Furies by Lauro Martines

Author:Lauro Martines
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE SOFT CORE OF LOGISTICS: FOOD

Food was the soft core—the most necessary but uncertain substance—in the whole business of moving and supplying armies. For unless it was actually in the baggage train of the army on campaign, it raised constant, urgent questions: Will there be enough food in the next town, the next supply depot, the next stretch of open territory? What are the scouts finding? Will the contractors deliver the promised foods? Geoffrey Parker has shrewdly observed that “no one spoke about the number of soldiers on the march, only about the number of ‘mouths’ (bouches or bocas) to be fed.” And in sieges the besieged, as we have noted, spoke of “useless mouths.”

Even if baggage trains had some food, the crucial item, bread, had to be replenished every two days in warm weather, or every four days when the weather was cold. Biscuit was a fallback. Soldiers always preferred bread. And a moving army of ten thousand men, requiring some nine and a half tons of grain for bread every day, easily overwhelmed regional flour mills and baking facilities. An extra five to ten tons of wheat, hauled in daily for immediate milling and baking, was a thing to be achieved only by careful planning—or by means of theft, blows, an abrupt war tax, or a tsunami of money. But this kind of cash was seldom around for armies. Indeed, cash itself could not summon up in a few days, or even a week or two, new mills, new baking facilities, and many tons of grain brought in from distant points. A Russian study of the nineteenth century found that if an army was to operate without food-supply depots (“magazines”), it had to keep to regions “whose population density is over 35 persons per square kilometre.” This meant the most fertile parts of Europe. In 1607, despite the many towns in the Netherlands, “the Dutch army’s provisioning train included 3 prefabricated windmills, 3 watermills, 26 hand mills, 25 baker’s kits, and tools to build mills and handle grain.”

Food shortages led to the undoing of scores of armies in early modern Europe. The royal siege of Protestant La Rochelle, in the spring of 1573, provides one of the models of such a logistical collapse.

Between January and late June of that year, the Duke of Anjou, brother to the king of France, led an army against the fully bastioned port. Starting out with a force of seven thousand men, he would finally have about eighteen thousand under his command, despite having been promised forty thousand and sixty siege guns. The two sides must have prayed for a short siege, with food at the heart of their worries. The Rochelais had laid in supplies of foodstuffs, but prices rose at once and stocks began to dwindle. The besiegers, instead, Anjou’s men, would eat up the adjacent countryside and be forced to slash rations, while also striving—in vain—to bring in food from afar. Promised a daily supply of 30,000 loaves of bread, 10,800 pintes of wine (pinte: 0.

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