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tilled the soil or tended the forge until a few hours earlier.
    As the regulars formed, Major Pitcairn came forward on his horse and bellowed out to the armed villagers in front of him, ‘Disperse! Disperse you damned rebels!’ Captain Parker decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The command was given to file off the green.
    Officers on both sides had given absolute orders to their men not to open fire first. At Lexington, early that morning of 19 April 1775, it seemed for a moment that they would be obeyed and civil war averted. Pitcairn signalled his soldiers to move forward and disarm the locals.
    The sight though of the Americans lowering their weapons and moving off touched some nerve of contempt among the British soldiers. For months the local people had abused and taunted them.Where was their courage now, when it came to a fight? Instead of a deliberate, orderly walk forward, many redcoats started shouting and cheering, running towards the Americans with fixed bayonets. Facing this onslaught, one or two of those villagers opened fire.
    It took just a few moments for the British response. Without orders from Pitcairn, one of the formed British companies levelled its weapons and let fly a crashing volley. Several villagers went down. There were a few straggling shots in reply, one wounded a redcoat in the leg, another hit Pitcairn’s horse, but within moments bonds of military discipline dissolved and the British soldiers were careering in all directions, chasing after the minutemen as they fled through gardens and groves, desperate to save their lives.
    Colonel Francis Smith, Pitcairn’s superior in charge of the 700 or so British troops sent out from Boston the previous night, heard the shots and came running to the head of the column. ‘Finding the Rebels scamping off (except those shut up in houses),’ the colonel wrote several weeks later, ‘I endeavoured to the utmost to stop all further firing, which in a short time I effected.’ Smith, an infantry officer in his early fifties, was thought of as a relic by many, but had the benefit of long service in America and thus a knowledge of its people.
    The cooler-headed among the British officers and serjeants then began scouring the fields and farmsteads, collecting up their men. ‘We then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty,’ one young lieutenant noted, ‘the men were so wild they could hear no orders.’ Some of the soldiers were shouting and pointing out buildings which they said were being used by the rebels to fire at them. Colonel Smith dreaded what might happen if his outraged troops entered Lexington’s homes or its Meeting House, ‘knowing if the houses were once broke into, none within could well be saved’. Strict instructions were issued to block the men, and they were successfully rallied under the colonel’s eye.
    Some sort of regularity had been restored, but several Americans had been killed and the remainder of Captain Parker’s company had scattered into the country, carrying breathless reports of the bloodshed to neighbouring villages. What to do? Colonel Smith had his orders, which were to push on to the village of Concord, a couple of miles further on, and destroy some cannon and other military supplies gathered there by the rebels.
    After what had happened in Lexington, he was determined to press ahead in a disciplined formation. Marching towards Concord, theroad was commanded to the right by some ridges. Setting off once more, Smith used his light infantry, Pitcairn’s men, trotting along the high ground to deny it to the enemy and protect his right flank. He marched meanwhile along the road at the head of his grenadiers, tall men in bearskin caps who were, by repute, the steadiest troops of the British regiments in Boston.
    A couple of shots were fired at the British but none returned, Colonel Smith noting with satisfaction that his troops moved on Concord ‘with as much good order as ever troops