s from his sick bed at Raystown wrote to Bouquet: "Your description
of the road pierces me to the very soul." And a few days later to Pitt:
"I am in the greatest distress, occasioned by rains unusual at this
season, which have rendered the clay roads absolutely impracticable. If
the weather does not favor, I shall be absolutely locked up in the
mountains. I cannot form any judgment how I am to extricate myself as
everything depends on the weather, which snows and rains frightfully."
There was no improvement. In the next week he writes to Bouquet: "These
four days of constant rain have completely ruined the road. The wagons
would cut it up more in an hour than we could repair in a week. I have
written to General Abercromby, but have not had one scrape of a pen from
him since the beginning of September; so it looks as if we were either
forgot or left to our fate."[663] Wasted and tortured by disease, the
perplexed commander was forced to burden himself with a multitude of
details which would else have been neglected, and to do the work of
commissary and quartermaster as well as general. "My time," he writes,
"is disagreeably spent between business and medicine."

[Footnote 663: _Forbes to Bouquet, 15 Oct. 1758. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1758.
Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758._]

In the beginning of November he was carried to Loyalhannon, where the
whole army was then gathered. There was a council of officers, and they
resolved to attempt nothing more that season; but, a few days later,
three prisoners were brought in who reported the defenceless condition
of the French, on which Forbes gave orders to advance again. The wagons
and all the artillery, except a few light pieces, were left behind; and
on the eighteenth of November twenty-five hundred picked men marched for
Fort Duquesne, without tents or baggage, and burdened only with
knapsacks and blankets. Washington and Colonel Armstrong, of the
Pennsylvanians, had opened a way for them by cutting a road to within a
day's march of the French fort. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the
detachment encamped among the hills of Turkey Creek; and the men on
guard heard at midnight a dull and heavy sound booming over the western
woods. Was it a magazine exploded by accident, or were the French
blowing up their works? In the morning the march was resumed, a strong
advance-guard leading the way. Forbes came next, carried in his litter;
and the troops followed in three parallel columns, the Hig