At midnight, on the 4th of November, Howe commenced withdrawing his troops, as though he were a vanquished foe, retreating before his victors. Soon the whole force disappeared from White Plains. The plan of the British general was soon made manifest. He encamped his army on Fordham Heights, near King’s Bridge, in preparation for an attack upon Fort Washington. He invested the fort and, on the 15th, sent a summons to surrender, with a barbaric threat, if he was forced to carry the works by assault. Washington hastened to the beleaguered fortress, which he reached in the gloom of a cold November evening. Colonel Magaw, who was in command, had nearly three thousand men. As the fort itself could not contain more than one thousand, the others were stationed at the outposts. General Howe planned for four simultaneous attacks. The assault was a series of complicated battles, some at the distance of two and a half miles from the fort, and some within cannon shot of its walls. Washington witnessed one of those awful conflicts, where the Hessians rushed like fiends over the ramparts of a battery, and bayoneted the young Americans begging for life. It is said that his sympathies were so moved by the demoniac scene, that he wept with the tenderness of a child.[138] The redoubts were captured and the retreating troops so crowded the fort, that the men could scarcely move about. The British could throw in a shower of shells and balls, which would cause awful carnage. A capitulation could not be avoided. Washington stood upon a neighboring eminence, and saw the American flag fall and the British flag rise in its place. The loss was a severe one. Washington had recommended, not ordered, that the fort should be evacuated, and the men and stores removed to a place of safety.[139] But some of his more sanguine generals were confident that they could hold the place. Deep as was his grief, he did not reproach them. The impetuous General Lee wrote to Washington; “Oh, General, why would you be overpersuaded by men of inferior judgment to your own? It was a cursed affair.” Colonel Tilghman wrote on the 17th to Robert R. Livingston, of New York: “We were in a fair way of finishing the campaign with credit to ourselves and I think to the disgrace of Mr. Howe. And had the general followed his own opinion, the garrison would have been withdrawn immediately upon the enemy’s falling down from Dobbs Ferry.” The captives, amounting, according to General Howe’s returns, to two thousand eight hundred and eighteen, were marched off, at midnight, to the awful prison hulks of New York, where they endured sufferings which must forever redound to the disgrace of the British government. CHAPTER X. _The Vicissitudes of War._