warfare of the savage in his native woods.  To charge the Indians in their hiding-places would have been useless.  They would have eluded pursuit with the agility of wildcats, and swarmed back, like angry hornets, the moment that it ceased.  The Virginians alone were equal to the emergency.  Fighting behind trees like the Indians themselves, they might have held the enemy in check till order could be restored, had not Braddock, furious at a proceeding that shocked all his ideas of courage and discipline, ordered them, with oaths, to form into line.  A body of them under Captain Waggoner made a dash for a fallen tree lying in the woods, far out towards the lurking-places of the Indians, and, crouching behind the huge trunk, opened fire; but the regulars, seeing the smoke among the bushes, mistook their best friends for the enemy, shot at them from behind, killed many, and forced the rest to return.  A few of the regulars also tried in their clumsy way to fight behind trees; but Braddock beat them with his sword, and compelled them to stand with the rest, an open mark for the Indians.  The panic increased; the soldiers crowded together, and the bullets spent themselves in a mass of human bodies.  Commands, entreaties, and threats were lost upon them.  “We would fight,” some of them answered, “if we could see anybody to fight with.”  Nothing was visible but puffs of smoke.  Officers and men who had stood all the afternoon under fire afterwards declared that they could not be sure they had seen a single Indian.  Braddock ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Burton to attack the hill where the puffs of smoke were thickest, and the bullets most deadly.  With infinite difficulty that brave officer induced a hundred men to follow him; but he was soon disabled by a wound, and they all faced about.  The artillerymen stood for some time by their guns, which did great damage to the trees and little to the enemy.  The mob of soldiers, stupefied with terror, stood panting, their foreheads beaded with sweat, loading and firing mechanically, sometimes into the air, sometimes among their own comrades, many of whom they killed.  The ground, strewn with dead and wounded men, the bounding of maddened horses, the clatter and roar of musketry and cannon, mixed with the spiteful report of rifles and the yells that rose from the indefatigable throats of six hundred unseen savages, formed a chaos of anguish and terror scarcely paralleled even in Indian war.  “I cannot describe the horrors of that scene,” one of Braddock’s officers wrote three weeks after; “no pen could do it.  The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution."[225]

[Footnote 225:  Leslie to a Merchant of Philadelphia, 30 July, 1755, in Hazard’s Pennsylvania Register, V. 191.  Leslie was a lieutenant of the Forty-fourth.]