ittle avail, and Washington prepared to shift for himself as best he
might. His Indian allies brought him news that the French were on the
march and had thrown out scouting parties. Picking out a place in the
Great Meadows for a fort, "a charming field for an encounter," he in
his turn sent out a scouting party, and then on fresh intelligence
from the Indians set forth himself with forty men to find the enemy.
After a toilsome march they discovered their foes in camp. The French,
surprised and surrounded, sprang to arms, the Virginians fired, there
was a sharp exchange of shots, and all was over. Ten of the French
were killed and twenty-one were taken prisoners, only one of the party
escaping to carry back the news.

This little skirmish made a prodigious noise in its day, and was much
heralded in France. The French declared that Jumonville, the leader,
who fell at the first fire, was foully assassinated, and that he and
his party were ambassadors and sacred characters. Paris rang with this
fresh instance of British perfidy, and a M. Thomas celebrated the
luckless Jumonville in a solemn epic poem in four books. French
historians, relying on the account of the Canadian who escaped,
adopted the same tone, and at a later day mourned over this black
spot on Washington's character. The French view was simple nonsense.
Jumonville and his party, as the papers found on Jumonville showed,
were out on a spying and scouting expedition. They were seeking to
surprise the English when the English surprised them, with the usual
backwoods result. The affair has a dramatic interest because it was
the first blood shed in a great struggle, and was the beginning of a
series of world-wide wars and social and political convulsions, which
terminated more than half a century later on the plains of Waterloo.
It gave immortality to an obscure French officer by linking his name
with that of his opponent, and brought Washington for the moment
before the eyes of the world, which little dreamed that this Virginian
colonel was destined to be one of the principal figures in the great
revolutionary drama to which the war then beginning was but the
prologue.

Washington, for his part, well satisfied with his exploit, retraced
his steps, and having sent his prisoners back to Virginia, proceeded
to consider his situation. It was not a very cheerful prospect.
Contrecoeur, with the main body of the French and Indians, was moving
down from the Monongahela