On the Men Available for Service

Sir,

Your letter objects that my account of the First Southern War was composed in a university, by a man whom you consider unacquainted with war. The place of composition is correctly identified. You have been less attentive to the places in which the figures were compiled: your department’s depots, hospitals and muster offices. I used those figures because your predecessors required their subordinates to swear to them. If you now propose a lower standard of confidence, I shall need to know which returns your office wishes withdrawn.

You describe my subtraction of men unavailable for field service as “the agreeable arithmetic of the lecture room”. Sudermark’s own accounts leave approximately twenty-seven thousand men available from the hundred and forty-six thousand committed to the northern campaigns. You may dispute the assignments to particular categories; indeed, I should welcome evidence of men counted twice. Your letter instead restores the dead and the captive to the commander’s effective strength by continuing to quote his original total. I cannot approve this procedure, although I recognise its attractions to an establishment reluctant to authorise replacements.

Your more substantial objection concerns fresh levies. Here you have correctly identified a weakness in my paper. I wrote that further recruitment would necessarily have diminished the army’s means of subsistence. “Necessarily” exceeds the evidence. Recruitment among men whose labour could be spared, or whose work could be assumed by others, might have increased fighting strength without a corresponding loss of supplies. I have sent a correction to the editor.

The commander’s requests for exemptions remain inconvenient to your argument. He sought to retain men at the mine pumps, in the harvest fields and upon the railway works serving his depots. These requests establish his awareness that some recruits were already supporting the army where they stood; they do not tell us how many could safely be removed. I do not know that number. Neither, on the documents supplied, do you. Your assurance that the deficiency could “readily” have been repaired requires some account of who would raise the coal and bring in the grain.

You also accuse me of understating northern strength. The northern establishments listed one hundred and twelve thousand soldiers; thirty-nine thousand were fit and present. Approximately eighteen thousand of those were required elsewhere in the military system. Whether every escort was indispensable is a proper subject of enquiry, though the establishment total cannot settle it. I should gladly examine orders showing that particular duties could have been reduced, and shall be obliged if your next communication includes any.

Finally, you defend the Corps’ two transport forms as the accumulated wisdom of service. Last Thursday I accompanied Mr Rudd, a teamster, to the accounts office after his memorandum on mule fodder had been returned for insufficient authority. I initially supposed that he had misunderstood one of the headings. He made me complete both forms. By the second page I understood his objection thoroughly and had acquired an unfavourable opinion of my own intervention.

I thereupon submitted his memorandum under the Collegium seal, with his authorship expressly retained. It was accepted. The mules’ classification had changed neither between offices nor between submissions; the authority attached to the explanation had changed considerably. I have requested that Mr Rudd’s instruction be printed upon the forms. Your assistance would save him repeated journeys and your clerks repeated errors.

You are entitled to demand competence from anyone who publishes upon military supply. I ask you to apply that demand to my calculations and sources. I have corrected the sentence you showed to be defective. Send me another, with the evidence, and I shall attend to it with equal pleasure.