illness in August or September and had not been replaced. About 140 of the regiment's officers and enlisted men—one-third of the unit's total complement of about 420 men—were not present at the battle, however, because they were still completing organization and recruiting. A few enlisted men of the regiment who escaped from their captors within the short chaotic period following the battle augmented this remaining active force, which continued to serve with the Main Army. On December 1, the first day of the army's next regular reporting period following the fall of Fort Washington, Washington provisionally grouped these remnants of the diminished regiment into two composite rifle companies commanded by the unit's highest ranking officers still free—Capts. Alexander Lawson Smith and Gabriel Long. Smith's company comprised all the remaining Marylanders in the regiment, whereas the Virginians of the unit were placed under Long's command. The regiment's two composite companies served with the Main Army during its retreat across New Jersey in late 1776, in the ensuing Battles of Trenton and Princeton in Brig. Gen. Hugh Mercer's Brigade, and in the early 1777 skirmishing in northern New Jersey, a period termed the Forage War. While in winter quarters at Morristown during the winter and spring of 1777, the two-company force and other riflemen from Pennsylvania and Virginia Line regiments supported detached elements of line infantry units in front-line positions and conducted patrols in northern New Jersey, primarily to keep the enemy's aggressive foraging activities in check. Because the two units under Captains Smith and Long provided an experienced, if small, force, Washington also used them to bolster the new 11th Virginia Regiment commanded by Col. Daniel Morgan after its arrival at Morristown in early April by formally attaching them to this Virginia regiment. Washington's decision to join the two composite companies with the 11th Virginia Regiment was based on Morgan's earlier direct association with the original three independent Continental rifle companies of 1775 that formed the core element of Rawlings' regiment. Inasmuch as the attachment of one military unit to another was technically a temporary arrangement, however, the permanent unit of Smith's and Long's composite companies remained the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment. The first muster rolls of the two companies taken after the Battle of Fort Washington, both dated May 16, 1777, were compiled by the army staff as a result of the attachment process and show that the units