ARMIES WERE NOT USUALLY DEFEATED by a lack of weapons, courage, or even by loss on the battlefield. They were stopped or destroyed by disease and hunger; and while disease was not a matter for logistics in the science of the day, food always was.
British soldiers, we have seen, feared and hated being sent to Ireland, because soldiering there was very likely to end in death from sickness or starvation. An army might land there with provisions, but these would be rapidly exhausted. In one week of 1643, the Marquis of Ormond’s royalist forces in Leinster, numbering four to seven thousand foot and horse, consumed “49,248 pounds of butter, 49,649 pounds of cheese, 447 barrels of wheat and rye, 367 barrels of peas and 356 barrels of oats.” The local economy could simply not go on replenishing these quantities, all the less so when military operations ravaged fields and farms. A few years later, in 1648, the Earl of Inchiquin moaned that “divers of my men have dyed of hunger after they lived a while upon catts and dogs.”
Hunger and small crop yields were more than chronic in early modern Europe; they were characteristic of the age, of the Continent’s subsistence economies. Degrees of hunger, more or less continually, were the lot of 15 to 20 percent of populations, depending upon weather conditions, crop yields, prices, and hoarding. In wartime, however, in the stricken areas, that figure could leap to a figure of 60 percent or more of local populations. Soldiers thus were always concerned about what lay ahead for them in the way of victuals. Bread was crucial: In Geoffrey Parker’s words, one and a half pounds “of bread each day was considered the minimum ration without which no soldier could survive.” But this ration alone meant slow starvation for a soldier, unless he was also getting other foods. When in the field, walking for six to eight hours daily with a moderate load, a soldier required an intake of 3,400 to 3,600 calories per day. The one and a half pounds of bread provided only about 1,875 calories. Any failure to get the rest made for a gnawing hunger. There were moments in the Thirty Years War when hungry troops, bursting into a village in search of something to eat and finding not a scrap, would seem to go berserk, as they howled with rage and started bonfires, burning some of the houses.
WAGONS AND HORSES
In 1522, the king of England, Henry VIII, allied to the Emperor Charles V, shipped ten thousand soldiers to Calais. Arriving there on August 20, they marched inland, bearing a short-term load of supplies, and reached Doullens, about seventy miles from Calais. There food supplies ran out. Calais and St. Omer had “a glut of victuals,” but officials could not get these to the war front because of a desperate shortage of horses and carts. By early October, with desertion rife and many soldiers ill, Henry’s army began its retreat, returning to Calais in ignominy on October 15.
More remarkable still is the fact that an almost identical sequence of events unfolded a year later. Another ten thousand British troops, landing at Calais in late August and sent on to besiege Boulogne, soon found themselves short of food and even ammunition, owing again to transportation and supply-cart failures. The outcome, in mid-November, was another retreat to Calais.
In operations against the Scots, along the northern borders of the kingdom, the English were often plagued by a scarcity of carts, and there too soldiers went hungry. Logistical lessons, it seems, were hard to learn.
The necessity of animals, carts, and wagons keeps us fixed to the core substance of logistics. In providing transport, they provided food. Without wheeled vehicles and pack animals there could be no food, unless it came by water, or unless it was bought or stolen or otherwise grabbed in situ, together with vehicles, if these were lacking.
Food and fodder apart, horses always topped the list of essential plunder for armies; and if there was much hunger, livestock came next. But no needy army would have rejected good carts or wagons: treasure for their baggage train. In 1581–1582, when German troops in Spain, mercenaries of the king, passed through the town of Antequera, near Jerez de la Frontera, they rustled 350 oxen and simply stole 150 wagons for their baggage trains. Later they returned eightyfive oxen, but not the wagons.
Flexible rules seem to have called for given numbers of carts or wagons per quotas of men and horses. In the middle of the French Wars of Religion, a Huguenot contract wanted one wagon for every four to six horses. Landsknechts sought to have one wagon for every ten men. In the early seventeenth century, an army might have one wagon for every fifteen men, with two to four horses per wagon. The twenty-four thousand men of Maurice of Nassau’s campaign of 1602 marched with a train of three thousand wagons: one wagon for every eight men. Four years later, again in the Netherlands, Ambrogio Spinola’s army of fifteen thousand soldiers had 2,000 to 2,500 wagons: an average of 6 to 7.5 men per wagon. In 1629, an army of eleven thousand Spaniards and Italians required 673 pack mules, for an average of one for every sixteen or seventeen men. Cart and animal numbers depended in part on the quantities of supplies to be carried.
From time to time, army officials arranged for carters to deliver wagons to soldiers on the move: for example, along the Spanish Road and in Savoy and Lorraine. But most carriage over the Alpine passes was by pack mules. And occasionally the étapes were pressed into lending some of these for use in transport over short distances, only to find, in the end, that as many as two thirds of the beasts came back injured or had perished, owing to their having been misused.
THE NUMBERS OF CARTS AND wagons in the train of an army tell us nothing—here the sources tend to go mute—about how exactly they were used: how many for the officers, for the rank and file, for camp followers, for bread and other foods, for fodder, and for hauling weapons, ammunition, tents, and all the paraphernalia of an army on campaign. A well-equipped field force was likely to carry portable ovens and querns (hand mills for grinding wheat, rye, and other grains). Splendor, too, and the insignia of social class, found their way into the train. The gear of grandee officers—boots, dress, hats, plumes, and other finery—sometimes displaced artillery. In the 1620s and 1630s, although much stronger than the Dutch army, the Army of Flanders often moved with fewer siege and field guns because officers—notes an expert—“used the artillery train to haul their personal baggage.” The ground of war, where a nobleman was meant to show his mettle, was also the very place for him to display the trappings of his identity. Vanity made finery more important than guns.
Lest we forget, the looting of towns and villages imposed an additional need. Carts and wagons were de rigueur for booty. Otherwise, how haul the stuff away? In 1512, in their sack of Brescia, one of the great laments of the French soldiers was that they had made such a race for the city that there was simply no time for them, when starting out, to get their hands on the needed carts.
In reflecting on ambulant cities, the most intriguing student of seventeenth-century logistics, Géza Perjés, imagined an army of forty thousand foot soldiers and twenty thousand horsemen. To these he added twenty thousand horses (draft animals) for the baggage train, plus ninety thousand rations of bread, which included the extra rations for the additional needs of the officers and all the auxiliaries connected with the train—teamsters, smiths, craftsmen, pioneers, and so on. His purely rational calculations resulted in a startling impossibility. An army of that magnitude, with more than eleven thousand wagons, supplies intact, and a modicum of space between the wagons, would stretch for 198 kilometers. Even moving at top speed, about twenty-five kilometers per day, the head and the tail of the column would have been separated by eight marching days.
The point of Perjés’s exercise was to fix the numerical limits of early modern armies, limits laid down by logistics. He observed that experts of the period—Montecuccoli, Turenne—put the limits at fifty thousand men. Recent studies have shown that an army of this size could only cohere for a few days, unless it was continually supplied by magazines or by the regular delivery of foods and fodder. This, however, was an impossibility for the administrative resources of states in early modern Europe. And any effort on the part of the fifty thousand to live off the surr
ounding lands would have spread them out widely, over many miles, as they moved about to ward off hunger. An army limit of twenty-five to thirty-five thousand men was more realistic. And even these numbers, campaigning in the most fertile parts of Europe—France, the Po Valley, and the Rhineland—would have been forced to keep roving as they exhausted local reserves and left stripped lands behind.
Large armies, then, when in the field, were bound to have hungry soldiers. The conditions of early modern Europe imposed this. This is why they seem to have averaged, when marching, some twenty kilometers per day, whereas the marching average of modern armies is in the region of thirty-five to forty kilometers.
IN THE LATE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, war horses in Italy were scarce. Good ones sold for not less than thirty gold ducats, and the best went for eighty to ninety ducats, or the wages, over a period of nearly two years, of a master craftsman in the Venetian shipyards. The sale of horses in Milan, or at the spring fairs of Como, Chiasso, and other points in Lombardy, attracted traders from all over northern Italy, as well as from Germany and Switzerland. Yet shortages of the right horses continued, partly at least because hungry soldiers frequently sold or pawned their mounts.
In northern Europe, the seventeenth century saw the price of combat horses reach new peaks. The Army of Flanders, in the 1640s, was importing thousands of horses from as far away as Sardinia, Naples, and especially Poland. Spain itself had few horses to spare because so many were being used up or killed in a hugely popular entertainment, bullfighting. The historian R. A. Stradling informs us that a fine cavalry horse in the Netherlands, in 1646, was worth more than twice the value “of a black galley slave and twelve times that of an Irish infantryman”—which tells us something about the wages of Irish soldiers on the Continent.
We must assume, accordingly, that cavalry officers looked after their horses with the best of care. But even nags required attention. The Veterinary Department of the British Army issued a report in 1908, concluding that “the transport animals of an army shall be regarded as worth their weight in gold,” and hence “no care or supervision can be too great or too strict.” These claims would have made good sense to Polish, Russian, and Tatar cavalrymen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And yet the wretched condition of armies in western Europe, particularly in wartime, rendered the proper treatment of horses all but impossible.
In circumstances of near famine, at the height of the Thirty Years War, in a scene that must have had its like countless times, villagers in southwestern Germany looked on as a Croatian soldier, raging over his horse’s refusal to move, kept hammering its head. The horse collapsed and died, whereupon the stunned and hungry villagers proceeded to eat it. Had it been overworked, or was it simply starving?
In the course of a day, a horse may safely carry a load of one fifth its weight and only go so far, while also requiring twenty to twenty-four pounds of feed, or even thirty and more pounds, if it is doing hard work. Moreover, as one logistics historian has noted, half of its feed “should be grain and the other half fodder,” that is, straw or hay. But once a horse has been “worn out by several days of excessive work and inadequate rations,” it becomes “unfit for further use,” and in wartime it may as well be killed, for the full recovery of the animal would require good nourishment and four to five months of rest.
Is it any wonder, then, that horses were the first targets of plundering soldiers, once they had stolen food supplies? And that oats, hay, and grass were next? Sold off illegally “by unpaid cavalry soldiers,” horses also “died in large numbers during long campaigns and severe winters.” Worse still: Since their abuse and undernourishment was common, theft of the animals was the only way to replace the dying ones. But this expedient had an immediate echoing impact on local communities, for it often brought farm work to a halt, such as in delayed plowing or the transport of goods; and in hilly country, carting could turn into a curse. Now peasants as well as soldiers would go hungry.
The 1645 spring campaign of the Swedish general Lennart Torstensson highlighted the importance of keeping horses well nourished. Moving his army of sixteen thousand men against Vienna, the Imperial capital, in late March of that year, he was unable to assault it, in spite of being only a day’s march from the city, in part at least because—as the battle expert William Guthrie tells us—“the lack of forage in the late winter had weakened his cavalry,” with the result that “the horses sickened and many died.”
Armies of twenty-five to thirty thousand men were not unusual in the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War. Their daily access to flour or bread was crucial, but so too was the accessing of fodder for the cavalry regiments, about one third of army numbers. Such a large force often moved—if we include pack animals—with no fewer than twenty thousand horses. John Lynn and others have shown that it was out of the question for that force to carry its own fodder: about five hundred tons per day. Horses had to live off the land, and this required foraging parties that might easily number thousands of men, riding out in widening circles, with a view to laying hands on dry fodder and/or green forage. Necessity drove armies from place to place, and nevertheless many of their horses inevitably died of exhaustion and hunger. In their 1568–1569 campaign against the Huguenots, taking in a swath of France that stretched from Saumur to Limoges and beyond, “the 30,000 men and … 15,000 animals” of the royal army moved continually, because they kept eating up local food and fodder within days.
The same logistical limits applied to the large armies of the Thirty Years War. This fact throws light on their apparent rambles, as they sought out river valleys and fertile regions in their hunt for victuals and fodder. The Swedish armies of the 1630s and 1640s, under Banér, Torstensson, and Wrangel, were mammoth search-and-eat engines.
War horses were walked, not ridden, except in combat, in order to preserve them in health. So of all army horses, those of the elite cavalry units were the best cared for, the ones most likely to get their forage rations. Action in battle to one side, work horses, the pullers of guns and wagons, perished first.
WAGON TRAINS AND CAMP FOLLOWERS
In 1615, a German observer noted that “when you recruit a regiment of German soldiers today, you do not only acquire 3,000 soldiers; along with these you will certainly find 4,000 women and children.”
The remark singled out a general feature of European armies. Wives, other women, and children, trailing behind columns of soldiers, stood out in wartime landscapes. But varieties of servants, the lackeys of officers, and other helpers also traveled with armies. At the end of the fifteenth century, Charles VIII, the king of France, declared “that he fed 48,000 to 50,000 mouths a day to maintain an army of 20,000 combatants in the field.” Female companions of the soldiers were not necessarily their wives. Widows, concubines, and prostitutes were also part of the scene behind the winding columns of soldiers. In 1544, in the wake of King Henry VIII’s invasion of France, large numbers of women crossed the Channel to join his forces.
Whether or not the tail of camp followers was longer than the beast itself, no one can say in the absence of sustained studies. In the Low Countries and in Germany, during the Thirty Years War, soldiers were sometimes outnumbered by their camp followers, but this was not generally the case. Geoffrey Parker’s study of the Army of Flanders reveals that the tail might number anywhere from 8 to 53 percent of a combat unit. For the Thirty Years War, the best-informed recent view sees a camp-follower ratio that often attained parity: one noncombatant for every soldier.
Apart from women, children, and officers’ lackeys, camp followers also included varieties of artisans, such as carpenters, wheelwrights, and smiths, in addition to sutlers (vendors of food and drink), pawnbrokers, medical quacks, old veterans, and all sorts of other hangerson. Here was the society of the early modern army, a community. But this itinerant city, with all its afflictions, could not have gone on for as long as it did without the solace, comforts, and family ways provided by women. And rulers put up with i
t because they could not raise large armies, or hold them together, without a tail of camp followers. In this sense, government itself had given rise to that alien society, so wholly divorced from the ways of the everyday world of city, town, and country. Despised and universally feared, the “aliens” were seen as a godless and immoral rabble, and they were feared because they supposedly included thieves, thugs, whores, and killers, and carried infectious diseases.
After 1660, rulers and armies brought in stricter regulations against camp-following wives, as well as harsh laws against prostitutes, including—as the threatened penalties—the branding of the face or the slitting of the nose and ears. But camp following, though waning, passed into the eighteenth century, and garrisons had to make arrangements for the presence of wives and children.
If the women who traveled with officers rode in wagons, this was not true of most female camp followers, whose men were too poor to own a horse, unless plunder in wartime brought one into their hands. Need, however, would soon force the lucky man to sell it, as attested to in the diary of Peter Hagendorf, a soldier who lived through the Thirty Years War. Most women in the train of followers walked, loaded down with clothing, pots, and sacks of other things, while being sometimes accompanied by, or lugging, a child or two. Unless billeted with civilians, they slept in tents, flimsy little huts, or in the open; and so they had to be strong, or too soon they would die of exhaustion, illness, or in childbirth. In the course of Hagendorf’s years of rambling with different armies (1624–1649), taking him over the face of Germany and beyond its borders, death claimed his first wife and seven children. When, instead, such a woman lost a husband or a partner to combat or disease, she was instantly cast into destitution, particularly if she had children. Now what? She would have to scheme to pick up extra work around the wagon train and perhaps beg, steal, and whore, or even find herself driven away. But to go where? Back home might be a possibility. Little boys, if she had any, the sons of soldiers, aspired to be taken on as officers’ lackeys. Others became petty thieves. Aging widows and old soldiers clung to the wagon train because they knew no better world, or had nowhere else to go.
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