Thus hesitating and confused, Lee permitted Clinton to get his baggage and train to the front, and to mass all his best troops in the rear under Cornwallis, who then advanced against the American lines.  Now there were no orders at all, and the troops did not know what to do, or where to go.  They stood still, then began to fall back, and then to retreat.  A very little more and there would have been a rout.  As it was, Washington alone prevented disaster.  His early reports from the front from Dickinson’s outlying party, and from Lee himself, were all favorable.  Then he heard the firing, and putting the main army in motion, he rode rapidly forward.  First he encountered a straggler, who talked of defeat.  He could not believe it, and the fellow was pushed aside and silenced.  Then came another and another, all with songs of death.  Finally, officers and regiments began to come.  No one knew why they fled, or what had happened.  As the ill tidings grew thicker, Washington spurred sharper and rode faster through the deep sand, and under the blazing midsummer sun.  At last he met Lee and the main body all in full retreat.  He rode straight at Lee, savage with anger, not pleasant to look at, one may guess, and asked fiercely and with a deep oath, tradition says, what it all meant.  Lee was no coward, and did not usually lack for words.  He was, too, a hardened man of the world, and, in the phrase of that day, impudent to boot.  But then and there he stammered and hesitated.  The fierce question was repeated.  Lee gathered himself and tried to excuse and palliate what had happened, but although the brief words that followed are variously reported to us across the century, we know that Washington rebuked him in such a way, and with such passion, that all was over between them.  Lee had committed the one unpardonable sin in the eyes of his commander.  He had failed to fight when the enemy was upon him.  He had disobeyed orders and retreated.  It was the end of him.  He went to the rear, thence to a court-martial, thence to dismissal and to a solitary life with a well-founded suspicion of treason hanging about him.  He was an intelligent, quick-witted, unstable man, much overrated because he was an English officer among a colonial people.  He was ever treated magnanimously by Washington after the day of battle at Monmouth, but he then disappeared from the latter’s life.

When Lee bowed before the storm and stepped aside, Washington was left to deal with the danger and confusion around him.  Thus did he tell the story afterwards to his brother:  “A retreat, however, was the fact, be the causes what they may; and the disorder arising from it would have proved fatal to the army, had not that bountiful Providence, which has never failed us in the hour of distress, enabled me to form a regiment or two (of those that were retreating) in the face of the enemy, and under their fire; by which means a stand was made long enough (the place through which the enemy were pressing being narrow)