Robert looked upon the scene and he found it awful to the last degree.  The bodies of the dead in red or blue lay everywhere.  Officers, English and Virginian, ran here and there begging and praying their troops to stand and form in order.  “Fire upon the enemy!” they shouted.  “Show us somebody to fire at and we’ll fire,” the men shouted back.  The confusion was deepening, and the signs of a panic were appearing.  In the forest the circle of Indians, mad with battle and the greatest taking of scalps they had ever known, pressed closer and closer, and sent sheets of bullets into the huddled mass.  Many of them leaped in and scalped the fallen before the eyes of the horrified soldiers.  The yelling never ceased, and it was so terrific that the few British officers who survived declared that they would never forget it to their dying day.

Among the officers the mortality was now frightful.  The brave Sir Peter Halket was shot dead, and his young son, the lieutenant, rushing to raise up his body, was killed and fell by his side.  The youthful Shirley, Braddock’s secretary, received a bullet in his brain and died instantly.  Out of eighty-six officers sixty-three were down.  Washington alone seemed to bear a charmed life.  Two horses were killed under him and four bullets pierced his clothing.  Braddock galloped back and forth, cursing and shouting to his men, and showing undaunted courage.  Robert believed that he never really understood what was happening, that the deadly nature of the surprise and its appalling completeness left him dazed.

How long Robert stood at the edge of the circle of death and fired into the bushes he never knew, but it seemed to him that almost an eternity had passed, when Tayoga seized him by the arm and shouted in his ear.

“It is finished!  Our army has perished!  Come, Lennox!”

He wiped the smoke from his eyes, and saw that the mass in red and blue was much smaller.  Braddock was still on his horse, and, at the insistence of his officers, he was at last giving the command to retreat.  Just as the trumpet sounded that note of defeat he was shot through the body and fell to the ground where, in his rage and despair, he begged the men to leave him to die alone.  But two of the Virginia officers lifted him up and bore him toward the rear.  Then the army that had fought so long against an invisible foe broke into a panic, that is what was left of it, as two thirds of its numbers had already been killed or wounded.  Shouting with horror and ignoring their officers, they rushed for the river.

Everything was lost, cannon and baggage were abandoned, and often rifles and muskets were thrown away.  Into the water they rushed, and the Indians, who had followed howling like wolves, stopped, though they fired at the fleeing men in the stream.