. . . And I think a valid one. The difficulty is that some generals who are great lose, Hannibal and Napoleon being the most obvious examples. Even George Washington lost more battles than he won, but I think many consider him a successful general because he never lost sight of the ultimate, and final goal -- keeping the Continental Army together and preventing the British from scoring a quick and decisive victory, slowly turning the war in favor of the colonials. Hannibal and Napoleon are rather Washington's opposites -- winning many battles, but ultimately losing sight of the ultimate goal, and therefore failing. On Hannibal, I have had many wonderful debates, and his generalship particularly is one that is quite rich, and open to many different interpretations.

As for the certainty with which we can judge Caesar's battles, you are correct that it is difficult. At the battle of Bibracte, it is not clear whether Caesar pushed back the Helvetti towards the North or the South! What we can gleam from the Commentaries are certain small things -- for instance, he relates to us that at Dyracchium his soldiers were reduced to grinding up roots for their bread, having run out of wheat, and that they were sorely suffering, while Pompey's legions were sitting pretty. Utlimately, however, Caesar's superior battlefield tactics won over Pompey's, logistics aside.

Sometimes, reconstructing a battle can be extremely difficult -- a friend of mine deeply interested in the Napoleonic Wars has read accounts that, using different interpretations, variously say the French, British, Belgians, and Prussians won the battle (though it is clear who was victorious, in the end)! Alexander's Battle of Issus has provoked works several hundred pages long. For Alexander's battle of Granicus, for instance, an interpretation can change the battle's dynamics tremendously. Many historians upheld that the Satrap of Ionia, who fought Alexander at the Granicus River, was incompetent, because his cavalry was perched on top of a hill that was too steep to charge down. As cavalry is useless unless charging, the Persians gained a reputation for clumsiness and disorganization that was erroneous (their two failures in the Persian Wars didn't help either). A more careful analysis, which I subscribe to, shows that the idea was to kill Alexander, and so he was meant to break through the cavalry to meet a row of troops waiting to knock him off. In fact, Alexander was almost killed in that battle. Some people, however, disagree with this interpretation, saying that no one would base a strategy on merely killing one man.

So how does this apply to Caesar? Well, I'll freely admit it is sometimes difficult to fully reconstruct parts of his campaigns, though I should add that set-piece battles are usually easy, because they are described very carefully and vividly. It is the small stuff, like how long the baggage train was, how far away the Romans were from camp, and what time of day it as when the enemy attacked, that are more challenging. This is particularly important for logistics, which we are chatting about.

Analysis of that part of the campaign takes creativity, and a careful selectivity of facts -- check out Delbruck's History of the Art of War, Volume I for a good example of this. His discussion of Caesar's campaigns in that regard is acute, graceful, and imaginative, though very much from a general's perspective (again, opposite of Victor Davis Hanson, who believes the perspective of the average soldier is, if not inherently more worthy, at least more in the spirit of military history than the detached Delbruck). Delbruck very systematically sets out to find out things "just as they were," to use Ranke's famous phrase, by calculating certain baggage trains, based on the length of a mule, how many supplies per person, etc. He, in my mind, conclusively argued that Caesar's figures regarding the number of Helvetii were inflated from the length of the baggage train it would entail (though for ancient battles, it is generally assumed that the numbers are inflated, save perhaps for Thucydides, so this is not "faulting" Caesar, as complete objectivity as an ideal in history was an alien concept until the 19th century -- Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, Caesar, Herodotus, and countless others consistently and obviously used outrageous figures).

I'm sorry this post is so long, but it mirrors my enthusiasm -- boundless!

A valid argument about Caesar, partially explaining his difficulty with logistics, is that he sacrificed it for superior mobility. Sometimes, I would agree with Fuller, it was more like slopiness, but at least as often it was meant as a strategic move, and speed was Caesar's greatest tactic. Without it, Vercingetorix would have had a far greater chance of success, and without it, he could not have crossed the Rubicon and marched into Italy. Alexander knew the value of speed, and Hannibal sacrificed a huge portion of his army to cross the Alps rather than wait for a better season (though I think that was just a plain old mistake).