CHAP. XIX. A HAUGHTY BRITISH GENERAL. 541 vincials in the advance were entrusted to the command of Washington, and were eager to press on, but were restrained by the regulars; and it was the 8th of July before the advanced division of the army reached the forks of the Monongahela and Youghiogany rivers, where they rested until the morning of the ninth. They were then about a dozen miles from Fort Du Quesne. The English forded the Monongahela on the morning of the 9th of July, and advanced along its southern shores. Washington knew the perils of their situation, for the troops were disposed in solid platoons, after the fashion of European tactics. He ventured to remonstrate with Braddock and advise him to dispose his army in open order, and employ the Indian mode of fighting in the forests. The colonel was silenced by the general angrily saying, "What! a provincial colonel teach a British general how to fight!" The army moved on, re-crossed the Monongahela to the north side, and were marching in fancied security on the part of the regulars at about noon on that hot July day, when they were suddenly assailed by volleys of bullets and clouds of arrows on their front and flanks. They had fallen into an ambush against which Washington had vainly warned the haughty general. De Beaujeu, the commander of a party of less than three hundred French and Canadians, and little more than six hundred Indians, had been sent from the fort by Contrecœur to meet the advancing English. They came upon the latter sooner than De Beaujeu expected, but the ambush was quickly and skillfully formed. He fought bravely and fell in the first deadly onslaught between the combatants. The suddenness of the attack and the horrid war-whoop of the Indians, which the regulars had never heard before, so frightened them that they were disconcerted and thrown into confusion; and nothing saved the little army from total destruction or capture but the more skillful manoeuvres of the provincials under Washington, who fought as the Indians did. The British officers behaved nobly and did all in their power to encourage their men, until they were disabled; but the regulars soon became unmanageable. Braddock, seeing the peril, was in the front of the fight rallying his recoiling troops, and inspiring them with what courage he might by his own example. For more than two hours the battle raged. Of the eightysix English officers, sixty-three were killed or wounded; among the former was Sir Peter Halket. One-half of the private soldiers was also killed or wounded. All of Braddock's aids were disabled; and Washington alone was left unhurt, to distribute the orders of the general. Braddock had five horses shot and disabled under him, and finally a bullet entered his body, and he, too, fell mortally wounded. So bravely did the provincials maintain their ground that they were nearly all killed. Of three Virginia companies, only about thirty men were left alive. "The dastardly behavior of those they call regulars," Washington wrote to his mother from Cumberland, "exposed all others that were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death; and at last, despite of all the efforts of the officers to the contrary, they ran, as sheep pursued by dogs, and it was impossible to rally them." Washington, perceiving that the day was lost-his dying general carried from the field, and the British regulars running for their lives-rallied the provincial troops, and gallantly covered the retreat. The French and Indians did not follow. Colonel Dunbar, in the rear, received the broken on the 12th of July. Then they all fled first to Fort Cumberland, which was abandoned, and thence marched to Philadelphia. Washington and the southern provincials went back to Virginia; and so ended the second expedition of the campaign of 1755. army The British had left their cannon and their dead on the battle-field; and the body of Braddock, from which life had departed three days after the conflict, was buried in the forest more than fifty miles from Cumberland. It was borne to the grave and interred by torch-light on the evening of the 15th of July, when Washington, surrounded by sorrowing officers, read the impressive funeral service of the Church of England. That grave may be seen near the National Road, between the 54th and 55th mile-stones. The protection of Washington from harm during that battle was wonderful. "I luckily escaped without a wound," he wrote to his mother, "though I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me." At CHAP. XIX. EXPEDITION AGAINST FORT NIAGARA. 543 one time an Indian chief singled him out for death by his rifle, and directed his followers to do the same. Fifteen years afterward, when Washington was in the Ohio country, that chief traveled many a weary mile to see the man at whom he said he had fired more than a dozen fair shots, but could not hit him. "We felt that some Manitou guarded your life," said the chief, "and we believed you could not be killed." "By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence," Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine, "I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation. Death was levelling my companions on every side." At Cumberland, he heard a circumstantial account of his death, and his “dying speech." Washington was never wounded in battle. Governor Shirley was appointed Braddock's successor in the chief command of the British forces in America. The expedition led by him to operate against Forts Niagara and Frontenac was not exposed to great perils nor suffered serious disasters. Nor did it accomplish much. After a very fatiguing march through the wilderness from Albany to Oswego on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, he arrived at the latter place in August, his little army of fifteen hundred men reduced by sickness and dispirited by the news of Braddock's disaster. The Assembly of New York had freely voted men and money for the expedition, and the Six Nations had promised many warriors; but on the first of September, not more than twenty-five hundred able-bodied men were in camp at Oswego. The energetic Shirley was not disheartened. There was a small, dilapidated fort at Oswego. He at once began to strengthen the post by erecting two stronger forts, one on each side of the Oswego River, which there enters the Lake between high banks. Fort Pepperell (afterward Fort Oswego), on the west side, had a strong stone wall, with square towers; Fort Ontario on the east was built of huge logs and earth. Shirley also constructed vessels to bear his troops over the bosom of the Lake to their future destination. But reinforcements did not come. He waited all through September. Storm after storm swept over the Lake, threatening any flotilla that he might launch upon it with great peril, if not actual disaster. The breath of approaching winter began to be keenly felt, and, disappointed, he was compelled to abandon the expedition for a season. Leaving seven hundred troops to garrison the fort, the general marched back to Albany with the remainder, where he arrived late in October. There he made vigorous preparations for reinforcing and supplying the garrison at Oswego, for the Marquis de Montcalm, a distinguished French soldier, was then governor of Canada, and would be likely to pursue aggressive measures the following spring. Colonel John Bradstreet was appointed commissary-general at |