At this juncture, Greene realized also, as well as did Cornwallis, that he could not expect any substantial aid from Virginia. He could hardly keep his immediate force in hand, while wear, waste, hunger and sickness began to impair their fighting energy as well as physical capacity. He determined to seek the first reasonable opportunity to join battle with Cornwallis; and the Battle of Guilford Court-House, on the fifteenth of March, realized Washington’s full anticipations of such protracted inaction. The light troops of both armies had skirmished daily. Cornwallis issued a proclamation giving a limit within which the people must return to their allegiance to the Crown. On the sixth of March a skirmish occurred at Wetzell’s Mills, which brought nearly the entire army of Cornwallis into action. On the eighth, Colonel Carrington and Frederick Cornwallis, acting as commissioners for the two opposing armies, agreed upon terms for an exchange of prisoners. Cornwallis had been in the habit of paroling militia, wherever found, and carrying them on his list, as if captured in battle. In the adjustment made, Greene obtained a few officers who would have been otherwise idle during the campaign; but the arrangement had no other immediate value. The position of the two armies is worthy of notice, because of its relations to succeeding events in Virginia. For several weeks Cornwallis had made special endeavor to control all upper fords. On the twenty-seventh of February he crossed the river Haw and fixed his camp on the Alamance, one of its tributaries. Greene adopted a line nearly parallel with that of his adversary, and advanced to the heights between Reedy Fork and Troublesome Creek, having his divided headquarters near the Speedwell Iron Works and Boyd’s Mills, on two streams. Greene had gained the choice of position, entirely reversing the old relations of the armies. There were no British troops in his rear, or on his eastern flank, and none to endanger his communications with Virginia. He could give battle; retire as he advanced, or move into Virginia, by the same upper fords which Cornwallis had once so carefully occupied. At this time, the army of Cornwallis was also in great need of clothing, medicines, and all other essential supplies. The strain of so many unequal marches and skirmishes, through woods, thickets, and swamps, and across innumerable small streams, with no recompense in victories won, was very severe. He therefore pitched his camp between the Haw and Deep rivers, where the roads from Salisbury, Guilford and Hillsborough unite, and thus controlled the road to Wilmington, his only proximate base of supply.