force, and the
independent companies which Colonel Washington had stationed here the
previous summer had been at work all winter clearing the ground and
building the fort. They had cleared a wide space in the forest, and on a
little hill some two hundred yards from Will's Creek and four hundred
from the Potomac, had erected the stockade. It was near two hundred yards
in length from east to west, and some fifty in width, but rude enough,
consisting merely of a row of logs set upright in the ground and
projecting some twelve feet above it, loopholed, and sharpened at the
top. There were embrasures for twelve cannon, ten of which, all
four-pounders, were already mounted. Though frail as it could well be, it
was deemed sufficient to withstand any attack likely to be brought
against it. A great two-storied barrack for the officers of the line had
been erected within the stockade, and two magazines of heavy timber. The
men were camped about the fort, and half a mile away through the forest a
hundred Indians had pitched their wigwams. And here, on the tenth of May,
came the Forty-Eighth under Colonel Dunbar, and General Braddock himself
in his great traveling chariot, his staff riding behind and a body of
light horse on either side. We were paraded to welcome him, the drums
rolled out the grenadiers, the seventeen guns prescribed by the
regulations were fired, and the campaign was on in earnest.

The morning of the next day, the general held his first levee in his
tent, and all the officers called to pay their respects. He was a
heavy-set, red-faced man of some sixty years, with long, straight nose,
aggressive, pointed chin, and firm-set lips, and though he greeted us
civilly enough, there was a touch of insolence in his manner which he
made small effort to conceal, and which showed that it was not upon the
Virginia troops he placed reliance. Still, there was that in his
heavy-featured face and in his bearing which bespoke the soldier, and I
remembered Fontenoy and the record he had made there. In the afternoon,
there was a general review, and he rode up and down with his staff in
front of the whole force, most gorgeous in gold lace and brilliant
accoutrement. Of the twenty-two hundred men he looked at that day, the
nine Virginia companies found least favor in his eyes, for he deemed them
listless and mean-spirited,--an opinion which he was at no pains to keep
to himself, and which had the effect of making the bearing of his
o