counted the cost, and not even his mother's entreaties turned him from his purpose.

At Alexandria, Washington first saw Braddock; he met there also the Governors of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, who had gathered for a grand council on the campaign. Washington, quiet but observant, looked upon all the preparations with admiration, but without losing his coolness of judgment. He saw the heavy artillery which Braddock had brought, and which was waiting for teams to transport it over the mountains. He remembered how his men had toiled in dragging their few guns over the rough road. 'If our march is to be regulated by the slow movements of the train," he said, "it will be tedious, very tedious indeed."

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Early in May, Washington joined General Braddock at Fredericktown, Maryland, and there he must have met a man of more consequence than all the governors of the colonies; for Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster-General of Pennsylvania, at that time a man of fifty years, came to confer with General Braddock, and to do for him what no one else could procure horses and wagons enough to transport his supplies and artillery. Franklin and Washington probably seemed to most people at that time as rather insignificant persons beside the Major-General in command of the English forces in America.

The headquarters were moved to Wills Creek, where the militia had been hard at work with ax and spade, and had built a fort which was named Fort Cumberland, from the Duke of Cumberland, Captain-General of the British army. For a month Braddock fretted and fumed over the delays which everybody seemed to cause. He was thoroughly out of patience with all his surroundings. There were in all about twenty-two hundred men gathered in camp. Some of these were Virginia troops, and Braddock set his officers to drilling them, but he thought them a slouchy lot that never could be made into soldiers. Indeed, it would have taken a long time to make them into such machines as the soldiers whom he had brought over from England. Washington was fast learning many things. He was not deceived by appearances. He found this great general an obstinate, hot-tempered man, who would scarcely listen to reason, and his soldiers, with all their military training, of different stuff from the Virginians.

Washington was sent off on an errand to Williamsburg for money. He performed his duty with great promptness, and a week after his return to camp, the army was on the move. But it moved like a snail, for it was carrying a whole house on its back. Braddock and his officers, accustomed to campaigns in Europe, seemed to be unable to

adapt themselves to the different conditions of a new country. They encumbered themselves with everything which English army regulations permitted. Washington saw the folly of the course pursued, and, when his advice was asked by the General, urged him, he says, in the warmest terms he was able to use, "to push forward, if even with a small but chosen band, with such artillery and light stores as were necessary, leaving the heavy artillery, baggage, and the like, with the rear division of the army, to follow by slow and easy marches, which they might do safely, while we were advanced in front"; and in order to enforce his opinion and to lead the officers to give up some of their superfluous baggage, and thus release horses for more necessary work, he gave up his own best horse, and took no more baggage than half his portmanteau could easily contain.

His advice prevailed, and he set out with the advance party. It was a prospect, he wrote to his brother, which conveyed infinite delight to his mind, though he was excessively ill at the time. "But this prospect was soon clouded, and my hopes brought very low indeed, when I found that, instead of pushing on with vigor, without regarding a little rough road, they were halting to level every molehill, and to erect bridges over every brook, by which means we were four days in getting twelve miles." Ill, indeed, he was, and for a fortnight so prostrated with fever that he was forced to lie in hospital. But as soon as he could move at all, he insisted on rejoining his corps. "My fevers are very moderate," he writes to one of the other aids on the last day of June, “and, I hope, near terminating. Then I shall have nothing to encounter but weakness, which is excessive, and the difficulty of getting to you, arising therefrom; but this I would not miss doing, before you reach Duquesne, for five hundred pounds. However, I have no doubt now of doing it, as I am moving on, and the General has given me his word of honor, in the most solemn manner, that it shall be effected."

On July 8, he succeeded in rejoining the advance division of the army, though he had to be carried in a covered wagon. On July 9, he attended the General on horseback, though he was still very ill and weak. He had joined Braddock's military family because he wished to learn how an experienced English general practiced the art of war, and how regularly trained troops fought. He was to have the opportunity that day. They had reached a ford on the Monongahela, fifteen miles from Fort Duquesne, and had crossed it. A second ford lay five miles below, and the troops marched, as if on dress parade, down the bank of the river. Braddock intended that the French, if they saw

him, should be dismayed by the array, and Washington was often heard to say in after years, that the most beautiful spectacle he had ever beheld was the display of the British troops on that eventful morning. Every man was neatly dressed in full uniform, the soldiers were arranged in columns and marched in exact order, the sun gleamed from their burnished arms; the river flowed tranquilly on their right, and the deep forest overshadowed them with solemn grandeur on their left. Officers and men were equally inspirited with cheering hopes and confident anticipations.

But Washington was not so dazzled by this brilliant spectacle as not to see the fatal blunder which Braddock was making. He urged the General to throw out Virginia rangers and Indian scouts into the woods and ravines which lay before them and on their side. It is almost incredible that the General paid no attention to the caution, and merely kept a few skirmishers a short way in advance of his force. His army was now across the second ford and moving along the other bank, eight miles only from the fort. Suddenly a man, dressed like an Indian, but bearing the decoration of an officer, sprang forward from the woods, faced the column a moment, then turned and waved his hat.

It was an officer leading the French forces, which, accompanied by a horde of Indian allies, had issued from Fort Duquesne, and had disposed themselves in the wood. Another instant, and a storm of bullets rained down upon the Englishmen. It was a surprise, but the troops were well trained. They fired volley after volley into the woods. They planted their cannon and went to work in a business-like way, cheering as they moved forward. For a moment the French seemed to give way; then, in another instant, again the bullets fell from all sides upon the Englishmen, who were bewildered by the attack. They could scarcely see any man; there was nothing to aim at. The enemy was indeed invisible, for every man had posted himself, Indian fashion, behind a tree. Now the troops huddled together into a solid square and made so much the more deadly mark for the rifles. They fell into a panic; they began to leave their guns and to retreat.

Braddock, who had been in the rear, came up with the main body and met the vanguard on its retreat. The two columns of men were thrown into confu

brave man, and if personal courage could have saved the day, his intrepidity would have done it. He dashed about on horseback. Two of the aids were wounded, and the duty of carrying the General's orders fell on the third, Colonel Washington, who was now learning war, with a vengeance. He rode in every direction, his tall, commanding figure a conspicuous mark for the enemy's sharpshooters. More than that, there were men there who had met him at Great Meadows, and who now made him their special mark. He had four bullets through his coat, and two horses shot under him. He seemed to escape injury as by a miracle.

Braddock at last ordered a retreat, and while he and such of his officers as remained were endeavoring to bring the panic-stricken troops into some kind of order, he was mortally wounded and fell from his horse. He was borne on a litter, but laid at last at the foot of a tree near the scene of Washington's fight at Fort Necessity, where he died in the night of July 13. The chaplain was wounded, and Washington read the burial service over the body of the General. It was a sorry ending of the expedition which had set out with such high hopes.

Five days later Washington reached Fort Cumberland, and one of his first duties was to send a letter to his mother. "I am still in a weak and feeble condition," he writes, "which induces me to halt here two or three days in the hope of recovering a little strength, to enable me to proceed homewards, from whence, I fear, I shall not be able to stir till towards September; so that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you till then, unless it be in Fairfax."

He arrived at Mount Vernon on July 26.

CHAPTER XI.

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE VIRGINIA FORCES.

THE disastrous defeat of Braddock filled the Virginia people with uneasiness, for it was sure to be followed by Indian raids. The House of Burgesses voted a sum of money, and resolved to increase the regiment by making it consist of sixteen companies. His friends immediately began to urge Washington to solicit the command, but he would do nothing of the sort. His experience had taught him the weakness of the colonial military system; if he were to seek the place he could not at the same time propose reforms. If the command were offered to him, that would be a different matter, for then he would be at liberty to make conditions.

The command was offered to him on his own terms, and for three years he was engaged in as trying and perplexing a business as could well be committed to a young man of twenty-three to

twenty-six years of age. He did not know it at the time, but we see now that he was attending a school of the severest sort in preparation for the arduous task which was to be set him later in life. His headquarters were at Winchester, where he had the active support of his old friend Lord Fairfax. As soon as he had effected some sort of organization, he sent out recruiting officers and did his best to fill up the ranks of his little army. Then he was off on a tour of inspection, visiting the outposts and making himself acquainted, by personal observation, with all the details of his command.

Everything seemed to be against him, and every advantage which he gained was won only by the most determined effort. He must often have thought with envy of the profusion of military stores of all kinds with which Braddock's army was provided, and of the abundant money in the hands of the paymaster. Here was he, obliged to use the strictest economy if he would make the money which the Burgesses doled out answer the needs of his command, and he was forced to be his own commissary and quartermaster, laying in stores and buying cattle up and down the country. “At the repeated instance of the soldiers," he writes once to the Speaker of the House, "I must pay so much regard to their representations, as to transmit their complaints. They think it extremely hard, as it is indeed, sir, that they, who perhaps do more duty, and undergo more fatigue and hardship from the nature of the service and situation of the country, should be allowed the least pay, and smallest encouragements in other respects. Our soldiers complain that their pay is insufficient even to furnish shoes, shirts, and stockings, which their officers, in order to keep them fit for duty, oblige them to provide. This, they say, deprives them of the means of purchasing any of the conveniences or accessories of life, and compels them to drag through a disagreeable service, in the most disagreeable manner. That their pay will not afford more than enough to keep them in clothes, I should be convinced for these reasons, if experience had not taught me. The British soldiers are allowed eight pence sterling per day, with many necessaries that ours are not, and can buy what is requisite upon the cheapest terms; and they lie onehalf the year in camp or garrison, when they cannot consume the fifth part of what ours do in continual marches over mountains, rocks and rivers. * * And I dare say you will be candid enough to allow that few men would choose to have their lives exposed to the incessant insults of a merciless enemy, without some view or hope of reward.”

But his difficulties with regard to money and supplies were as nothing to those which he endured

when seeking to raise men, and to control them. His recruiting officers were negligent. "Several officers," he writes at one time, "have been out six weeks, or two months, without getting a man, spending their time in all the gayety of pleasurable mirth, with their relations and friends; not attempting nor having a possible chance to recruit any but those who, out of their inclination to the service, will proffer themselves." At one time, when the Shenandoah valley was in imminent danger from Indians, he called upon Lord Fairfax and other officers of the militia to put forth special efforts to bring together all the men they could raise for an expedition to go out and scour the country, and when the day came, after all the drumming and beating up of recruits, only fifteen appeared!

Nor, after he had his men, could he bring them under regular discipline. He had seen something of the order which prevailed under English officers, and it brought into stronger contrast the loose, independent ways of the Virginia militia, where the men had very little notion of obedience, and regarded an order as a request which they could attend to or not as suited their convenience. All this was exasperating enough to a high-spirited commander, who knew that no effective military work could be done when there was such a spirit, and Washington prevailed upon the legislature to enact a more stringent code of laws, which gave more power to the commander, and compelled the soldier to obey at risk of severe penalty. To accomplish this, he had to visit Williamsburg and labor with the members of the legislature individually.

There is no doubt that Washington had very troublesome material to make into soldiers, and that, as a young commander, he was incensed by their conduct, and ready to be very summary with them. As a military man, he was also greatly annoyed by the indifferent manner in which he was supported by the country people whom he was engaged in protecting. One reason lay in the peculiar life of Virginia. When an ignorant white man found himself under strict orders, he resented it, because he thought it placed him on a level with negro slaves. Then there was no class of intelligent, hard-working mechanics, from which soldiers could be drafted. The planters' sons were ready to be officers, but they did not care about being privates. The better men in the ranks were drawn from the hardy backwoodsmen, whose life was a free, self-reliant one. In fact, the stubborn Burgesses and independent soldiers were made stubborn and independent by the life in America which several generations of planters and frontiersmen had been living. Washington was too near

these people to understand this at the time, but we can see that his troublesome soldiers were the stuff out of which the fighting armies of the war for independence were made.

The old trouble between provincial officers and those appointed by the King continued; and Washington found himself balked in his plans by a little whipper-snapper of a captain, who was

posted at Fort Cumberland and refused to take orders from him. Even the Governor was timidly unwilling to sustain the Commander-in-chief, and in order to set the matter at rest, for the case was one which involved much, Washington made a journey to Boston to consult with Governor Shirley, who at that time was at the head of all the British forces in America.