Among the rest of the Allies matters were little better than with the Austrians. The Hessians in Flanders were far below their proper strength, sickness and constant skirmishes having swallowed up the additional recruits furnished during the winter; while the brigade which had been attached to Moira’s force left one hundred dead and two hundred and fifty invalided in the Isle of Wight, over and above five hundred sick men whom they carried with them to Ostend.[214] As to the British, everything was, as usual, behindhand, though the Duke of York had now a more energetic Chief of Staff than Murray in Colonel James Craig, whom we saw last at Wilmington in 1781. Recognising from his American experience how serious was the Duke’s deficiency in light troops, Craig tried to hire some from Prussia, but without success. There was a difficulty about the British siege-train, for it was discovered, some weeks after the Duke had made requisition for it, that the application had been mislaid at the Office of Ordnance. Though Dundas made profuse promises of British drafts and reinforcements, to the number of five thousand men, not one thousand of these had arrived by the middle of March, and Abercromby’s brigade was quite unfit to take the field. The remount-horses were discovered to be very bad. Artillery-drivers, moreover, the dearth of which had been represented by the Duke for quite six months, were found to be so scarce in England that the Master-General was fain to seek them, though without success, in Hanover. A fresh disappointment arose in the matter of foreign troops, for it proved impossible to obtain three thousand Brunswickers, whom Dundas had counted upon taking over from the Dutch into the British service. Rapidly the forty thousand soldiers promised by Pitt dwindled away; and Craig resigned himself to the inevitable fact that the deficiency would amount to at least ten thousand men. But this was not, to his thinking, the most formidable danger. With a boldness which must have shocked Pitt and Dundas, he wrote to the War Office a very strong and damaging criticism of the cordon-system, and predicted that nothing but misfortune could attend Generals who upon principle preferred dispersion to concentration.[215] So the month of March passed away, the unhappy Coburg waiting in anxious suspense to know first, when the troops that composed his heterogeneous army would be ready; secondly, what their numbers might be when they were ready; and thirdly, what the Emperor would expect him to do with them when it should please him to honour headquarters with his presence. Meanwhile Coburg had even in February given orders for the contraction of his cantonments; and at the beginning of April, after much shifting, his force occupied the following positions.