part of the shadowy “Sons of Liberty” that managed to exterminate over a thousand of King George’s finest and lived to tell the tale.

It was fortunate that this farm as well as a whole series of similar farms was the supply sources of the British military might in Boston and, as such, they were allowed to continue to operate and expand their production because of the greater benefit to the occupying troops.

A British patrol consisting of both British regulars and Hessian support elements marched into the farm from the nearby dirt road in a perfect formation and a cloud of dust so fine that it clogged the pores with grit that made ordinary sweat a puddle of mud.

On the other side of the world, the finest fighting force on Earth, the British Army was collecting thousands of uniformed regulars to fight in the distant colonies, a half a world away. The military staging harbors were soon dotted with scores and then hundreds of ships to carry the troops and the supplies to the colonies to rid the land of the scum of the Earth, the so-called Patriots that murdered honest hard-working British troops in traitorous joy.

In a few months, the lead elements of the more than four hundred ships expeditionary force that would reach the harbors of New York and start to unload their troops and supplies on the shores of Staten Island for the ultimate successful invasion and seizing of New York City, the greatest port and harbor in the American wilderness.

All of the farm workers and the owner-families were gathered together in the rectangular courtyard of the sprawled out farm that supplied the British Army in Boston with the chickens, eggs, and other produce that fed the enlisted troops with regularity and eliminating the need to re-supply from sources back in Europe transported over thousands of miles in a logistical nightmare of a supply train that never ended.

This particular farm was not one of the “Tory” ones that were quite happy to assist the King’s troops but that was of no consequence since the food was food regardless of the political convictions of the people that grew it and produced it for consumption.

The Captain in charge was a fellow from Cornwall and had farming roots of his own that found the entire affair both tedious and distasteful. Still, he gave the order that all of the family females were to be placed in a row along the low wooden fence that was used to keep the milk cows in pasture and allow them to collect their patties for the cooking fires as they made excellent heat.

They also were like drops of gold for the growing of huge vegetables to garnish the dinner table for the officers and finer gentlemen sent to the colonies for a lesson in administering the King’s justice.

Now that the total of eight females were presented in front of all the spectators, Captain Harry from Cornwall instructed his special Hessian contingent to disrobe them using brute force and making a show of it for the disloyal viewers to retain in their memories should they continue in their filthy show of disrespect for the King’s rule and order.

The eight naked women were doing their best to cover their privates and looking wondrously delicious in a rustic sort of way. The pair of younger females, probably eighteen or nineteen was crying from the shame of being completely nude in front of so many people and especially the soldiers that looked at them like they were the main course of a special dinner being served more for their entertainment than for their stomachs.