It was not until the 4th of December, that Lee crossed the Hudson and began a laggard march, though aware of the imminent peril of Washington and his army—how different from the celerity of his movements in his expedition to the South! In the meantime, Washington, who was at Trenton, had profited by a delay of the enemy at Brunswick, and removed most of the stores and baggage of the army across the Delaware; and, being reinforced by fifteen hundred of the Pennsylvania militia, procured by Mifflin, prepared to face about, and march back to Princeton with such of his troops as were fit for service, there to be governed by circumstances, and the movements of General Lee. Accordingly, on the 5th of December he sent about twelve hundred men in the advance, to reinforce Lord Stirling, and the next day set off himself with the residue. “The general has gone forward to Princeton,” writes Colonel Reed, “where there are about three thousand men, with which, I fear, he will not be able to make any stand.”[143] While on the march, Washington received a letter from Greene, who was at Princeton, informing him of a report that Lee was “at the heels of the enemy.” “I should think,” adds Greene, “he had better keep on the flanks than the rear, unless it were possible to concert an attack at the same instant of time in front and rear. * * * I think General Lee must be confined within the lines of some general plan, or else his operations will be independent of yours. His own troops, General St. Clair’s, and the militia, must form a respectable army.” Lee had no idea of conforming to a general plan; he had an independent plan of his own, and was at that moment at Pompton, indulging speculations on military greatness, and the lamentable want of it in his American contemporaries. In a letter from that place to Governor Cooke of Rhode Island, he imparts his notions on the subject. “Theory joined to practice, or a heaven-born genius, can alone constitute a general. As to the latter, God Almighty indulges the modern world very rarely with the spectacle; and I do not know, from what I have seen, that he has been more profuse of this ethereal spirit to the Americans, than to other nations.”