France La Nouvelle France

[PKeating]

Something I put together for a magazine back in 2006:

the ?first first world war?/snowshoes battle/monongahela battle/jumonville glen/fort necessity/robert rogers/langy/george washington/dodgy dealings/overlength/copyright ? prosper keating 2006/for paradis magazine/uncorrected first draft/not for publication/?

OF MYTHS AND MEN - WAR HEROS

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

15:45 hrs, March 13th 1758: upper Trout Brook Valley, New England: the Abenaki pointman leading the detachment up the valley squatted down on his snowshoes on the frozen surface of the little brook and listened intently, his Tulle fusil de chasse rifle cradled in his left arm. Behind him, bunched in single file for around 150 yards, around a hundred Abenakis and a few French Colonial Marines from the garrison at Fort Carillon followed his lead. The commander, Ensign de la Durantaye, shuffled forwards to confer with his pointman. As Durantaye reached him, the Abenaki jerked, a fine pink mist spreading out from his head, before slumping on the ice. Durantaye looked to his left, up the rocky, wooded slopes towards the peaks of the 1000 foot ridge, just as nearly two-hundred muskets unleashed a hailstorm of .75 calibre one-ounce lead bullets, one of which glanced off the muzzle of Durantaye?s Marine-issue M1728/46 St-Etienne musket at around 1,200 miles an hour, spinning him around and knocking him into a snowdrift. A terrible, pregnant silence fell. All Durantaye could hear was a gentle hissing near him from a hot musket ball on the ice.

Then the screams started. Durantaye looked towards the dead ground about a hundred feet further up the slope, where he had seen the flashes of the enemy volley, English voices were yelling commands. Men in the green jackets of an English Ranger unit were rising to their knees and feet under the pall of gunsmoke. Durantaye could hear metal on metal as the enemy feverishly reloaded their cut-down British Army-issue Long Land Pattern Muskets, ramming the charges and linen-wrapped lead balls home with their iron ramrods. He fingered the tomahawk at his side. No chance of charging them before they were ready. Durantaye rose and looked down the brook as some of his Indians began firing up the hill. ?Cessez le feu! Cessez le feu! Reculez! Reculez!?, he screamed.

Sergeant Prigent, the arm of his dirty white tunic scarlet with fresh blood, took up Durantaye?s shout, grabbing men and pushing them off the frozen brook towards the woods and cover. Here and there, Indians and Marines took cover behind trees and rocks but some men remained in the open as the second English volley filled the valley like a thunderclap. Caporal Morvan was sitting on the bank in the snow looking at the remains of his hand when his face disappeared. An Abenaki taking aim at the enemy staggered a little before firing: grounding the butt of his flintlock to reload, he noticed his intestines, steaming gently on his left snowshoe and with a bemused expression, sank gently to his knees. Durantaye scrambled off the frozen brook, now choked with the dead and wounded, and began moving as fast as he could back down the valley through the trees, calling survivors as he went. The screaming continued.

Up the slope, the Ranger commander, Captain Robert Rogers, saw the survivors peeling off into the trees to follow the French officer. Thirty yards away, to his left, Captain Bulkeley was on his feet, looking towards his commander for orders. ?Head them off!?, screamed Rogers, pointing down the valley. Seconds later, Bulkeley?s platoon, accompanied by Ensign McDonald?s section, were back on their showshoes, moving after the retreating Franco-Indian survivors. Downslope to Rogers, his platoon were already at the brook, scalping the dead and tomahawking the wounded Indians, or dispatching them with knives before taking their trophies; worth five pounds in Sterling back at Fort Edward. Wounded marines were spared for questioning. Some Rangers stood over a marine screaming in a high-pitched monotone, pausing only to draw breath; a tomahawk silenced him. Only then did Captain Rogers realise he had not even fired a shot. Carefully easing the hammer of his sharpshooter rifle to the half-cock safety position, he slipped back into his snowshoes and started down the hill. It was not yet four-o-clock.

In his memoir, published in a January 1766 edition of The London Chronicle, Rogers recalled that moment: ?I now imagined the enemy totally defeated and ordered Ensign McDonald to head the flying remains of them, that none might escape; but we soon found our mistake, and that the body we had attacked were only their advanced guard, their main body coming up consisting of 600 more, Canadians and Indians.? Montcalm, commanding French forces in New France at the time, described Rogers as the British Army?s ?most famous partisan? in a dispatch to Paris about the battle.

So ended the first phase of an engagement that would be known, simply, as The Battle on Snowshoes, just one of many confrontations in the war that erupted in 1754 between New England and New France as a result of friction over their respective territorial claims in the strategically important Ohio Valley. Captain Rogers and his 182-strong Ranger detachment were on a mission from their headquarters at Fort Edward, some sixty miles to the south, to reconnoitre French defences around Fort Carillon, on the shores of Lake Champlain close by the mouth of La Chute. 110 miles long, Lake Champlain ran into the Richelieu River which joined the St-Lawrence to the north-east of Montr?al, then the capital of New France. The French had built Fort Carillon in 1755 to dominate this important natural waterway. It would take the British four years and many lives to capture the fort, which they renamed Ticonderoga and which still stands, restored, by the mouth of the LaChute river today.

The war was almost four years old when the Battle on Snowshoes was fought in a valley on the other side of the mountain ridge rising up from the western shore of Lake George, a flooded 32-mile gash in the Allgehenies where Vermont now collides with New York. Sieur de la Durantaye and the Indians had come from Fort Carillon after Abenaki scouts had reported the rangers? tracks. In fact, Durantaye and several marines had run after the group of Indians, many of whom had been drinking all night, to try to instil some order. Behind him, a larger force of Colonial Marines and regular soldiers from the R?giment de La Reine drew snowshoes and extra ammunition from the fort stores, watched by their commander, Ensign Jean-Baptiste Levereault de Langis de Montegron, the Qu?becois partisan known by his English enemies as Langy.

15:50 hrs, March 13th 1758: lower Trout Brook Valley, New England: trudging along beside the frozen stream along on his snowshoes followed by his 205-strong force of partisans, Colonial Marines and regular soldiers from the R?giment de la Reine, Fort Carillon?s garrison guard, Langy froze as the sound of the first volley came towards them around the bend in the valley half a mile ahead and died in the snow.

Langy looked up the valley, curving to the left just up ahead. The sun had dipped below the ridge to the right but the peaks of Mont Pelee and the neighbouring mountains to the left were bathed in the late afternoon?s softening light. Behind him, his 205-strong force of partisans, Colonial Marines, and regular soldiers from the R?giment de La Reine followed in open order along each side of the stream, their .69 calibre St-Etienne muskets at the ready. Around the bend down the brook came running figures, sliding and tumbling on the slippery surface. Behind them, moving fast across the snow at an angle, were more figures in green tunics.

Anticipating their leader, Langy?s men were fanning out across the valley in skirmishing groups, checking powderpans and flints. Kneeling, Langy took aim with his Tulle rifle at a figure moving slowly 200 yards distant and fired. He felt the heat of the priming charge as the distant figure flopped into the snow. The figures in the brook were turning to fight. Skimming over the snow as fast as they could go, shoulders swinging to increase momentum, Langy and his group closed the distance. The enemy turned and fled. Here and there, a green-jacketed figure fell.

As the French partisans and regulars came around the corner, Rogers was howling himself hoarse at his men to form firing parties. Ensign McDonald?s men were in full flight, bunching by the brook. Several groups of Frenchmen paused and loosed volleys from about 100 yards, knocking twenty rangers down. Rogers heard screams. Howling at his men to fall back into cover, Rogers backed up the slope, signalling and calling to Ensign Phillips to cover them.

Phillips was marshalling a couple of dozen rangers to cover the retreat and never saw Langy?s men racing up the frozen brook and cutting them off from the rest of their unit. A couple of Phillips? group saw the danger and struck out for the high ground as a hail of bullets hit the readguard, pulping muscle, splintering bone and sending sprays of crimson liquid and scraps of pink flesh over the snow. The rearguard began to withdraw.

Further back, the French and Indians had converged on the dead and wounded rangers from Langy?s onslaught and were tucking dripping scalps into their tunics and belts. Indians were gulping the grog from the rangers? canteens. Langy took command, forming them into two groups and ordering them up the hill while he took a group in a flanking movement. By now, the failing light and the clouds of gunsmoke were making it hard to see any distance.

Up the slope the French moved, from tree to rock and rock to tree, dividing instinctively into groups of three, while the drunken Indians, screaming like banshees, ran ahead forcing rangers in cover to show themselves as they aimed at the Indians, only to be felled by the oncoming French. A group of about two dozen Frenchmen advanced slowly, laying half-volleys on the centre of the ranger line, one half firing while the other reloaded and vice-versa. There was not much the rangers could do about this as incoming fire from the flanks and rum-fuelled Indians running amok forced them to keep their heads down or lose them. Any ranger trying to take an aimed shot found two or three aimed in his direction.

Phillips and his rearguard group downed their muskets and raised their hands. They were quickly tied up and left under guard as the assault continued. Cupping his hands to his mouth, Durantaye called on Rogers to surrender. This was met with a blast of musketfire that had Durantaye and the Frenchmen around him dropping into cover. It was almost night as the firing petered out. Rogers took stock. He had maybe sixty men left around him. If the French charged them, they would be dead. Calling to his rangers, he told his men to run back to the lake.

As the rangers slipped out of cover and ran along the contours of the mountain towards the nearest valley that led back down to Lake George, some of Langy?s best shots picked a few of them off. Indians moved towards them. Wounded rangers limped as fast as they could but the Indians were faster as the shrieks and screams showed. The battle was over and Rogers and his rangers had lost. Langy and his partisans let them go: as hunters, they knew it was dangerous to chase big game in the dark.

Glimpsed through the dramatic filter of such films as Last of the Mohicans (1992) or the older but far darker Northwest Passage (1940), with Spencer Tracy playing Robert Rogers, the conflict so accurately described by Winston Churchill as ?the first First World War? spread from North America and ultimately involved almost all of the major European powers and their colonial subjects, slugging it out in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, India and the Far East. Europeans usually refer to it as The Seven Years War because Great Britain made no formal declaration of war until 1756 but it actually lasted nine years, from 1754 to 1763. In North America, it is traditionally known as The French and Indian War while the Qu?becois refer to it, bleakly, as The Conquest.

A number of popular heroes of American history and lore first came to prominence in The French and Indian War, including Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, who drove a wagon on Braddock?s Expedition in 1755 and George Washington, hailed as The Hero of the Monongahela after the disasterous defeat of Braddock?s troops by a smaller Franco-Indian force on the Monongahela River near modern-day Pittsburgh. Washington, better known as one of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, also has another claim to fame in relation to The French and Indian War: he started it, as we shall see. However, the heros of the losing side are, of course, forgotten.

Viewed by many as a heroic and even romantic figure, Rogers is widely considered the best guerilla leader of the war; there are mountains and islands named after him and he has been the subject of books and films, including a couple of fairly recent television documentaries, including the BBC?s Extreme Survival series, in which Ray Mears retraced the route taken by Rogers? Rangers during their famous ? or infamous ? long range raid on St-Francis in 1759. Indeed, Robert Rogers is regarded as ?the Father of US Special Forces?, which is rather ironic given that he was, although American-born, very much a Briton who fought for Britain in both The French and Indian War and The American Revolution or War of Independence. His Independent Company of Rangers, formed in 1755 as a response to the British need for a force capable of fighting Franco-Indian guerilla units on their own terms, is seen as a forerunner of modern long range penetration units like the SAS or the Green Berets.

In his dispatch of April 10th 1758, Montcalm also referred to a Colonial Marines officer, the Sieur de Langis, ?who understands petty war the best of any man?, la petite guerre meaning guerilla warfare. If Roberts was the best partisan leader the British had, Langy was certainly the best the French had. In fact, when the recorded exploits of Langy and Roberts are compared, Langy emerges as a more skilled guerilla soldier and commander than Rogers. His military prowess aside, Langy appears to have fought a comparitively clean war by the standards of the time whereas Robert Rogers, as accounts of the St-Francis Raid show, qualifies as a war criminal in the mould of commanders like Major Adolf Diekmann and Lt. William Calley who oversaw more familiar atrocities like Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944 or My Lai in 1968. Rogers and his rangers ignored explicit orders from the British commander-in-chief to spare women and children.

Rogers, who was prone to gross exaggeration when it served his interests, claimed to have killed over 300 Abenaki warriors in St-Francis and to have burned it down. In fact, more reliable accounts stated just thirty dead, of whom twenty were women and children, many of whom were prevented from leaving their burning homes by the rangers. Rogers? Rangers? tally does not equal the 452 women and children immolated in the church in Oradour-sur-Glane by Diekmann?s men in 1944 but it serves as a reminder that history tends to be written by victors; and the British did defeat New France, despite some spectacular early setbacks, such as the defeat of Braddock?s Expedition at The Battle of the Monongahela in 1755.

The aim of Braddock?s Expedition was to eject the French from the fort they had built in 1754 at the Forks of the Ohio, site of modern-day Pittsburgh, where the Allgeheny and Monongahela Rivers converge to form the Ohio River. In fact, the British were building the fort, which they called Fort Trent, when a large French force appeared in canoes, with artillery on rafts, on the Allgeheny one morning and the British withdrew without a shot. The French then built their own fort, which they named Fort Duquesne in honour of the Governor of New France, le marquis de Duquesne.

The uncomplicated view of the cause of the war, remembering that victors usually write the history, is that France embarked on an aggressive policy of fort-building in the Ohio Valley and Britain was forced to react, thereby sparking the conflict. The French view is precisely the inverse. The truth, of course, is a little more complicated than that. Dwight Eisenhower?s words swim back into focus: ?In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.? Rather than being a ?British? establishment, Fort Trent was a private venture by a cabal of Anglo-American proto-capitalists and their political puppets, who blurred the lines between Big Business and State when it suited them. Plus ?a change?

By the early 1750s, with a population of 1.2 million and rising, New England had an urgent need for lebensraum. With the French colonies of Louisiana to the south and New France to the north, the only option was westward expansion into the Ohio territory, across the Allgeheny Mountain range. Anticipating this, a group of wealthy Virginian landowners and speculators had set up The Ohio Company with Scottish-born Robert Dinwiddie at the helm and, after petitioning King George II of England in 1749, obtained a provisional grant of 500 square miles of land around the Forks of the Ohio. Many solvent Virginians invested in the company. The provisions required the company to settle at least a hundred families on the land within seven years. The company was also required to finance the construction of a fort to protect the settlers at the Forks of the Ohio, site of modern-day Pittsburgh, where the Allgeheny and Monongahela Rivers converge to form the Ohio River.

With the support of his friends, associates and fellow shareholders, Mr Dinwiddie was appointed Deputy-Governor of Virginia in 1751, the Governor himself being far too busy in London to run the colony, and naturally resigned as director of The Ohio Company. Just as naturally, he retained his shares. The job passed to Major Lawrence Washington, Adjutant of the Virginia Militia, one of Virginia?s most powerful landowners and like Mr Dinwiddie, a Freemason. In fact, many of New England?s Great and Good were Freemasons...and remain so today. If you ever wondered why the greenback design features a pyramid with a large eye, this piece of information might being you closer to understanding. Soon after his appointment, Mr Dinwiddie, in his capacity as Lieutenant-Governor, ratified The Ohio Company?s land grant and the company began establishing fortified trading posts west of the Allgehenies, stocked with thousands of poundsworth of goods to seduce the local Indians of the Iroquois League.

With one exception, a chieftan and diplomat named Tanghrisson, the Iroquois sachems were not so easily seduced. Until the early the 1750s, French activity had been confined to trading with the tribes of the Iroquois League and a bit of fur trapping. They tended to favour New France over New England, largely because they viewed the French, with a population of just 60,000 dispersed across the vast expanse of New France, as less of a demographic threat than the land-hungry, voracious Anglo-Americans on the other side of the mountains. It was rather a na?ve, short-sighted attitude because the French, having claimed the Ohio country for New France in the name of King Louis XV, had every intention of settling it at some point in the future. France also had a grand plan to develop an inland trading route from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, via the St-Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and the Allgeheny, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Protected by a line of forts, this link from New France to their southern colony of Lousiana would also hem in New England, preventing westwards expansion.

Consequently, when word reached the French of The Ohio Company?s incursion into the Ohio country, it galvanised Paris into action. A tough naval officer, the marquis de Duquesne, was appointed Governor of New France in 1752, with orders to enforce French sovereignty over the Ohio Valley whilst avoiding war with Britain. The following spring, a French column of 1,500 regular and colonial troops under Capitaine Mercier marched into the Ohio country. By the first winter snows, they had established Fort Presque-Isle on the southern shore of Lake Erie, followed by a 15-mile road to the Venango river, where they erected Fort Le Boeuf. Next came Fort Machault, at the confluence of the Venango and Allgeheny Rivers, about 100 miles upstream from the Forks of the Ohio, where they planned to built a fourth fort the following Spring.

Back in Virginia, Lt-Governor Dinwiddie was deeply perturbed: there was a lot of money at stake, most of which belonged to the people who had put him in power. Mr Dinwiddie decided to send Major George Washington to the French commander at Fort Le Boeuf with a written demand to cease trespassing on British Crown territory. Despite being just 21 years old, George Washington was well-qualified from Mr Dinwiddie?s viewpoint: he had come into his late brother Lawrence?s properties, was an Ohio Company shareholder and a Freemason. Furthermore, as Mr Dinwiddie had noted, young George was ambitious and persuasive: he had convinced the Lt-Governor to give him his late brother?s military rank and appointment.

Major Washington rode the 500 miles through the snow and sleet from Williamsburg to Fort Le Boeuf, joined by the noted explorer and surveyor, Christopher Gist, who had mapped the Ohio Valley for the Ohio Company in 1750 and who was trying to establish a town near present-day Uniontown. They parleyed along with way with various Iroquois chieftans, including Tanaghrisson, whom the English called Half-King and who, as the Iroquois League?s spokesman in the Forks region, had given the Ohio Company permission to build their trading post there in the face of the quiet disapproval of his fellow chieftans. Having been enslaved by the French as a child, Tanghrisson had no love for them. He also saw the English view of him as the principle spokesman for the Iroquois League as a means of increasing personel power. So, like the Virginians, he had a vested interest in keeping the French out of the Ohio Valley.

When a furious Washington rode back into Williamsburg in January 1754 bearing the French refusal to comply, Dinwiddie reacted quickly. Promoting Washington to Lieutenant-Colonel and ordering him to raise a regiment to march upon the Forks of the Ohio, he sent a messenger to the Ohio Company factor at the Forks, William Trent, making him a captain in the Virginia Militia and ordering him to raise a militia company to build and defend a fort until Lt-Colonel Washington?s militiamen joined them. By March, Captain Trent and his men were running low on supplies and Trent went back to Virginia in March for provisions, leaving Ensign Ward in charge. Ward was admiring the new gate on the fort on April 17th when a large contingent of French troops appeared on the Allgeheny River in canoes, with artillery strapped to rafts.

As Ward and his men watched, mouths agape, the Colonial Marines landed just upstream, rolled their cannon ashore, formed up in battle order, and marched to musket range. Their commander, Captain Claude-Pierre P?caudy, seigneur de Contrecoeur, adjusted his tricorne hat and, marching up to Ward, offered him a choice between honourable surrender or anhililation. Ward looked past him at the French guncrews readying their 6-pounders, the hard-faced French marines fixing bayonets and Indians fingering tomahawks. Then he looked back at Fort Trent and his ?militiamen?, forty malnourished workmen and carpenters, and surrendered. With typical French aplomb, Contrecoeur fed them a handsome dinner before they marched off eastwards the next day along the Monongahela River towards the ford where Braddock?s Expedition would make their crossing fifteen months later. Pushing over Fort Trent, Contrecoeur and his 500-strong detachment commenced work on Fort Duquesne.

Meanwhile, watched much of the way by pro-French Indian scouts, the 22-year old Lt-Col Washington and his ?regiment? of 160 men dragged from taverns and brothels or signed up with a promise of plots of land around the Forks of the Ohio were slogging across the Allgehenies along the route Washington knew from his abortive diplomatic mission a few months before. By May 24th 1754, they had reached the Great Meadows, a long, narrow clearing bordered by forested slopes, about 60 miles march south-east of Fort Duquesne, where Washington ordered work to begin on a wooden stockade and entrenchments. On the morning of May 27th, Washington was informed by Gist that French soldiers were in the area and sent almost half his men out to look for them. That night, an Iroquois brave arrived with word from Tanghrisson, camped about five miles from Great Meadows, of a French encampment in the hills about six miles to the northwest. It was raining hard as Washington set out around 10-o-clock for Tanghrisson?s camp with 47 militiamen. They reached Tanghrisson just before dawn, having lost seven men in the pitchblack forest on the way.

First light, May 28th 1754: Laurel Ridge, Allgeheny Mountains: shivering in his damp uniform, Ensign Jumonville put his hand against a tree to take the weight off his foot, pierced by a jagged splinter knocked from a tree by a musket ball. A marine, bleeding from a gash to the head, supported his commander. He looked around the little hollow in the wooded ravine where they had camped for the night. About a dozen of his marines stood against the cliff, some of them wounded, guarded by English soldiers and watched hungrily by Iroquois warriors with tomahawks and scalping knives. Here and there, English soldiers helped themselves to the food his men had been warming on the smoking fires a few moments before. Some joined the Iroquois in hacking off the scalps of dead marines, a few of whom were not even halfway out of their bark bivouacs. A couple of marines, not yet dead, screamed thinly as the knife blades grated on bone. Near him lay Marais, the only English-speaker on the expedition, his brains steaming on the sodden compost of the forest floor.

Washington leafed through the papers in Jumonville?s leather document case. They were in French, which Washington could not read. The smoke from the Frenchies? campfires and the musquet volleys hung in the cold, humid air. At least it kept the midges at bay. He was tough but the night march in the pouring rain had taken its toll. It would be better once they were on the move back to Fort Necessity, working a bit of heat into their bodies. With any luck, they would find the men who had gotten lost in the forest during that awful march in the pitch black. He looked at the French officer. The man was trying to speak to him. Something about peace. Well, they weren?t so tough, these Frenchie marines. Two volleys and they begged for quarter. They had not even posted sentries and as for having campfires that could be seen and smelt for miles: very unsoldierly!

Knife in hand, an Iroquois stepped up to the marine assisting Jumonville and started pulling him away. Jumonville started shouting. Tanghrisson stepped over to Jumonville and spoke gently to him in French: ?Tu n?es pas encore mort, mon p?re?. With that, he struck Jumonville on the head with his tomahawk. As Jumonville crumped to the ground, Tanaghrisson carried on hacking away until he had split the skull wide open. Reaching into the cavity with both hands, he pulled out a lump of matter and and washed his hands, gobs of grey jelly oozing through his fingers and plopping onto the ground. His warriors needed no further encouragement. They beat and hacked the remaining marines to death with musket butts, war clubs, tomahawks and rocks. Then they took their scalps as trophies, signs of their manhood. As a final touch, before Lieutenant-Colonel Washington led them away, they sawed off a marine?s head and mounted it on a sharpened branch, which they stuck in the ground.

In his diary, Washington stated that they approached the French for ?an engagement? and that he ordered his men to open fire on them when the French saw the Virginians. He repeated this version in his official reports. By any military standards, it was a successful assault. Writing to his brother from Fort Necessity, as he named the stockade at Great Meadows, he enthused in a letter about hearing ?the Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound?. When someone read this to King George II, the monarch remarked caustically that Washington ?would not say so if he had been used to hear many?.

There was, of course, just one small problem: Britain and France were not at war. There again, whose interests was George Washington representing when he and his men murdered Jumonville and thirty-four French soldiers in that place now called Jumonville Glen? One marine, named Monceau, managed to hide in the undergrowth and made it back to Fort Duquesne.

Washington apologists usually suggest that Jumonville was on a scouting or raiding mission. Were that the case, it begs the question of why a 35-year old professional soldier with years of campaign and guerilla warfare experience under his belt would have moved so openly from Duquesne towards Fort Necessity, allowing his men to burn campfires at every halt, and declined to post sentries around their bivouacs. The situation is pretty clear: Jumonville was indeed on a mission to deliver a letter to the British asking them to quit the Ohio Valley and he was obvious in his movements in order to signal his peaceful intentions. He would not have felt threatened by the British, as they were not at war, nor by the Iroquois, who were friendly to France. Sadly for Jumonville, Washington represented shady corporate interests rather than Britain and Tanghrisson had sold out to the company whose interests Washington was defending.

Tanaghrisson certainly had motives for debraining Jumonville. Contrecoeur?s easy, bloodless eviction of the English construction party and its tiny military escort from the Forks of the Ohio had caused Tanghrisson a massive loss of face in front of his people. He was also still smarting over Contrecoeur?s rude dismissal of him when he had tried to play the French and the British off against each other, a tactic that had served the Indian nations quite well up to that point. By killing Jumonville, he was repaying the insult and creating the circumstances in which some form of robust response by the French was inevitable. However, Washington instigated the massacre.

Washington returned to Fort Necessity. In the first half of June, another 200 Virginian Militia soldiers arrived, followed by 100 British regulars from South Carolina under the command of Captain James MacKay. The contempt in which Mackay obviously held the 22-year old Lieutenant-Colonel can be seen in the regular officer?s refusal to order his men to assist in the digging of entrenchments around the fort unless Washington paid them. The trenches were required as Washington?s fort provided room for a mere seventy men. Affronted by Mackay?s attitude, as his letters to his patron Dinwiddie show, Washington formed up his troops and his wagons on June 16th and marched off to attack Fort Duquesne. They reached Gist?s Planatation several days later, having had to destroy all the horses and abandon their wagons. On June 28th, Indian scouts informed Washington that a large French force was approaching from Fort Duquesne.

Consisting of around 600 French regular and colonial troops and maybe a hundred Indians, the force was led by Jumonville?s older brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, intent on avenging his little brother?s murder. Marching in light order, with extra ammunition and rations, Villiers? column was moving fast up the Monongahela Valley towards the Virginians. Washington and his men retreated to Fort Necessity and arriving exhausted on July 1st, slid into the trenches and behind the firing slits in the log walls and waited. Many of them were suffering from scurvy, a common soldiers? condition provoked by a lack of Vitamin C. The symptoms include terrible aches, spongy gums and bleeding from every mucous mebrane. People with scurvy tend to feel depressed and listless and are often partially immobilised. That night, the heavens opened. The trenches filled with water. The majority of Washington?s men had no shelter and many must have been in the first stages of hypothermia by the next morning as only 300 of the 400-strong garrison were able to answer to the roll call.

When the French advance scouts were sighted around 11-o-clock on July 3rd, what did Washington do? He formed up the men who could still walk and marched them into the meadow like the pictures he had seen in books of the redcoats he so admired. Villiers, however, deployed his men on the wooded hills above the meadow and the fort and rained .69 calibre bullets down on Washington?s lines of miserable, sodden militiamen, who fell back to the trenches and the fort. And there they sat in the rain for hour after hour as the French poured fire into them. Many men in the fort received terrible wounds from wood splinters as the French rounds tore through the walls.

As more and more of the defenders? muskets were soaked in the deluge, the Virginians realised they only had two ?screws?, the long tool required to extract a dud charge from a muzzle-loading musket. By mid-afternoon, perhaps ten percent of the Virginians were able to return fire. When darkness mercifully fell over Great Meadows, at least a third of Washington?s men were dead or wounded. Perhaps half the men fit for duty but without any means of fighting broke into the rum store and got very drunk, presumably deadening their nerves for the painful deaths that awaited once the Indians amongst the enemy overran them. One wonders if the idiot Washington still thought there was ?something charming in the sound? of bullets.

Around eight in the evening, the French stopped firing and a voice from the darkness came through the rain, proposing surrender negotiations. Washington sent Captain Jacob van Braam, a Washington family friend, out to the enemy. It says much for Captain de Villiers? humanity and a lot about the state of the defenders that he was not only offering the murderers of his brother quarter but surrender with honours, allowing them to march away with their arms and flags. Braam returned with a surrender document in French. By signing it, the English would be agreeing to leave the Ohio country for at least a year, to hand back all French prisoners and to leave two officers at Fort Duquesne as hostages. Washington and MacKay signed and marched away with their men the next day. Villiers withdrew to Fort Duquesne.

The document to which Washington put his name contained a clause describing the killing of Jumonville and his men as murder. In effect, Washington signed a confession to murder. The French naturally lost no time in publicising this and Washington was severely criticised in London over what was already being called The Jumonville Affair. As the English writer and politician Horace Walpole would remark once the war was in full swing: "The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire."

However, the Virginia Establishment closed ranks around their fellow landowner, shareholder and Freemason in a classic whitewash. They hailed him as a hero. As for the signed confession, they blamed Jacob van Braam for mistranslating the document. Braam was not there to defend himself, having volunteered himself as one of the hostages taken by Villiers. However, the original document survives and the sentence is really very clear in stating: ?Comme notre intention n?a jamais ?t? de troubler la paix [?] mais seulement de venger l?assin[at] qui a ?t? fait sur un de nos officiers porteur d?un sommation et sur son escorte?? The more likely scenario is that young Washington would have signed anything to escape with his life at that point.

London?s reaction was swift and damning. Orders came that no colonial officer would have any authority over any regular officer holding a King?s Commission. When George Washington heard this, The Hero of Fort Necessity resigned his commission. From an early age, one of Washington?s burning ambitions was to acquire a commission in the British Army and he saw the militia post as a stepping stone to achieving his aims. Like other New Englanders, Washington saw himself very much as a Briton. For their part, the British military establishment were aloofly disdainful of colonial regiments and militia and tended to see colonial settlers like Washington as not quite Englishmen. For the scions of the Virginian landed gentry, like George Washington, the situation was more acute for they aspired very much to the status of English Gentlemen.

George Washington was a man amongst men but there is of course quite a difference between the man and the myth. Washington was very much of his time and social background. Far from being the kindly, avuncular figure of dozens of Hollywood movies, Washington was something of a hanger and flogger who imposed draconian British Regular Army disciplinary codes as Colonel of the 1st Virginia Regiment from 1757 to 1758, when he married a wealthy widow and resigned his commission to spend more time with his family and his slaves.

Some Washington apologists make much of the fact that he seems to have refrained from sexual abuse of the female slaves at Mount Vernon. It is probably closer to the truth that the straitlaced Washington would no more have contemplated sex with a negress than any of the other livestock on his estates. A lack of clear accounts of casual cruelty to slaves should not blind us to the realities of servitude under this particular Founding Father of the American Republic. He wrote that ?if Negroes will not do their duty by fair means, they must be compelled to do it? and would order overseers to give ?a good whippin? to workshy blacks. Believing that his slaves had positioned a watchdog whilst robbing plantation stores, Washington ordered the shooting of all dogs belonging to his slave families. He then added that ?if any negro still presumes under any pretense whatsoever to preserve or bring one into the family, he shall be severely punished and the dog hanged?.

11:00 hrs, July 9th 1755: Frazier?s Cabin, Monongahela River: the sound of fife and drum music rose and fell on the hot breezes blowing off the river as the redcoats waded ashore and formed up around the ruined trading post on the northern bank. From his vantage point a few hundred yards away at the edge of the forest, an Abenaki scout watched. Slipping a piece of dried beef under his tongue, Sozap Tahamont, known to his French brothers as Jos?, half-lay on one elbow, fingering the tasselled rosary beads the monks had given him after his baptism back in Saint-Francis or Odenak, as the Abenaki people called it.

It was a fine rosary, made of wood but with a little pewter Jesus attached to the cross. He?d added the tassle himself. It was the scalp he had taken from a pastoni child the previous summer. He had come up behind her so fast that she was still standing, looking at him, as he ran off with her scalp. It took real skill to take the scalp from a living person so fast that they did not even fall down. Tahamont smiled at the memory of the French officer who had threatened him with a pistol when he explained what the tassle was. Tahamont considered himself a better Catholic than that French idiot: after all, he could have sold that scalp for five golden livres. It meant there was one less English female to make more English babies to claim the earth as theirs. Yes, he could have sold the scalp but he had given it to his Lord: Jesus Christ.

He could see the regimental flags shimmering in the hot air. He could see the Pastoni General on his horse with his officers. Squinting, he scutinised the mass of soldiers. They knew how many there were and that they were coming. But were they bringing the cannon the scouts had reported to Capitaine Contrecoeur last night? They had crossed the Monongahela twice that morning. Maybe they would leave the cannon behind. Then Tahamont saw the cannon, men pushing them up and into view over the 12-foot bank above the shoreline. He had seen enough. Crawling backwards into dead ground, he rose and set off to run the seven miles to Fort Duquesne, which he covered in under an hour.

Although he had left half his artillery behind when he split his 2,200-strong force at the suggestion of one of his aides-de-camp, young George Washington, forming the best of the regulars and colonials into a Flying Column so that they could move faster towards their target, General Braddock had brought half a dozen 12 and 6-pounders along with several mortars, lashed to the covered wagons drawn by teams of horses. At the beginning of the 110-mile trek, hacking at brambles, felling trees and moving rocks to widen the road for the heavy wagons and artillery, their progress across the Allgehenies had slowed to as little as two miles a day. They had left Fort Cumberland on the Potomac River on May 29th. It had taken them almost three weeks to reach Little Meadows, just 20 miles away. Now, in the same time, they had covered 90 miles, passing the site of young Washington?s glorious stand against the French. Since Braddock had arrived in Virginia from Ireland with the 44th and 48th Regiments of Foot in March, Washington had been a regular visitor to the General?s quarters, offering his advice and knowledge of the route to the Forks of the Ohio. Braddock had taken the young colonial on as an unpaid aide-de-camp with a courtesy but temporary rank of captain for the duration of the Braddock Expedition to eject the French from Fort Duquesne.

The 44th and 48th, the backbone of the expedition, were a third understrength but they had found enough men in Williamsburg taverns and gutters to make up the numbers and given them a quick training before setting out. Most of the trained soldiers who had crossed the Atlantic with Braddock were hardened veterans of various campaigns and battles, including Culloden Moor in 1745, where they had faced and beaten the fearsome Highlanders of Charles Stuart?s army. European generals estimated that it took five years to train infantrymen to the point where they would stand still whilst being shot at by the enemy. This training was underpinned by liberal use of draconian punishments, including frequently fatal floggings of as many as a thousand lashes and, for serious transgressions, the gallows, which involved death by slow strangulation rather than the long-drop method later adopted for humane motives.

Conventional 18th century infantry tactics were uncomplicated: an attacking force marched three-deep in line-abreast towards the defending force. Sometimes they both advanced. Given the inaccuracy of smoothbore muskets of the day, it was important to be no more than forty yards from the target; it was desirable to be much closer. Hollywood and Pinewood films often show the front rank firing and then replaced by the rank behind as they retire to reload and so on. In real life, an advancing force fired en masse at the same time and, depending on the effect upon the enemy, paused to reload or charged them with bayonets fixed. It was a lethal form of bluff and the defending force was obliged to play the same game, waiting until the attackers were as close as possible before delivering their massed volley. A confrontation was often decided according to who fired first. After the first volley or two, soldiers were deafened anyway and could not hear orders so engagements usually degenerated into violent free-for-alls before one side or the other surrendered or ran away.

Regarding Indians, Braddock opined to Benjamin Franklin that it was impossible that savages should make any impression upon disciplined troops. He then dismissed the Indians who had volunteered for the expedition. Later, Braddock also managed to alienate the Ohio Indians, who had not yet allied themselves with the French, by telling their chiefs that once he had evicted the French, the Ohio country would also be cleared of Indians. Given that one of these chiefs had just presented Braddock with a plan of Fort Duquesne, drawn by a British prisoner there, which the chief had smuggled out at considerable risk to himself, this was a diplomatic blunder of gross proportions. Indeed, the Indians could not believe their ears and came back the next day to give Braddock a second chance to reassure them. Braddock?s answer remained the same. When the Indian delegation returned to the Ohio Valley with the news, several hundred furious warriors joined Contrecoeur?s garrison at Fort Duquesne.

Although the mile-long column had been harrassed by small Franco-Indian detachments, there had been no contact for a couple of days. When Braddock saw no massed ranks of white-coated French marines and grenadiers drawn up to greet his army on the open ground by Frazier?s Cabin as they arrived at the ford around 11 am, he assumed the French had been deterred by the prospect of meeting real soldiers rather than colonials. He and his officers expected to hear an explosion at any moment from Fort Duquesne as the retreating French blew it up.

At Fort Duquesne, Contrecoeur was nervous. Apart from the small size of his garrison, he knew that the fort could not yet withstand a pounding from artillery. Like his adversary, he decided to split his force. He ordered Capitaine Daniel de Beaujeu to take half the French troops and Indians and delay the enemy in the forest. As 36 officers, 72 marines and 146 miliciens paraded to draw their M1728/46 St-Etienne muskets and extra ammunition, Beaujeu found the Indians outside the fort decidedly reticent: ?Do you want to die, my father, and sacrifice us besides?" So Beaujeu stripped to his breechclout, daubed himself with warpaint, and with just his brass and silver officer?s gorget marking him out as a whiteman, dared the Indians to follow him. Over 600 warriors followed Beaujeu and the French soldiers out of the fort at a shuffling ?battle march? run.

Around 1-o-clock, Braddock?s ?Flying Column? was formed up around Frazier?s Cabin, flags flying, fifes and drums playing The Grenadiers? March. A surgeon who was there, Dr Walker, remembered the scene over twenty years later: ?A finer sight could not have been beheld; the shining barrels of the muskets, the excellent order of the men, the cleanliness of their apparel, the joy depicted on every face at being so near Fort Duquesne ? the highest object of their wishes. The music reechoed through the mountains. How brilliant the morning; how melancholy the evening!? And so they marched off into the forest, which was less overgrown than the primaeval woodlands in which they had spent almost two months. Like Washington?s men the previous year, many of Braddock?s soldiers had scurvy, amongst other ailments. Washington himself was recovering from a fever and a painful bout of haemharroids.

By 2-o-clock or so, the mile-long column had not covered much more than a mile when Braddock?s advance guard saw Beaujeu and his group through the trees coming towards them down the track. Some reports suggest that Braddock ordered one of his officers to take a detachment to the top of a hill just to the right of the column just before the contact with the enemy. When the sound of firing came, it was completely unexpected. Up at the front, the 300 regular soldiers of the advance guard quickly faced to the front, presented arms and fired three volleys in quick succession at the enemy, about 200 yards away. By chance, one of the heavy lead balls blew Beaujeu off his feet into eternity. So died the true Hero of the Monongahela. As the French troops organised themselves, hundreds of screaming, howling Indians rushed forwards, splitting into two lines as they charged through the trees on either side of the advance guard. Dropping into cover, they poured withering fire into the advance guard. Firing at an unseen enemy, the redcoats fell back towards the main column.

To the redcoats of the 44th and 48th, the warcries of the Indians were deeply unnerving: ?the yell of the Indians is still fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me until the sound of my dissolution?. Braddock ordered his main force forwards to engage the French. The British officers on their horses with their silver lace and shining gorgets were quickly picked off by the Indians. As the retreating advance guard met the advancing main force, the front lines of the main force opened fire on them in the smoke and confusion. Meanwhile, many New England militiamen, veterans of previous battles with the French and Indians, ran into into the trees to hide or, in the case of veterans, to try to winkle the Indians out. The regulars of the 44th and 48th, with fewer and fewer officers to give them orders, fell back on their training, forming firing lines and firing into the forest at the Indians. As a result, many New England militiamen were shot by their own side. As one veteran recalled years later back in England: ?the French and Indians crept about in small parties so that the fire was quite around us, and in all the time I never saw one, nor could I on enquiry find one who saw ten together?.

As the Indians occupied the hill on the right with the French marines and grenadiers who had rallied after Beaujeu?s death, the shower of hot lead slamming into the column intensified, causing fatalities and terrible wounds. At one point, some artillerymen managed to deploy a couple of cannon, which they loaded with grapeshot and fired into the forest. The resultant shards and splinters of wood killed and wounded even more of their own side, as did lengths of chain and chunks of iron ricocheting off rocks. For nearly three hours, Braddock rode up and down on his horse rallying his men as best he could. He had two horses killed under him before he took a bullet through the lung and fell, mortally wounded.

After that, it was not long before his men, deprived of any effective leadership, began to break and run. And once they started running, it was all over. The Indians swept out of the trees, tomahawking and scalping, and chased the panic-striken English to the Monongahela. Once at the river, the Indians turned around and went back to join their French and Indian brothers who had found the rum in Braddock?s baggage train?and the women. The survivors straggled across the river, carrying their wounded with them, and met up with the other part of the column after a few days. Of fifty women camp followers, just four survived. Of the prisoners marched back to Fort Duquesne, twelve were stripped naked and burned over slow fires that night by the Indians as the French and their fellow prisoners watched. Surgeons reported extracting two .75 calibre British bullets for every one .69 calibre bullet from the maggot-infested wounds of the wounded who survived the retreat, confirming that most of the British casualties had been due to friendly fire. British casualties amounted to 606. The area was still carpeted with bones ninety years afterwards.

Back in Virginia, George Washington was hailed by the usual crowd as The Hero of the Monogahela. It is true that he was recovering from a fever and had a bad case of piles before the battle. He was said to have rallied the troops and commanded an orderly retreat after Braddock was shot. There was nothing orderly about the retreat back across the Monongahela. It was a case of every man for himself: sauve qui peut. He was said to have looked after Braddock during the retreat yet it was the General?s regular aide-de-camp, Captain Orde, who oversaw the evacuation of his commander. The contemporary accounts simply do not support the stories of derring-do by the future Father of the Nation.

Nevertheless, Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie and the worthies of Virginia rewarded Washington by making him a Colonel and giving him the new 1st Virginia Regiment. Like some of the other officers and gentlemen who survived The Battle of the Monongahela, Washington was quick to attribute the defeat to a lack of discipline amongst the common soldiers. If anything, it was the discipline of the regular British troops and their General in adhering to European battlefield tactics and training, because they knew no better, that contributed greatly to the defeat. The real heroes of the Monongahela were Beaujeu and the hardened veterans of the 44th and 48th Regiments of Foot who endured that maelstrom for three hours before withdrawing. Fear and a lack of direction aside, they must have been out of ammunition by then.

Colonel Washington imposed British-style military discipline upon his men, believing it would make them as good as British regular soldiers?and might bring him the King?s Commission he desperately coveted. In May and June 1757, Colonel Washington presided over the passing of fourteen death sentences on soldiers of the 1st Virginia Regiment, exceeding the regular British Army average when it came to shooting and hanging their own men pour encourager les autres. Washington regularly approved floggings of more than 600 lashes with the Cat-o-Nine-Tails for offences such as wearing a hat incorrectly or not cleaning a musket properly.

It is sometimes said that Washington?s methods were successful. In 1760, the decidedly anti-colonial Brigadier-General Monckton remarked that the 1st Virginia Regiment was as good as any regular line regiment. However, Washington was long gone by then, having resigned his command in 1758 after increasing his substance through marriage to a wealthy widow. His officers expressed regret and sorrow at their Colonel?s departure but the opinions of the ordinary soldiers who served under Washington do not appear to have been recorded for posterity.

The facts are that under Colonel Washington, the 1st Virginia Regiment spent most of its time on uneventful garrison duty in various forts and that the only time Washington led them on campaign, during the Forbes Expedition, when Fort Duquesne was finally captured by the British, they got lost in the woods during the march and fired upon another British unit, causing many casualties in a grim repeat of the confusion on the Monongahela. In the end, Britain prevailed through a combination of their traditional field tactics and the new style of warfare they had to learn in North America. They also prevailed through sheer weight of numbers.

There is no doubt that Washington proved himself as a general during the American Revolution of the 1770s but solely at a strategic level because he was an appallingly bad field commander. He is one of the few generals who can be said to have won a war but never won a battle. Indeed, General Charles Lee, who served as Washington?s second-in-command during the Revolution and had served in the field with Washington on the Braddock Expedition of 1755, remarked caustically that Washington was ?unfit to command a sergeant?s guard?. Washington had him court-martialled and suspended for a year.

A direct consequence of the Braddock Expedition was the formation of Rogers Rangers, which brings us in where we started. The Battle on Snowshoes was the first time Rogers and Langy met but it would not be the last: Langy bested Rogers several times, the last occasion when he ambushed Rogers and some recruits near Fort Ticonderoga ? formerly Carillon ? in February 1760, killing half the party and capturing several others while Rogers ran away. Langy and his partisans were helped by the fact that Major Rogers, as he was by then, had not armed the recruits. On one of the sleighs was a Rogers Rangers payroll of about ?800.00, and over ?4,000 belonging to Rogers himself.

Langy drowned soon afterwards when he fell through ice on the St-Lawrence River. He is buried in the graveyard of St-Antoine de Padua, in Longueil, Qu?bec yet his grave has no marker on it. One can understand such an oversight on the part of the Canadian authorities, given that they retain the British monarch as head-of-state but the Qu?becois ought to be ashamed of themselves. Langy was a Canadian hero and a far better warrior than Robert Rogers ever was.

As for the shareholders and investors of The Ohio Company, they got a comeuppance of sorts after the war when George III issued a Royal Proclamation forbidding westward expansion into Indian territory across the Allgehenies. In the end, though, it helped to seal Britain?s doom as the imperial power in North America by alienating all of the New Englanders keen on expansion for various reasons. This simmering resentment would result in the American Revolution thirteen years later. The proclamation was not an altrusistic or generous measure in respect of the Indians: George III?s tax collectors were based in the coastal cities of New England and London didn?t want colonials making themselves difficult to reach beyond the mountains.

The war is obviously interesting from an historical point of view in that: it resulted in the fall of New France, sealed the doom of the American Indians and foreshadowed the end of British imperial power in North America less than two decades later. However, it should also be of interest to people who might not be all that history-minded but who are sensitive enough to be perturbed by what is happening in the world today because it underscores Santayana?s maxim that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

Copyright ? Prosper Keating 2006 for PARADIS

It was, of course, edited.

PK