Meanwhile Hull was besieged at Detroit. Immediately after returning there, August 8, he sent nearly half his force--a picked body of six hundred men, including the Fourth U. S. Regiment--to restore his communications with Ohio. Toward afternoon of the next day, when this detachment reached the Indian village of Maguaga fourteen miles south of Detroit, it came upon the British force consisting of about one hundred and fifty regulars of the Forty-first Regiment, with forty or fifty militia and Tecumthe’s little band of twenty-five Indians,--about two hundred and fifty men, all told.[267] After a sharp engagement the British force was routed and took to its boats, with a loss of thirteen men or more, while the Indians disappeared in the woods. For some unsatisfactory reason the detachment did not then march to the river Raisin to act as convoy for the supplies, and nothing but honor was acquired by the victory. “It is a painful consideration,” reported Hull,[268] “that the blood of seventy-five gallant men could only open the communication as far as the points of their bayonets extended.” On receiving a report of the battle Hull at first inclined to order the detachment to the Raisin, but the condition of the weather and the roads changed his mind, and August 10 he recalled the detachment to Detroit. The next four days were thrown away by the Americans. August 13 the British began to establish a battery on the Canadian side of the river to bombard Detroit. Within the American lines the army was in secret mutiny. Hull’s vacillations and evident alarm disorganized his force. The Ohio colonels were ready to remove him from his command, which they offered to Lieutenant-Colonel Miller of the U. S. Fourth Regiment; but Colonel Miller declined this manner of promotion, and Hull retained control. August 12 the three colonels united in a letter to the governor of Ohio, warning him that the existence of the army depended on the immediate despatch of at least two thousand men to keep open the line of communication. “Our supplies must come from our State; this country does not furnish them.” A postscript added that even a capitulation was talked of by the commander-in-chief.[269] In truth Hull, who like most commanders-in-chief saw more of the situation than was seen by his subordinates, made no concealment of his feelings. Moody, abstracted, wavering in his decisions, and conscious of the low respect in which he was held by his troops, he shut himself up and brooded over his desperate situation.