Twenty-two-year-old George Washington was pleased by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and quite content to be the second-in-command of Governor Robert Dinwiddie's expedition to remove the French from the Ohio Valley.

Then Joshua Fry, the mission's elderly commanding officer, is killed in a fall from his horse. Washington, whose experience in battle is all but nonexistent, is suddenly in command of the Virginia Regiment at a remote field in the Allegheny Mountains called Great Meadows—and the enemy is coming.