In the meanwhile the storm of war had broken over the colonies. A terrible war it was. It lacked the wholesale devastation of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, but it was marked by infinite cruelties. Dinwiddie described it vividly. "Think you see the infant torn from the unavailing struggles of the distracted mother, the daughters ravished before the eyes of their wretched parents, and then, with cruelty and insult, butchered and scalped. Suppose the horrid scene completed, and the whole family, man, wife, and children murdered and scalped by these relentless savages, and then torn in pieces."[17] To Dinwiddie goes the credit of warning the British government that the French were trying to confine the English to the region east of the Alleghenies. In December, 1752, he wrote the Board of Trade that they had built a string of forts from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi, that they had 5,000 soldiers at New Orleans, and 1,600 elsewhere in America. When he heard that a force of French and Indians had built a fort on the Allegheny River, and were preparing to descend on the Ohio, he sent young George Washington to warn them to leave. This proving ineffectual, he came to the Assembly for funds to finance an expedition to drive them out. This was the first of a series of appeals for money which gave the Assembly a golden opportunity to weaken the power of the Governor and the royal prerogative. Yet it was an opportunity full of danger. If they clogged their grants with such conditions that Dinwiddie would not accept them, they ran the risk of having the colony overrun by the enemy. At times the Governor was in despair. "The French could have cut off every one of our men and marched down to Hampton without the least danger," he wrote in July, 1754. When the Assembly met in February, 1754, Dinwiddie told them that Washington had seen a large body of the enemy on the upper Allegheny. Give me men and supplies to oppose them, he pleaded. The safety of Virginia depends on you at this critical juncture.[18] In reply to this appeal they did vote L10,000 but Dinwiddie was far from happy about it because the bill named a committee of the two Houses to supervise its expenditure. "This bill takes from me the undoubted right I have of directing the application of the money," he complained. But since funds could be had on no other terms he gave his assent. "I assure you it was contrary to my inclination, but necessity has no law," he wrote James Abercrombie.[19]