The remainder of the campaign has been often told and in detail. Washington and his Virginians came northward over the newly-cut road to Fort Bedford at Raystown and plunged westward to the Loyalhannan, to which point Armstrong and St. Clair pushed the road-building. Washington himself supervised the cutting of Forbes's road westward from Fort Ligonier toward Fort Duquesne. Much as he had wrangled with Bouquet as to the propriety of making a new road he was as good as his word and worked heroically for its success. Never, even in Braddock's death-trap on the Monongahela, did he come nearer giving his life to his country. Forbes's first check came when Grant's command, sent forward from Fort Ligonier to reconnoitre Fort Duquesne, was cut to pieces on Grant's Hill within sight of the French fort. Eight hundred men went on the expedition; two hundred and seventy-three were killed, wounded, or captured. Bouquet reported the disaster to Forbes on the seventeenth of September, upon which the sad man "deeply touched by this reverse," writes Parkman, "yet expressed himself with a moderation that does him honor." "Your letter of the seventeenth I read with no less surprise than concern, as I could not believe that such an attempt would have been made without my knowledge and concurrence. The breaking in upon our fair and flattering hopes of success touches me most sensibly. There are two wounded highland officers just now arrived, who give so lame an account of the matter that one can draw nothing from them, only that my friend Grant most certainly lost his wits, and by his thirst of fame brought on his own perdition, and ran great risk of ours." The brave generosity of these words is not so significant as the fact that this pain-racked man, far behind on the road, had such a grasp of the minutest detail of the whole campaign that Bouquet, he believed, would not even send out a scouting party in force without his "knowledge and concurrence."