Ancient Chinese Warfare (64 page)

The straw and moss padding spread on the compartment’s wooden floor to provide additional damping proved to be minimally absorptive while inducing further instability, just as sponge padding might on the floor of an open pickup truck. (Comfortable when stationary, spongelike
substances tend to exhibit less desirable properties when the vehicle is in motion or the fighter is active.) In some cases the floors were fabricated by interweaving leather thongs, but their effectiveness in reconstructive experiments was decidedly poor, particularly after they lost their initial tension, and they could even result in the fighter’s stance becoming more tenuous. The use of interior straps and efforts to improve the battlefield in the Spring and Autumn period confirm that stability continued to be a problem: the warriors were jostled about as the chariot moved at speed across the terrain.
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24.

NO STUDY OF MILITARY AFFAIRS can ignore the crucial issue of logistics, herewith understood in the constricted sense of the art of supplying and sustaining armies both in movement and at rest. (Logistics thus encompasses the acquisition and transport of materials and provisions, feeding of the forces, and movement of armies rather than, as Jomini said, “all aspects ancillary and apart from the ‘conduct of war itself’.”)
¹
Pioneering studies of Western armies provide exemplary models, and the probable requirements of individual soldiers can be projected, even historically employed, to assess the believability of massive campaign forces.
²
However, armies often achieved seemingly impossible tasks, little is known about ancient dietary requirements, and concrete evidence is lacking for most of antiquity. Accordingly, our consideration of logistics is necessarily confined to a few introductory comments, an exploration of the main difficulties identified in Warring States writings and subsequent practice, and a brief overview of the measures and structures that may have characterized supply and support efforts in the Hsia and Shang.

The problems inherent to supplying expeditionary armies in China rarely deterred military initiatives and were never articulated until broached by the classic military writings. The earliest forces, which numbered less than a few thousand, survived by carrying large quantities of foodstuffs at the outset, being supplied (willingly or not) by allies and subject peoples en route, seizing accumulated resources, foraging, and frequently pausing to fish and mount massive hunts in forested areas.
³
Nevertheless, the onerous requirements of campaign sustainment gradually prompted the assignment of supply responsibilities
in even the most primitive administrative structures. Thereafter, the passage of time and fielding of increasingly larger forces compelled the development of specialized positions.

For the Chou, Shang, and remote Hsia, the
Chou Li
’s discussion of administrative hierarchies and functional responsibilities is generally acknowledged as an unreliable idealization. Officials noted as having exercised logistical duties may have existed but not necessarily been assigned the indicated role, or the titles may be wrong but the activities correct. Even then, “quartermasters” are not actually described until late in the Warring States period in a chapter of the
Six Secret Teachings
outlining the essential members of a general staff
.
⁴
Among the eighteen basic categories of officials, there should be four “supply officers responsible for calculating the requirements for food and water; preparing the food stocks and supplies and transporting the provisions along the route; and supplying the five grains so as to ensure that the army will not suffer any hardship or shortage.”

The army’s first priority in the field would have been locating adequate water resources and ensuring they had not been poisoned or contaminated, two pernicious measures that would be practiced from the sixth century BCE onward.
⁵
Water, especially its denial, is a focal issue in the later military writings, but even Hsia and Shang forces must have been acutely conscious of the need for it, particularly when venturing out against enemies in the semiarid steppe.
⁶
How much water they carried, what sort of containers they employed (such as gourds), and whether wheeled vehicles—either human or animal powered—were used are all unknown. However, being heavy, bulky, and fluid, water is inconvenient to transport; the countryside was still relatively unpopulated; techniques for digging wells were already known; and potential sources were numerous, especially leading up to the early Hsia and in the Shang from Wu Ting’s reign onward, suggesting they depended on ongoing acquisition.

Because the primary nourishment was provided by millet, then wheat, and finally rice, and all three require cooking, firewood had to be gathered and primitive stoves or other cooking arrangements set up. (To secure the allegiance of their troops, Warring States writings advised commanders to emulate famous generals like Wu Ch’i, who never ate or drank until the army’s wells had been completed and the fires lit for
cooking.)
⁷
Once they exhausted the local firewood, the inability to boil water and prepare hot food would have immediately increased the army’s misery and the likelihood of disease, especially in winter months and the rainy season.

In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, campaign provisions would be increasingly sourced through official confiscations that took several forms, including outright seizure and military impositions (
fu
), while laborers were assembled through broad-based conscription and onerous work levees. Tax obligations might include supplying any of the grains, furnishing an ox or horse, or providing certain types of equipment, and it is claimed that conscripts in the Warring States period were required to report for duty fully equipped and even to sustain themselves for brief periods, though this quickly proved ineffective. Across the centuries monetary impositions would be increasingly imposed, allowing the government greater flexibility in purchasing the requisite equipment and provisions while minimizing the inconvenience and expense of transporting bulky commodities in every conceivable amount around the realm.

By improving trails and demarking regal highways, the Shang initiated an unbroken heritage of increasingly ambitious road projects intended to facilitate administration, communication, and the rapid dispatch of troops to quell unrest or counter peripheral threats. Nevertheless, because oxen rapidly consume a high percentage of their grain loads, and horses were comparatively few and inordinately inexpensive, ordinary soldiers still carried hefty rations.
⁸
However, the small boats that began to ply China’s extensive rivers and lakes in the middle to late Shang could have been employed to transport grain, and oracular inscriptions indicate the king actively contemplated the possibility of moving troops over water. Many centuries later, at the very inception of canal building in the Spring and Autumn, the state of Wu would construct a canal solely to facilitate moving troops and provisions from the southeast into the heartland. Lengthy canals intended for military and dual-use purposes such as supplying interior capitals would also multiply in the Ch’in and subsequent dynasties.

Although the expenses incurred in the Hsia and Shang for military activities are likely to remain unknown, some sense of martial costs and
their greater impact can be gleaned from later calculations and comments. The average 100,000-man Warring States operational force, with its numerous chariots and complex siege equipment (but no cavalry), required an extensive supply train, numerous support personnel, and Herculean efforts. The
Art of War
, attributed to Sun-tzu, but probably compiled sometime early in the Warring States period, notes that, “if there are 1,000 four-horse attack chariots, 1,000 leather-armored support chariots, 100,000 mailed troops, and provisions are transported 1,000
li
, then the domestic and external campaign expenses, the expenditures for advisers and guests, materials such as glue and lacquer, and providing chariots and armor will be 1,000 pieces of gold per day. Only then can an army of 100,000 be mobilized.”
⁹

A thousand pieces of gold being an almost incalculable expense at that time, Sun-tzu warned that prolonged warfare would not only exhaust the people, but also consume some 60 to 70 percent of the state’s resources and entangle seven families for every man who served: “Those inconvenienced and troubled both within and without the border, who are exhausted on the road or unable to pursue their agricultural work, will be 700,000 families.”
¹⁰
(These numbers may have been derived from rather late, idealized concepts of the well-fielded organization, in which eight families were supposedly allotted individual plots arrayed much like a tic-tac-toe board around a center portion that they farmed in common to sustain the government.)

Seconding Sun-tzu’s conclusion that “one bushel of the enemy’s foodstuffs is worth twenty of ours, one
picul
of fodder is worth twenty of ours,”
¹¹
most military writers subsequently advised capitalizing on whatever might be acquired en route or seized in enemy territory, including from the enemy themselves in armed clashes. Victorious Spring and Autumn forces occasionally captured “three days of supplies,” suggesting that this might have been the minimal reserve for a field force, and larger amounts were sometimes noted.
¹²
In no doubt characterizing Warring States practices, the
Six Secret Teachings
states that the vanguard should carry three days of “prepared food” to facilitate rapid movement and transitioning to combat as necessary. However, the advance force that preceded the vanguard had a six-day supply, and “the main army set out with a fixed daily ration.”
¹³

To implement Sun-tzu’s belief that “if you forage in the fertile countryside, the Three Armies will have enough to eat,” generals across the ages routinely dispatched contingents tasked with plundering and foraging.
¹⁴
However, the prospects for success would depend on the terrain’s accessibility and the existence of warehouses, granaries, animal herds, and readily harvested crops. Yet armies around the world have managed to sustain major field efforts for almost unimaginable periods, though always at a devastating cost to the local populace. (At a minimum the land is denuded, the infrastructure damaged, heavy collateral casualties suffered, the local population displaced, and starvation endured, especially when seed crop allotments are confiscated.)

Population and agricultural yields both continued to increase throughout the Lungshan period, resulting in local surpluses. As previously noted, recently investigated storage pits indicate that surprisingly large amounts of grain could be accumulated, a situation that probably persisted in the Hsia and Shang. The production of inebriating liquors, attested by the proliferation of drinking vessels in the Shang as well as being a purported cause of their downfall, is generally seen as further evidence of a grain surplus.
¹⁵

Contradictorily, the early military writings also decried confiscation policies as counterproductive because they would stiffen enemy resistance.
¹⁶
Moreover, even the stupidest commander would have herds shifted away from projected lines of march, structures dismantled, goods moved into fortified towns, a scorched earth policy implemented, and as many provisions as possible acquired before becoming entangled in a probable siege situation, just as outlined in sections of the
Mo-tzu
and the
Wei Liao-tzu
.

Battlefield experience would stimulate an acute consciousness of the value of food and its denial as a weapon, both in practice and in the classic theoretical writings. For example, in stressing the role of measure and constraint in campaigns, Wu Ch’i said:
¹⁷
“If their advancing and resting are not measured, drinking and eating not timely and appropriate, and they are not allowed to relax in the encampment when the horses are tired and the men weary, then they will be unable to put the commander’s orders into effect. When the commander’s orders are thus disobeyed, they will be in turmoil when encamped and will be defeated in battle.”

Armies operating in the field for prolonged periods often found themselves either out of supplies or cut off by the enemy, resulting in weakness, starvation, and even death should they be compelled to surrender, as happened to the 400,000 from Chao at Ch’ang-p’ing in the third century BCE. The middle Warring States
Six Secret Teachings
counseled trickery when confronted by a lack of supplies or inability to forage,
¹⁸
and even included a five-inch strip for “requesting supplies and additional soldiers” among its set of tallies for secret communications.
¹⁹

The
Wu-tzu
, an early Warring States compilation nominally attributed to the great general Wu Ch’i, included exhaustion of the food supplies and an inability to acquire firewood and fodder as such debilitating conditions for the enemy that they could be attacked without further contemplation or assessment.
²⁰
The critical importance of supplies is also evident from their deliberate abandonment, a desperate measure designed to stimulate death-defying resolve in the troops and impress upon them the finality of their situation as they battled on “fatal terrain.”
²¹

By the Warring States period well-provisioned cities would be viewed as relatively impregnable to attack, but those who had not made appropriate preparations remained highly vulnerable: “If the six domesticated animals have not been herded in, the five grains not yet harvested, the wealth and materials for use not yet collected, then even though they have resources, they do not have any resources!”
²²
Conversely, “collecting all the grain stored outside in the earthen cellars and granaries and the buildings outside the outer walls into the fortifications will force the attackers to expend ten or one hundred times the energy, while the defenders will not expend half.”
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