When Hohenlohe returned with 2000 fresh troops and found the gates shut in his face, he had nothing to do but to ride away, the enterprise having failed entirely through his own folly and recklessness; for it was he himself who had encouraged his followers to plunder. Had he kept them together until the main force entered, no resistance could have been offered to him, or had he when he rode out to fetch reinforcements left a guard at the gate to prevent its being shut, the town could again have been taken. Parma himself wrote to Philip acknowledging that "Had the rebels succeeded in their enterprise, I should have been compelled to have abandoned the siege of Antwerp." But now the winter, upon which the people in Antwerp had chiefly depended for preventing the blocking of the stream, was upon the besiegers. The great river, lashed by storms into fury, and rolling huge masses of ice up and down with the tide, beat against the piers, and constantly threatened to carry them away. But the structure was enormously strong. The piles had been driven fifty feet into the river bed, and withstood the force of the stream, and on the 25th of February the Scheldt was closed. Parma had from the first seen that it was absolutely impossible to drive piles across the deep water between the piers, and had prepared to connect them with a bridge of boats. For this purpose he had constructed thirty-two great barges, each sixty-two feet in length, and twelve in breadth. These were moored in pairs with massive chains and anchors, the distance between each pair being twenty-two feet. All were bound together with chains and timbers and a roadway protected by a parapet of massive beams was formed across it. Each boat was turned into a fortress by the erection of solid wooden redoubts at each end, mounting heavy guns, and was manned by thirty-two soldiers and four sailors. The forts at the end of the bridge each mounted ten great guns, and twenty armed vessels with heavy pieces of artillery were moored in front of each fort. Thus the structure was defended by 170 great guns. As an additional protection to the bridge, two heavy rafts, each 1250 feet long, composed of empty barrels, heavy timbers, ships' masts, and woodwork bound solidly together, were moored at some little distance above and below the bridge of boats. These rafts were protected by projecting beams of wood tipped with iron, to catch any vessels floating down upon them. The erection of this structure was one of the most remarkable military enterprises ever carried out. Now that it was too late the people of Antwerp bitterly bewailed their past folly, which had permitted an enterprise that could at any moment have been interrupted to be carried to a successful issue.