permit, Dieskau was carried on a litter, strongly escorted, to Fort Lyman, whence he was sent to Albany, and afterwards to New York.  He is profuse in expressions of gratitude for the kindness shown him by the colonial officers, and especially by Johnson.  Of the provincial soldiers he remarked soon after the battle that in the morning they fought like good boys, about noon like men, and in the afternoon like devils.[314] In the spring of 1757 he sailed for England, and was for a time at Falmouth; whence Colonel Matthew Sewell, fearing that he might see and learn too much, wrote to the Earl of Holdernesse:  “The Baron has great penetration and quickness of apprehension.  His long service under Marshal Saxe renders him a man of real consequence, to be cautiously observed.  His circumstances deserve compassion, for indeed they are very melancholy, and I much doubt of his being ever perfectly cured.”  He was afterwards a long time at Bath, for the benefit of the waters.  In 1760 the famous Diderot met him at Paris, cheerful and full of anecdote, though wretchedly shattered by his wounds.  He died a few years later.

[Footnote 313:  See the story as told by Dieskau to the celebrated Diderot, at Paris, in 1760. Memoires de Diderot, I. 402 (1830).  Compare N.Y.  Col.  Docs., X. 343.]

[Footnote 314:  Dr. Perez Marsh to William Williams, 25 Sept. 1755.]

On the night after the battle the yeomen warriors felt the truth of the saying that, next to defeat, the saddest thing is victory.  Comrades and friends by scores lay scattered through the forest.  As soon as he could snatch a moment’s leisure, the overworked surgeon sent the dismal tidings to his wife:  “My dear brother Ephraim was killed by a ball through his head; poor brother Josiah’s wound I fear will prove mortal; poor Captain Hawley is yet alive, though I did not think he would live two hours after bringing him in.”  Daniel Pomeroy was shot dead; and his brother Seth wrote the news to his wife Rachel, who was just delivered of a child:  “Dear Sister, this brings heavy tidings; but let not your heart sink at the news, though it be your loss of a dear husband.  Monday the eighth instant was a memorable day; and truly you may say, had not the Lord been on our side, we must all have been swallowed up.  My brother, being one that went out in the first engagement, received a fatal shot through the middle of the head.”  Seth Pomeroy found a moment to write also to his own wife, whom he tells that another attack is expected; adding, in quaintly pious phrase:  “But as God hath begun to show mercy, I hope he will go on to be gracious.”  Pomeroy was employed during the next few days with four hundred men in what he calls “the melancholy piece of business” of burying the dead.  A letter-writer of the time does not approve what was done on this occasion.  “Our people,” he says, “not only buried the French dead, but buried as many of them as might be without the knowledge of our Indians, to prevent their being scalped.  This I call an excess of civility;” his reason being that Braddock’s dead soldiers had been left to the wolves.