The wagons
and all the artillery, except a few light pieces, were left behind; and
on the eighteenth of November twenty-five hundred picked men marched for
Fort Duquesne, without tents or baggage, and burdened only with
knapsacks and blankets. Washington and Colonel Armstrong, of the
Pennsylvanians, had opened a way for them by cutting a road to within a
day's march of the French fort. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the
detachment encamped among the hills of Turkey Creek; and the men on
guard heard at midnight a dull and heavy sound booming over the western
woods. Was it a magazine exploded by accident, or were the French
blowing up their works? In the morning the march was resumed, a strong
advance-guard leading the way. Forbes came next, carried in his litter;
and the troops followed in three parallel columns, the Highlanders in
the centre under Montgomery, their colonel, and the Royal Americans and
provincials on the right and left, under Bouquet and Washington.[664]
Thus, guided by the tap of the drum at the head of each column, they
moved slowly through the forest, over damp, fallen leaves, crisp with
frost, beneath an endless entanglement of bare gray twigs that sighed
and moaned in the bleak November wind. It was dusk when they emerged
upon the open plain and saw Fort Duquesne before them, with its
background of wintry hills beyond the Monongahela and the Alleghany.
During the last three miles they had passed the scattered bodies of
those slain two months before at the defeat of Grant; and it is said
that, as they neared the fort, the Highlanders were goaded to fury at
seeing the heads of their slaughtered comrades stuck on poles, round
which the kilts were hung derisively, in imitation of petticoats.
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