ould see no
enemy, and wasted volley after volley on the impassive trees. The most
destructive fire came from a hill on the English right, where the
Indians lay in multitudes, firing from their lurking-places on the
living target below. But the invisible death was everywhere, in front,
flank, and rear. The British cheer was heard no more. The troops broke
their ranks and huddled together in a bewildered mass, shrinking from
the bullets that cut them down by scores.

[Footnote 223: _Journal of the Proceeding of the Detachment of Seamen_,
in Sargent.]

[Footnote 224: _Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756. Contrecoeur a
Vaudreuil, 14 Juillet, 1755_. See Appendix D, where extracts are given.]

When Braddock heard the firing in the front, he pushed forward with the
main body to the support of Gage, leaving four hundred men in the rear,
under Sir Peter Halket, to guard the baggage. At the moment of his
arrival Gage's soldiers had abandoned their two cannon, and were falling
back to escape the concentrated fire of the Indians. Meeting the
advancing troops, they tried to find cover behind them. This threw the
whole into confusion. The men of the two regiments became mixed
together; and in a short time the entire force, except the Virginians
and the troops left with Halket, were massed in several dense bodies
within a small space of ground, facing some one way and some another,
and all alike exposed without shelter to the bullets that pelted them
like hail. Both men and officers were new to this blind and frightful
warfare of the savage in his native woods. To charge the Indians in
their hiding-places would have been useless. They would have eluded
pursuit with the agility of wildcats, and swarmed back, like angry
hornets, the moment that it ceased. The Virginians alone were equal to
the emergency. Fighting behind trees like the Indians themselves, they
might have held the enemy in check till order could be restored, had not
Braddock, furious at a proceeding that shocked all his ideas of courage
and discipline, ordered them, with oaths, to form into line. A body of
them under Captain Waggoner made a dash for a fallen tree lying in the
woods, far out towards the lurking-places of the Indians, and, crouching
behind the huge trunk, opened fire; but the regulars, seeing the smoke
among the bushes, mistook their best friends for the enemy, shot at them
from behind, killed many, and forced the rest to return. A few of the
regulars a