One of the direct serious charges brought against Washington was that he did "not know the difference between a party and an army." This is brought by Colonel Bouquet and I do not believe that he was in error or that the accusation can be proved unjust. Washington had had much experience, such as it was, in the Fort Necessity campaign, with Braddock, and on the Virginia frontier. But the Fort Necessity campaign was conspicuous as a political, not a military event. The force he led west did not number two hundred men. This was, surely, a party, not an army. Now, be it remembered, the great difficulty of leading any body of men, small or great, lay in provisioning them and feeding the horses. The larger the army the greater the difficulty--indeed the difficulty trebled as the number of men and horses was doubled. On those mountain roads the second wagon was drawn with much greater difficulty than the first. Again, a small body of men could, in part, be supplied with food from the forests; in the case of an army this source of supply must be ignored. In the case of Washington's Fort Necessity campaign, how did his handful of men fare? They nearly starved--and capitulated because they did not have the food to give them the necessary strength to retreat. This was not Washington's fault, for he, properly, left this matter with those whose business it was; but the experience certainly did not teach him how to handle an army. I cannot see that he had the opportunity to learn much more in Braddock's campaign in 1755. He was that general's aide, a carrier of messages and orders, and a member of the military family. He had ever before his eyes a thousand examples of carelessness, chicanery, and mismanagement, but those could not teach him how an army was to be cared for properly. His advice was often asked and minded, but he gave it in the capacity of a frontiersman, not as a tactician or officer. The one exception was when he urged that Braddock divide the _army_ into two _parties_ by sending a small flying column rapidly against Fort Duquesne. It is clear from preceding pages that, on the Virginia frontier, he learned no lessons on the control of large bodies of men.