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that Braddock solemnly pledged that he would be brought forward before Fort Duquesne was attacked. As Washington’s condition worsened, he found it agonizing to lie in the wagon as it jolted along uneven country roads through impenetrable woods dubbed the “Shades of Death.”22 He told his brother on June 28 that he had barely enough energy to pen the letter and that a doctor had warned him that, if he persisted, he would risk his life.23 Although the medicine helped Washington, his illness and frequent bleeding by doctors left him woefully depleted on the eve of a major battle. Even though he had recuperated sufficiently by July 8 to rejoin Braddock a dozen miles from Fort Duquesne, he was still so weak that when he mounted his horse the next morning, he had to strap on cushions to ease his painful hemorrhoids. He would require all the stamina he could muster for the extraordinary events in the offing.

Early on the morning of July 9, Braddock’s advance force, which had grown to some fourteen hundred men, began to ford the Monongahela River in three groups. (The spot stands near present-day Braddock, Pennsylvania.) Each section was led by an officer who was to reappear in the American Revolution. The first party to cross was spearheaded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, the son of a viscount and an officer much admired by young Washington. The second party was led by Captain Horatio Gates, said to be the illegitimate offspring of a duke’s housekeeper. The last group to cross in the early afternoon was the five-hundred-man contingent led by Braddock himself, escorted by the weary Washington. All three groups crossed the river without the slightest intimation that a party of nine hundred soldiers from Fort Duquesne lay poised to attack on the other side.

As at Fort Necessity, the French and their Indian allies practiced a terrifying form of frontier warfare that unnerved the British. Letting loose a series of shrill, penetrating war whoops—“the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution,” a shaken British soldier later said—the Indians swooped down suddenly and opened fire on the startled British.24 Before British grenadiers could fire a retaliatory round, the enemy had melted nimbly into the woods. For a short interval, it seemed they had vanished. Then it became clear that they had split into two wings and encircled the British, releasing a hail of bullets from behind trees and well-protected elevated positions. The impressive miter caps of the grenadiers made them tall, conspicuous targets. In the rear with Braddock, Washington heard the ensuing panic, which he still couldn’t see. The vanguard of British troops, he recollected, “were so disconcerted and confused” by the “unusual hallooing and whooping of the enemy” that they soon fell “into irretrievable disorder.”25 The British soldiers had never encountered this North American brand of fighting. “If we saw five or six [of the enemy] at one time,” said one soldier, “it was a great sight and they [were] either on their bellies or behind trees or running from one tree to another almost by the ground.”26 Even as officers tried vainly to subdue the hysterical fears of their men, the latter threw down their muskets and fled helter-skelter. All the while, Indians scalped and plundered the British dead in what became a veritable charnel house by the river.

As Braddock and Washington rode toward this scene of helpless slaughter, panic-stricken redcoats streamed back toward them. After Braddock sent thirty men under Captain Thomas Waggener to climb a hillside and secure a high position, British troops fired at them in the smoky chaos under the mistaken assumption that they were French, while British officers fired at them thinking they were deserters. All thirty men under Captain Waggener were killed by French or British fire. For Washington, who had warned Braddock repeatedly about the unorthodox style of wilderness combat, the situation grimly fulfilled his worst premonitions. Braddock had clung to the European doctrine of compact fighting forces, forming his