Washington [43]
Braddock handed Washington two directives: to send another party up the exposed hill and to retrieve two lost cannon. With exceptional pluck and coolheadedness, young George Washington was soon riding all over the battlefield. Though he must have been exhausted, he kept going from sheer willpower and performed magnificently amid the horror. Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle. When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders. One account claimed that he was so spent from his recent illness that he had to be lifted onto his second charger. By the end, despite four bullets having torn through his hat and uniform, he managed to emerge unscathed.
One close observer of Washington’s heroism was a young doctor and future friend, James Craik. Handsome, blue-eyed, and urbane, Dr. Craik had studied medicine in Edinburgh and was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man in western Scotland. He watched Washington’s exceptional performance that day with unstinting admiration: “I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and station exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him.”28
Even before the battle, Washington had suffered his fill of British condescension from Braddock. Now he was further embittered by his conviction that the Virginians had fought courageously and died in droves, while British regulars had fled to save their skins. “The Virginians behaved like men and died like soldiers,” he insisted to Dinwiddie. By contrast, “the dastardly behavior of the English soldiers exposed all those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death . . . at length, in despite of every effort to the contrary, [they] broke and run as sheep before the hounds . . . And when we endeavored to rally them in hopes of regaining our invaluable loss, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild bears of the mountains.”29
So many intrepid British officers were killed or wounded—nearly two-thirds of the total—that it led to a complete collapse of the command structure. Among the wounded were Braddock’s two other aides-de-camp. When Braddock was felled by a bullet that slashed through his arm and pierced his lung, only Washington was left to tend him. Braddock had fought with more valor than wisdom, having four horses shot from under him. Washington stretched out the general in a small cart and shepherded him back across the Monongahela. Henceforth Washington received orders from an intermittently lucid Braddock who lay groaning on a stretcher. “I was the only person then left to distribute the general’s orders,” Washington said, explaining that it was difficult to do so because of his own “weak and feeble condition.”30
One order required Washington to relay a message to a Colonel Dunbar, whose division lay forty miles in the rear, to come forward with supplies, medication, and wagons to assist the moaning legions of wounded soldiers. By now Washington had been on horseback for twelve excruciating hours, yet he gathered up the energy to ride all night and execute Braddock’s command. Thirty years later the horror of that night—the black woods, the ghastly cacophony of sounds, the unspeakable heaps of corpses—was still engraved on his memory. “The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night’s march are not to be described,” he said. “The dead—the dying—the groans