I think the choice of Braddock unfortunate. He is a brave, or rather a reckless, man, overconfident, arrogant, and sure to despise his enemy, and goes out, as I am assured, with a bad opinion of the Colonials. Horace Walpole, who knows, as we all do, the mad life Braddock has led in London, says: “He is a very Iroquois in disposition, and so, I suppose, fit to fight his kind.” Horace is making himself merry over the appointment, and the Colonial helping he is to have. But it is the fashion here to laugh at Colonials, and not for the world would Horace be out of the fashion. I wish the General may have good fortune, but I fear the matching of drill and pipe-clay against the wiles of the woods; as sensible would it be to set a fencing-master with a rapier to fight a tiger in a jungle. When I consider how vast is this increasing number of English in a country where must be great prospects and a fine sense of independency, I wonder how little they are regarded here. But it is our way to despise other nations, and even our own blood if it has had enterprise to cross the seas. Come back and help us to learn better. Always your Lordship’s Ob’d’t hum’le serv’t. _Henry Conway._ His lordship looked at me as I put away the letters. I said: “That seems to me good sense; but about the general, I cannot credit it.” “You will judge for yourself,” he said, “if this be the man to send into the wilderness. Keep the letters, but do not lose them; you may return them later.” Which I should have done, only that the rout on the Monongahela put it out of my mind. XXXII It was about noon when, as I have said, being in the rear of the Forty-eighth Foot, we heard a noise behind us. We drew up at the side within the wood to see what was coming. Amid a great dust came General Braddock, in a fine red chariot bought of Governor Sharpe, with an escort of light horse, all in great haste, and bumping over the worst road possible. Presently they flew by the troops, who saluted, the drums beating the Grenadier’s March, a tune I was to hear again. “If I were the general,” I said, “I should have preferred a horse to a coach.” “Not if you were he,” said his lordship. “But the man is not a fool,” I ventured to say. “He seemed to me not to want for intelligence.” “An intelligent fool, George, is the worst fool. His intelligence feeds his folly.” This, like much else that his lordship said to me, was not so plain as it would be now, and, accordingly, I made no reply. After being silent for a time, his lordship went on to say that I should do well to talk little, and quietly to observe things for myself; that he himself knew General Braddock to be a spendthrift, obstinate as a pig, and very self-confident; and, finally, that I knew what a lot of drilled regulars would be worth in the woods. He feared also that the officers were quite unfit for the service.