As approximately four hundred troops under Grant advanced, Bentinck wrote, “1500 French and Indians sallied out upon us, with a Horrid Howling, like a wild Beast.” Lining up in traditional military formation “to receive the enemy, whom we could not yet see through the thickness of the underwood,” the British force opened fire at first sighting, seeming to repel them back into the woods, he wrote, “but instead of that, they crept on all fours, till they had almost surrounded us, when all at once, we received a very hot fire, without seeing the Enemy, and within a few minutes, all the officers, and above half the men were killed or wounded, upon which the remainder retreated in the greatest confusion.” It was a hard-learned lesson for the British troops, who, Bentinck noted, were “not much acquainted with the Indian way of fighting, and too brave to sculk behind trees.” James Grant to assess enemy strength at and around Fort Duquesne, the French-held stronghold at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. John Forbes’ expedition to drive the French out of the Ohio River Valley, he volunteered to serve on a reconnaissance mission led by Maj. Its author, Rudolph Bentinck (1738-1820), was a Dutch-born lieutenant in the Royal American Regiment, a special infantry unit raised to meet the challenges of frontier combat. The brutality of warfare in the North American wilderness during the French and Indian War comes through vividly in a British army officer’s manuscript journal acquired by the Institute in February 2020. Rudolph Bentinck’s thirty-page journal of his service in the French and Indian War begins in April 1756, when, “Having obtained a Lieuts Commission in the British service, in a Royal American Regiment, to be forthwith raised in North America,” he left his home in the Hague to assume his new duties. The American Revolution in Our Schools, 1783-2020.Plan of Instruction on the American Revolution.Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War.Ten Great Revolutionary War Battlefield Parks.Why Revolutionary War Battlefields Matter.