“Let me serve voluntarily,” Washington wrote to the Governor, “and I will, with the greatest pleasure, devote my services to this expedition,—but, to be slaving through woods, rocks and mountains for the shadow of pay, I would rather toil like a day laborer for a maintenance, if reduced to the necessity, than to serve on such ignoble terms.”
In a letter to his friend, Colonel Fairfax, in which he preferred to serve as a volunteer without pay, rather than for what he was getting, he added, “for the motives that have led me here are pure and noble. I had no view of acquisition but that of honor, by serving faithfully my king and my country.”
In the midst of all this dissatisfaction and distress, word came through Indian scouts that the French were marching to attack him. The tracks of a scouting party having been discovered, an Indian was put on the trail and he found the camp of the enemy. Washington determined to surprise them. He planned to slip up on one side of them, as his Indian allies did the same on the other side. Between them he believed he could capture them all. But the sharp watch of the French caught sight of the English and the forest battle began. One of Washington’s men had been killed and three wounded in a fifteen minutes’ battle, when the French, having lost several and becoming frightened at being between two fires, gave way and ran. They were soon overtaken and captured, excepting one who escaped and carried the news to the fort at the forks of the Ohio. Ten of the French had been killed and one wounded. Twenty-one were prisoners.
Though this battle, as measured in the deeds of other wars, was indeed a small affair, it was weighty with consequence for the interests of America. It was Washington’s first experience in battle. In a letter to one of his brothers, he says, “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
This statement of a boy, at the age of twenty-two in the first emotions of military excitement, is hardly to be called mere rodomontade as Horace Walpole termed it. It is said that George II remarked, when he was told of this expression used by the young Virginian commander, “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.” Forty years later, when Washington was President of the United States of America, he was asked about the so-called charm of whistling bullets, and he replied, “If I said so, it was when I was young.”
The victory of this battle, small as it was, aroused the colonists and held the confidence of the Indians. The Indian chief sent the scalps of the ten slain soldiers to the different tribes and called on them to come at once to the help of their brothers, the English.
Washington’s difficulty in getting supplies and in obtaining reinforcements taxed all his powers and all his stability of character. There was no doubt that the entire success of the campaign depended upon his patience and resourceful perseverance. It was making the twenty-two-year-old gentleman of Mount Vernon and Belvoir very rapidly into a hardy warrior of the wilderness, and a tactful manager of men. These qualities were being strengthened for the coming great day, when there should be a new nation. Doubtless the sordid stupidity of the colonial governors, in their tardy and meager support of him, had much to do in preparing the way for ideas of independence and a self-governing body of States.