Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/296

 that this disaster gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the powers of British regular troops had not been well founded, and indeed I am assured that when Lord Percy's and Colonel Pitcairn's force was put to flight at Lexington the older farmers on our own frontiers, when they knew what had been done, were less amazed than the minute-men of Massachusetts.

We reached Wills Creek on the 18th, as Morris said, the worst-beaten army that had not been in battle. Colonel Dunbar did not require my aid, and my general being dead, my service as a volunteer was at an end.

The march to the settlements was most disgraceful—all in cowardly haste to get out of the wilderness. I am satisfied that no troops are so given to pillage as a retreating army, and certainly none was ever worse conducted by the officers or more disorderly than Colonel Dunbar's force. The settlers and outlying farms near Fort Cumberland suffered much; men and women were misused, and chickens and cattle stolen. I heard afterwards that in their march through Pennsylvania Dunbar's men plundered and insulted the farmers still