The value to the colonists of their military experience in this war can hardly be overestimated. If the outbreak of the Revolution had found the Americans a generation of civilians, if the colonial cause had lacked the privates who had seen hard service at Lake George and Louisburg, or the officers, such as Washington, Gates, Montgomery, Stark, and Putnam, who had learned to fight successfully against British regulars by fighting with them, it is a question whether the uprising would not have been stamped out, for a time at least, almost at its inception. Especially at the beginning of such a war, when the first necessity is to get a peaceful nation under arms as quickly as possible, a few soldier-citizens are invaluable. They form the nucleus of the rising army, and set the standard for military organization and discipline. In fact, the French and Indian War would have repaid the colonies all it cost even if its only result had been to give the youthful Washington that schooling in arms which helped fit him to command the Continental armies. Without the Washington of Fort Necessity and of Braddock's defeat, we could in all likelihood never have had the Washington of Trenton and Yorktown. Besides Washington, to say nothing of Gates, Gage, and Mercer, also there, Dan Morgan, of Virginia, began to learn war in the Braddock campaign. [Illustration: Tree lined Pond covered with leaves.] Bloody Pond, near Lake George, which is said to still contain the bones of many of those who fell in the fight at Fort William Henry. Again, the war prepared the colonists for the Revolution by revealing to them their own rare fighting quality, and by showing that the dreaded British regulars were not invincible. No foe would, at Saratoga or Monmouth, see the backs of the men who had covered the redcoats' retreat from the field of Braddock's death, scaled the abatis of Louisburg, or brained Dieskau's regulars on the parapet of Fort William Henry.