Hi Erwin,

Howie's book is on British methods, and I know that he has no direct knowledge of Dutch practice. His surmise would be that such a sequencing would correlate well with the more democratic-leaning sequencing of straight numerical order that was manifested in the French 1791 Regulations, which put the “senior” on the right and trailed to the more “junior” unit on the left. There may be a national Dutch quirk here, as they placed the jäger (essentially, the light unit of the brigade) on the right. In French and British practice, the default expectation would have been the left, though outside the sequencing of the line units. It may be that the Dutch jägers were regarded as elite or more senior than the Dutch line units – but he is only guessing here, as he doesn't know enough about the historical basis of Dutch military organization.

To support that conceptualization of straight numerical ordering from right to left as “democratic”, during the American War of Independence, when the British created an American Establishment of regiments, those regiments stood in straight order of the seniority, unlike those on the British Establishment, which stood in alternating sequence right, left, inside right, inside left and so on toward the center. The Americans’ customary sequencing during the AWI was also in straight numerical order.

- Ned