His only hope was in the detachment he had sent to the rear under Lewis to guard the baggage. But Lewis and his men, when they heard the firing in front, had left their post and pushed forward to help their comrades, taking a straight course through the forest; while Grant was retreating along the path by which he had advanced the night before. Thus they missed each other; and when Grant reached the spot where he expected to find Lewis, he saw to his dismay that nobody was there but Captain Bullitt and his company. He cried in despair that he was a ruined man; not without reason, for the whole body of French and Indians was upon him. Such of his men as held together were forced towards the Alleghany, and, writes Bouquet, "would probably have been cut to pieces but for Captain Bullitt and his Virginians, who kept up the fight against the whole French force till two thirds of them were killed." They were offered quarter, but refused it; and the survivors were driven at last into the Alleghany, where some were drowned, and others swam over and escaped. Grant was surrounded and captured, and Lewis, who presently came up, was also made prisoner, along with some of his men, after a stiff resistance. Thus ended this mismanaged affair, which cost the English two hundred and seventy three killed, wounded, and taken. The rest got back safe to Loyalhannon. [661]
[661] On Grant's defeat, Grant to Forbes, no date, a long and minute report, written while a prisoner. Bouquet à Forbes, 17 Sept. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 1 Nov. 1758. Letters from camp in Boston Evening Post, Boston Weekly Advertiser, Boston News Letter, and other provincial newspapers of the time. List of Killed, Wounded, and Missing in the Action of Sept. 14. Gentleman's Magazine, XXIX. 173. Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, VIII. 141. Olden Time, I. 179. Vaudreuil, with characteristic exaggeration, represents all Grant's party as killed or taken, except a few who died of starvation. The returns show that 540 came back safe, out of 813.
The invalid General was deeply touched by this reverse, yet expressed himself with a moderation that does him honor. He wrote to Bouquet from Raystown: "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." [662]
[662] Forbes to Bouquet, 23 Sept. 1758.
The French pushed their advantage with spirit. Early in October a large body of them hovered in the woods about the camp at Loyalhannon, drove back a detachment sent against them, approached under cover of the trees, and, though beaten off, withdrew deliberately, after burying their dead and killing great numbers of horses and cattle. [663] But, with all their courageous energy, their position was desperate. The militia of Louisiana and the Illinois left the fort in November and went home; the Indians of Detroit and the Wabash would stay no longer; and, worse yet, the supplies destined for Fort Duquesne had been destroyed by Bradstreet at Fort Frontenac. Hence Ligneris was compelled by prospective starvation to dismiss the greater part of his force, and await the approach of his enemy with those that remained.
[663] Burd to Bouquet, 12 Oct. 1758. Bouquet à Forbes, 13 Oct. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758. Letter from Loyalhannon, 14 Oct., in Olden Time, I. 180. Letters from camp, in Boston News Letter. Ligneris à Vaudreuil, 18 Oct. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 20 Nov. 1758.
His enemy was in a plight hardly better than his own. Autumnal rains, uncommonly heavy and persistent, had ruined the newly-cut road. On the mountains the torrents tore it up, and in the valleys the wheels of the wagons and cannon churned it into soft mud. The horses, overworked and underfed, were fast breaking down. The forest had little food for them, and they were forced to drag their own oats and corn, as well as supplies for the army, through two hundred miles of wilderness. In the wretched condition of the road this was no longer possible. The magazines of provisions formed at Raystown and Loyalhannon to support the army on its forward march were emptied faster than they could be filled. Early in October the elements relented; the clouds broke, the sky was bright again, and the sun shone out in splendor on mountains radiant in the livery of autumn. A gleam of hope revisited the heart of Forbes. It was but a flattering illusion. The sullen clouds returned, and a chill, impenetrable veil of mist and rain hid the mountains and the trees. Dejected Nature wept and would not be comforted. Above, below, around, all was trickling, oozing, pattering, gushing. In the miserable encampments the starved horses stood steaming in the rain, and the men crouched, disgusted, under their dripping tents, while the drenched picket-guard in the neighboring forest paced dolefully through black mire and spongy mosses. The rain turned to snow; the descending flakes clung to the many-colored foliage, or melted from sight in the trench of half-liquid clay that was called a road. The wheels of the wagons sank in it to the hub, and to advance or retreat was alike impossible.
Forbes from his sick bed at Raystown wrote to Bouquet: "Your description of the road pierces me to the very soul." And a few days later to Pitt: "I am in the greatest distress, occasioned by rains unusual at this season, which have rendered the clay roads absolutely impracticable. If the weather does not favor, I shall be absolutely locked up in the mountains. I cannot form any judgment how I am to extricate myself, as everything depends on the weather, which snows and rains frightfully." There was no improvement. In the next week he writes to Bouquet: "These four days of constant rain have completely ruined the road. The wagons would cut it up more in an hour than we could repair in a week. I have written to General Abercromby, but have not had one scrape of a pen from him since the beginning of September; so it looks as if we were either forgot or left to our fate." [664] Wasted and tortured by disease, the perplexed commander was forced to burden himself with a multitude of details which would else have been neglected, and to do the work of commissary and quartermaster as well as general. "My time," he writes, "is disagreeably spent between business and medicine."
[664] Forbes to Bouquet, 15 Oct. 1758. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758.
In the beginning of November he was carried to Loyalhannon, where the whole army was then gathered. There was a council of officers, and they resolved to attempt nothing more that season; but, a few days later, three prisoners were brought in who reported the defenceless condition of the French, on which Forbes gave orders to advance again. The wagons and all the artillery, except a few light pieces, were left behind; and on the eighteenth of November twenty-five hundred picked men marched for Fort Duquesne, without tents or baggage, and burdened only with knapsacks and blankets. Washington and Colonel Armstrong, of the Pennsylvanians, had opened a way for them by cutting a road to within a day's march of the French fort. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the detachment encamped among the hills of Turkey Creek; and the men on guard heard at midnight a dull and heavy sound booming over the western woods. Was it a magazine exploded by accident, or were the French blowing up their works? In the morning the march was resumed, a strong advance-guard leading the way. Forbes came next, carried in his litter; and the troops followed in three parallel columns, the Highlanders in the centre under Montgomery, their colonel, and the Royal Americans and provincials on the right and left, under Bouquet and Washington. [665] Thus, guided by the tap of the drum at the head of each column, they moved slowly through the forest, over damp, fallen leaves, crisp with frost, beneath an endless entanglement of bare gray twigs that sighed and moaned in the bleak November wind. It was dusk when they emerged upon the open plain and saw Fort Duquesne before them, with its background of wintry hills beyond the Monongahela and the Alleghany. During the last three miles they had passed the scattered bodies of those slain two months before at the defeat of Grant; and it is said that, as they neared the fort, the Highlanders were goaded to fury at seeing the heads of their slaughtered comrades stuck on poles, round which the kilts were hung derisively, in imitation of petticoats. Their rage was vain; the enemy was gone. Only a few Indians lingered about the place, who reported that the garrison, to the number of four or five hundred, had retreated, some down the Ohio, some overland towards Presquisle, and the rest, with their commander, up the Alleghany to Venango, called by the French, Fort Machault. They had burned the barracks and storehouses, and blown up the fortifications.