not yet curbed his tongue.  There is the famous boast attributed to him by Horace Walpole.  In a despatch which Washington sent back to the Governor after the little skirmish in which Jumonville was killed, Washington said:  “’I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.’  On hearing of this the King said sensibly, ‘he would not say so if he had been used to hear many.’” This reply of George II deserves to be recorded if only because it is one of the few feeble witticisms credited to the Hanoverian Kings.  Years afterward, Washington declared that he did not remember ever having referred to the charm of listening to whistling bullets.  Perhaps he never said it; perhaps he forgot.  He was only twenty-two at the time of the Great Meadows campaign.  No doubt he was as well aware as was Governor Dinwiddie, and other Virginians, that he was the best equipped man on the expedition, experienced in actual fighting, and this, added to his qualifications as a woodsman, had given him a real zest for battle.  In their discussion over the campfire, he and his fellow officers must inevitably have criticized the conduct of the expedition, and it may well be that Washington sometimes insisted that if his advice were followed things would go better.  Not on this account, therefore, must we lay too much blame on him for being conceited or immodest.  He knew that he knew, and he did not dissemble the fact.  Silence came later.

The result of the expeditions to and skirmishes at the Forks of the Ohio was that England and France were at war, although they had not declared war on each other.  A chance musket shot in the backwoods of Virginia started a conflict which reverberated in Europe, disturbed the peace of the world for seven years, and had serious consequences in the French and English colonies of North America.  The news of Washington’s disaster at Fort Necessity aroused the British Government to the conclusion that it must make a strong demonstration in order to crush the swelling prestige of the French rivals in America.  The British planned, accordingly, to send out three expeditions, one against Fort Duquesne, another against the French in Nova Scotia, and a third against Quebec.  The command of the first they gave to General Edward Braddock.  He was then sixty years old, had been in the Regular Army all his life, had served in Holland, at L’Orient, and at Gibraltar, was a brave man, and an almost fanatical believer in the rules of war as taught in the manuals.  During the latter half of 1754, Governor Dinwiddie was endeavoring against many obstacles to send another expedition, equipped by Virginia herself, to the Ohio.  Only in the next spring, however, after Braddock had come over from England with a relatively large force of regulars, were the final preparations for a campaign actually made.  Washington, in spite of being the commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces, had his wish of going as a volunteer at his own expense.  He wrote his friend William Byrd, on April 20, 1755, from Mount Vernon: