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Green Standard forces and not so about the Lien-chün, we can assume that he was a member of, or attached to one of the Lien-chün.
Mesny wrote relatively short explanatory notes in the first volume of his Miscellanies on the three armies, the Army of the Huai River, the Army of the Hsiang River and the Army of Ch'u, about which he felt he had unique knowledge having served with the Chinese military.
'The Huai Army, an important Field Force raised in the area drained by the River Huai, did such good service to the Imperial cause under the C-in-C Li Hung-chang, who had been wise enough to advocate and introduce the use of foreign weapons. The Ever-victorious Army, styled Chang-sheng Chün, first organised and disciplined in a foreign manner by General Ward and subsequently rendered so famous under the command of General Gordon, was the principal corps of this army, and consisted of 5,000 men all told. The Ming-tzu Ying, another corps of the same army, raised by General and later Governor Liu Ming-ch'uan, and disciplined by General Pinel and Colonel Lucas, though senior to the Ever-victorious was, however, secondary in importance at the time' [but still existed when Mesny was writing this in 1895].
At no time did Mesny allude to a general staff in the sense we understand it today. This raises the question what did the Force have by way of what we now call an operations staff or department? Nor did Mesny refer to staff officers responsible for the organisation of manpower or materials; and although he mentioned procurement officers and a staff of officers surrounding the General commanding to carry out his bidding, 'operations' as such, the most crucial aspect of an army's functioning was kept strictly in the hands of the Szechuan force C-in-C. It would appear that military operations in their wider sense were directed by civil mandarins who were more interested in cost cutting than in the direction of the campaign, whereas the military officers, who grade for grade were very much the juniors to the civil mandarins, were responsible for the day to day running of the various forces.
Forward planning was always limited by financial constraints. Arms and ammunition, rations and reinforcements had to be reviewed and planned well in advance, but with the attitude of the Viceroy in Ch'eng-tu [according to Mesny] and the restraints imposed by him little could ever be expected to be achieved.