The insufficient provision of ordnance and stores for siege purposes will henceforth often strike the reader; and the question why—possessed, as Bengal is, of an inland navigation from one extremity of the presidency to the other, offering every facility for a speedy and cheap conveyance of stores—ample materials had not been pushed forward to meet our wants, must continually recur. The suddenness of the campaign cannot be admitted as a valid reason; the war had been deliberately entered on eighteen months before, and it was known that the enemy possessed many strongholds which required battering-trains for their reduction. The first campaign had given us Agra, a place admirably situated for a depôt, with reference to the scene of war, to which an adequate equipment should have been forwarded; but it was not done, and the want was severely felt in the course of this campaign. If ample supplies are not available against a fortified place, and it is absolutely necessary to reduce it, men’s lives must be substituted for shot and shells; in some cases, no doubt, _time_ is most precious, and it may be a matter of calculation whether time or men can best be spared; but when near our own frontier, there can be no excuse for the improvidence which has failed to provide the requisite stores, and by that means to take from the commander the choice between expenditure of his troops or of the munitions of war. In most we must attribute the blame to the cumbrous and inefficient machinery of the Military Board, in whose province lies the supervision of the magazines; but the Board, composed of many members, becomes a screen for individual responsibility, and this must always be the case until each member is vested with the sole control of the details of his own department, subject only to a discussion in the Board of the general question, that each may have the benefit of his colleagues’ opinions, and be made aware of what is going on in other departments, that all may work in concert.