It would have been much better had General Braddock chosen a route farther to the north, where the Pennsylvanian farmers of the frontier had begun to make roads and open the forests for the plough; but it made little difference, after all, which way he went: his temper and his training doomed him to fail. He lacked neither courage nor capacity, but he sadly lacked discretion. He meant to make his campaign in the wilderness by the rules of war he had learned in Europe, where the forests were cleared away and no subtile savages could dog or ambush an army; and he would take no advice from provincials. Few but Washington cared to volunteer advice, for the commander-in-chief was “a very Iroquois in disposition.” He took two thousand men into the wilderness, with artillery trains and baggage: fourteen hundred regulars, nearly five hundred Virginians, horse and foot, two independent companies from New York, and sailors from the transports to rig tackle to get his stores and field-pieces out of difficulties in the rough road. Washington went with the confident commander, by special invitation, to act as one of his aides, and was the only provincial officer whose advice was given so much as consideration during all the weary weeks in which the little army widened and levelled its way with axe and spade through the dense woods. And then the fatal day came which filled all the colonies with dismay. [Illustration: MAP OF BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT] The French commander at Duquesne had no such force as Braddock was bringing against him. He expected to be obliged to retire. But on the 9th of July the English general, with his advance force of twelve hundred men, forded the shallow Monongahela but eight miles from Duquesne, and striking into the trail which led to the fort, walked into an ambush. A thousand men,—Indians, chiefly, and Canadian provincials,—poured a deadly fire upon him from the thick cover of the woods on either hand. He would not open his order and meet the attack in forest fashion, as Washington begged him to do, but kept his men formed and crowded in the open spaces of the road, to be almost annihilated, and driven back, a mere remnant, in utter rout. It was shameful, pitiful. Washington and his Virginian rangers could with difficulty keep the rear when the rout came, and bring the stricken commander off, to die in the retreat. Dinwiddie could not persuade the officers left in command even to stay upon the Virginian frontier to keep the border settlements safe against the savages. It was Washington’s impossible task for the rest of the war to guard three hundred and fifty miles of frontier with a handful of half-fed provincial militia, where the little huts and tiny settlements of the Scots-Irish immigrants lay scattered far and wide among the foothills and valleys of the spreading mountain country, open everywhere to the swift and secret onset of the pitiless redskins.