Washington at the outset flung himself headlong into the fight.  He rode up and down the field, carrying orders and striving to rally “the dastards,” as he afterwards called the regular troops.  He endeavored to bring up the artillery, but the men would not serve the guns, although to set an example he aimed and discharged one himself.  All through that dreadful carnage he rode fiercely about, raging with the excitement of battle, and utterly exposed from beginning to end.  Even now it makes the heart beat quicker to think of him amid the smoke and slaughter as he dashed hither and thither, his face glowing and his eyes shining with the fierce light of battle, leading on his own Virginians, and trying to stay the tide of disaster.  He had two horses shot under him and four bullets through his coat.  The Indians thought he bore a charmed life, while his death was reported in the colonies, together with his dying speech, which, he dryly wrote to his brother, he had not yet composed.

When the troops broke it was Washington who gathered the fugitives and brought off the dying general.  It was he who rode on to meet Dunbar, and rallying the fugitives enabled the wretched remnants to take up their march for the settlements.  He it was who laid Braddock in the grave four days after the defeat, and read over the dead the solemn words of the English service.  Wise, sensible, and active in the advance, splendidly reckless on the day of battle, cool and collected on the retreat, Washington alone emerged from that history of disaster with added glory.  Again he comes before us as, above all things, the fighting man, hot-blooded and fierce in action, and utterly indifferent to the danger which excited and delighted him.  But the earlier lesson had not been useless.  He now showed a prudence and wisdom in counsel which were not apparent in the first of his campaigns, and he no longer thought that mere courage was all-sufficient, or that any enemy could be despised.  He was plainly one of those who could learn.  His first experience had borne good fruit, and now he had been taught a series of fresh and valuable lessons.  Before his eyes had been displayed the most brilliant European discipline, both in camp and on the march.  He had studied and absorbed it all, talking with veterans and hearing from them many things that he could have acquired nowhere else.  Once more had he been taught, in a way not to be forgotten, that it is never well to underrate one’s opponent.  He had looked deeper, too, and had seen what the whole continent soon understood, that English troops were not invincible, that they could be beaten by Indians, and that they were after all much like other men.  This was the knowledge, fatal in after days to British supremacy, which Braddock’s defeat brought to Washington and to the colonists, and which was never forgotten.  Could he have looked into the future, he would have seen also in this ill-fated expedition an epitome of much future history.  The expedition began with stupid contempt toward America and all things American, and ended in ruin and defeat.  It was a bitter experience, much heeded by the colonists, but disregarded by England, whose indifference was paid for at a heavy cost.