Covering blushes

Burnished Rows of Steel, Chapter 3 Part 2:

the covered face, a half-built but existing earthwork that defended the shore approaches to Montgomery... Unfortunately for the British, however, Parrott had emplaced several rifled guns in embrasures cut into the covered face

Textbook of Fortification and Military Engineering, for use at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Part I (1877):

Counterguards are works intended to protect the faces of bastions... When they are so narrow as to be suitable only for musketry they are termed couvrefaces; such narrowness has the advantage that the besieger has no room to establish breaching batteries upon them.

Of course, you can tell through observation that the covered face is too narrow to mount artillery. However, in light of TFSmith's pretensions to academic status, it's nice to know that a covered face is by its very definition too narrow to mount artillery.

Canadian Militia: Missing in Action? (2)

This post takes the volunteer list for April 1862 and compares it to the OOB produced by TFSmith. Units whose existence he failed to acknowledge are denoted with square brackets. Where the number of batteries or companies is greater than the figure given by TFSmith, the figure in square brackets is the total number of sub-units that existed historically and not the number which have been missed. All references to military districts are those which existed historically. A summary of the results has been provided above the cut, and if that's sufficient for you you can always move straight onto part 3.

Missing units:

14/34 cavalry troops (6/14 Lower Canada, 8/20 Upper Canada)
2/8 field batteries (1/3 Lower Canada, 1/5 Upper Canada)
10/19 foot/garrison batteries (3/12 Lower Canada, 7/7 Upper Canada)
4/5 engineer companies (1/2 Lower Canada, 3/3 Upper Canada)
6/7 naval/marine companies (6/7 Upper Canada)
146/186 rifle companies (72/105 Lower Canada, 74/81 Upper Canada)
182/259 = 70.3% of the formations present in April 1862 are missing

Canadian Militia: Missing in Action? (1)

TFSmith's assumptions for the numbers of Canadian volunteer and sedentary militia are based on some of the most egregious research failures which have been conducted. His overall estimate of 15,000 volunteers and 10,000 militia has been well and truly debunked, as having been based on misunderstood peacetime figures. Yet nobody has, as yet, taken the time to deconstruct his overall order of battle for the Canadians in the winter of 1861-2. This is a real shame, as doing so proved not to be particularly difficult.

This is a weighty topic, and as such will be split into sections. This first section will deal with some preliminary remarks on both the sources used and the way in which they have been used. The second section will provide a full OOB for Canadian volunteer units in April 1862, after the crisis had subsided, and compare it to the version which TFSmith produced. The third section will add commentary and analysis to this OOB and provide some closing thoughts.