[Footnote 154:  Journal de Campagne de M. de Villiers depuis son Arrivee au Fort Duquesne jusqu’a son Retour au dit Fort.  These and other passages are omitted in the Journal as printed in Precis des Faits.  Before me is a copy from the original in the Archives de la Marine.]

The party set out on the next morning, paddled their canoes up the Monongahela, encamped, heard Mass; and on the thirtieth reached the deserted storehouse of the Ohio Company at the mouth of Redstone Creek.  It was a building of solid logs, well loopholed for musketry.  To please the Indians by asking their advice, Villiers called all the chiefs to council; which, being concluded to their satisfaction, he left a sergeant’s guard at the storehouse to watch the canoes, and began his march through the forest.  The path was so rough that at the first halt the chaplain declared he could go no farther, and turned back for the storehouse, though not till he had absolved the whole company in a body.  Thus lightened of their sins, they journeyed on, constantly sending out scouts.  On the second of July they reached the abandoned camp of Washington at Gist’s settlement; and here they bivouacked, tired, and drenched all night by rain.  At daybreak they marched again, and passed through the gorge of Laurel Hill.  It rained without ceasing; but Villiers pushed his way through the dripping forest to see the place, half a mile from the road, where his brother had been killed, and where several bodies still lay unburied.  They had learned from a deserter the position of the enemy, and Villiers filled the woods in front with a swarm of Indian scouts.  The crisis was near.  He formed his men in column, and ordered every officer to his place.

Washington’s men had had a full day at Fort Necessity; but they spent it less in resting from their fatigue than in strengthening their rampart with logs.  The fort was a simple square enclosure, with a trench said by a French writer to be only knee deep.  On the south, and partly on the west, there was an exterior embankment, which seems to have been made, like a rifle-pit, with the ditch inside.  The Virginians had but little ammunition, and no bread whatever, living chiefly on fresh beef.  They knew the approach of the French, who were reported to Washington as nine hundred strong, besides Indians.  Towards eleven o’clock a wounded sentinel came in with news that they were close at hand; and they presently appeared at the edge of the woods, yelling, and firing from such a distance that their shot fell harmless.  Washington drew up his men on the meadow before the fort, thinking, he says, that the enemy, being greatly superior in force, would attack at once; and choosing for some reason to meet them on the open plain.  But Villiers had other views.  “We approached the English,” he writes, “as near as possible, without uselessly exposing the lives of the King’s subjects;” and he and his followers made their way through the forest till they