ficer's badge, dash out of the
woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later
the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to
tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In
vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers
shouted, "The King! God save the King!" One officer tried to rally
his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of
bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how
to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like
Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy's aim, they had broken from
rank to fight in bushman fashion when Braddock {229} came galloping
furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was
military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen
Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled
together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only
in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and
rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear,
much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless
commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging
forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only
plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen
and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march
became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so
stolidly under withering fire now dashing in headlong flight from the
second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if
pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes,--all
were abandoned. Washington's clothes had been riddled by bullets, but
he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally
wounded, to be carried {230} back on a litter to that scene of
Washington's surrender the year before. Four days later the English
general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay
dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians.
Braddock was buried in his soldier's coat beside the trail, all signs
of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.

[Illustration: PLAN OF FORT BEAUSEJOUR]

Of all the losses the most serious were the dispatch boxes; for they
contained the English plans of campaign from Acadia to Niagara, and
were c