Furies (22 page)

Although Marlborough's famous victory at Blenheim was made possible by the logistics of his march from Bedburg to the Danube, it was paid for by the tears and material possessions of Bavarian farmers, peasants, and villagers.

TO CAST AN INQUIRING EYE at a small army, shipped over several hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean, is to touch on the central question of logistics in early modern Europe.

On June 27, 1627, the Duke of Buckingham set sail from England with a fleet of one hundred boats and in command of just under six thousand foot and one thousand horse. He made for the Bay of Biscay and the Isle of Ré, which faces the harbor of La Rochelle, the last Protestant stronghold in France and at that point under a ruthless siege by the French army. The aim of the expedition was to win glory for the duke, in part to placate Parliament, and to stiffen the Huguenot stand against the French crown. Buckingham, the great splendor-loving favorite of Charles I, king of England, had no military experience. But he was driven by the conviction that he needed none, being a nobleman and hence a natural leader. Besides, he was attended by officers with considerable experience of war on the continent.

The enterprise was to turn into a nightmare, with vanishing food rations at the heart of the disaster.

Reaching Ré on July 12, the English were at once engaged in a brief and bloody skirmish. The French then retreated to their high-walled fortress, the citadel of St. Martin. To storm it would require a determined siege, but the brave duke embraced the challenge, despite the fact that the trained eyes around him considered the fortress impregnable. The only other hitch was that food supplies would have to come from England, moving over four hundred to five hundred miles of open sea. Ré was too small an island to provide the English with a steady stream of victuals.

The commanders of the expedition had set sail with enough food, they believed, for three months. It was an insanely mistaken belief. Rations began to run short within a week of the landing on Ré, in part because of forty-five hundred new mouths, the fleet's sailors. These men were pressed into helping the foot soldiers to blockade the fortress, in order to keep the French mainland army—only four kilometers away—from getting provisions to the besieged.

Now the responsible men in London and around Buckingham suddenly had to confront a few basic questions. How many tons of foodstuffs per month—bread, biscuit, beef, butter, cheese, beer—would it take to feed ten to twelve thousand men? How many boats and of what tonnage must they commandeer to transport these provisions to Ré? How many round-trips to the Bay of Biscay would the food convoys have to make? Would this not depend on the weather? And most important, where were they going to find the money or credit to pay for the needed provisions?

These questions turned into an inscrutable algebra. Army and navy victuallers had different ways of calculating needed food supplies, so that six-month food estimates for any army of ten thousand men varied from 8,200 to 12,000 tons of foodstuffs. The average weight of the boats to be commandeered would be 250 tons. Or was it 300? Tonnage determined the amount of freight that each boat could carry. But cutting through all their tormented considerations,
the core question of payment remained. Who would pay? Who would their supply merchants be? That Parliament might offer a few pennies was utterly unthinkable. Members of Parliament, many of them, were already in a fury with the king and his favorite, the prime movers of the Ré adventure, not over the effort to aid La Rochelle but because the two men were seen as wild spendthrifts.

In all this anxious business, stretching from July to November, action and discussion in London morphed into an astonishing drama of dither, false hopes, haste, confusion, rumor, conflicting views, and staggering irresponsibility. On the island itself, most of the besiegers—a “rabble” of pressed men, plus some carried over from a previous armed calamity—must have seen their rations repeatedly slashed. Essential provisions for the leading officers seem to have held. Custom always entitled them to extra rations, intended chiefly for their servants. And the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most hated men in England, was not a fan of the ascetic life. In the words of two historians, this gentleman “lavished £10,000 on his own retinue” and delayed the departure of the expedition to put on “masques and farewell feasts,” while “his soldiers, pent up in transport ships anchored in the Thames, were dying at the rate of fifty per day.”

Within a day or two of landing on Ré, Buckingham's victualler, Sir Alan Apsley, sent a plea to London for more food, but he did not worry much, because “he expected the [French] citadel to fall within a week.” Mad hopes came easily. Back in London, officials proposed to use the leftover provisions from a calamitous raid into Spanish territory, the Cádiz expedition of 1625, although even then officers had bitterly complained “that the supplies were rotten and smelt worse than the leavings of a bear pit.”

Aside from what they could scrounge and pillage from the islanders, no other foods reached the besiegers until September 25. And even this shipment sufficed for only another three or four weeks, despite the fact that the men in charge were meant to hold back three weeks' rations for the return voyage to England. In the meantime, with their numbers reduced by combat losses and sickness, the
English blockade of the citadel was a sieve. So that on a moonless night in late September, the French were able to beach a boatload of provisions for the citadel, in addition to several thousand extra troops. The next morning, to taunt the English, they took to waving speared chickens from their high ramparts. Stunned, Buckingham refused to back away, although his striking force was now a mere four thousand troops even after other men had been added. Back in England, critics were baying for his impeachment. He had too much face to lose. And so on October 27, he ordered his men to make a final assault on the citadel. The result was a massacre. In pouring rain, they were easily thrown back by the French, for they had attacked with scaling ladders that were too short for the citadel's walls. Such was their logistical preparation. Many were killed by shot, debris, stones, and chunks of wood. Even in retreat, as they made their way to board boats for England, they had to fight off attacking soldiers. And then it so happened that on the very day of their departure from the island, November 7, a relief fleet sailed out of Plymouth, bearing a small cargo of foodstuffs for them, in addition to more soldiers, most of whom were probably impressed men.

The Ré experiment moved in the shadows of a play of characters in London and took in the worries of Sir William Russell, Filippo Burlamacchi, and Sir Sackville Crow: leading financiers. They had contacts in the food trade; they had helped to bankroll the disastrous Cádiz expedition of 1625; and they were repeatedly approached for loans to buy the emergency food supplies for Ré. But knowing that King Charles could expect no subsidies from an angry Parliament, they were afraid of losses. The king was still in debt to them for their part in the financing of the Cádiz adventure, and his limited resources had already been mortgaged for several years; hence his available income was greatly reduced. Total costs for the Ré expedition would be in the region, conservatively, of £250,000. The king's annual income—drawn from purveyance, wardship, monopolies, and other royal expedients—amounted to something like £500,000, but it had already been spent. And although majesty enabled him to borrow
more than one million pounds between 1624 and 1628, he inspired little trust in bankers. Buckingham's lavishing of £10,000 on his Ré entourage was a mark of the way King Charles and his court threw money around.

Of one thing we can be certain, judging by hard English practice of the day: The soldiers who managed to return from Ré would never see the wages owed to them. Unlike Crow, Russell, and Burlamacchi, they would remain creditors of the English crown forevermore. But Buckingham got his comeuppance, an unheard-of happening in these matters: Within a year, he was assassinated by an angry young lieutenant.

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
: 0.93 liter), and 20,000 pounds of beef, they may have got some of these provisions in the first weeks of the siege. But the flow quickly thinned out, and by late March the king's soldiers were going hungry. In April hunger was imperiling their lives. May brought degrees of outright starvation. The besiegers had exhausted the foods and fodder of the La Rochelle region, but the most alarming note in May and June turned probably on this question: Was there any food at all available even for sale?

At Metz in 1552, toward the end of the failed Imperial siege of
that great urban fortress, it was reported by the famous surgeon, Ambroise Paré, a participant in the events, that there was absolutely no food around to be bought. It had all been consumed, or snatched away to be hoarded.

Bloody skirmishes around La Rochelle were almost an everyday affair. Disease, death, and defection riddled the royal ranks. Ammunition for their big guns ran out even as they were met by “blistering fire from [the city's] 175 cannons of all calibers.” When the siege was finally lifted in late June, the besiegers had lost more than half of their numbers, some ten thousand foot and horse. Three fourths of all the officers, noblemen mainly, were either dead or wounded. La Rochelle would burn in many a heart, Protestant and Catholic, for generations.

A few years later, on the other side of Europe, in a war between the Poles and the Russians, the former laid siege to Muscovite Pskov for five months. Neighboring populations and villages were sparse, and food for the army had to be hauled in or looted. But the hunt for edible loot required far-ranging forays, with Polish supply wagons having to be guarded by their famous light cavalry. In September 1581, early on in the siege, the Poles were already riding seventy kilometers in search of food and fodder, with the round-trip taking up to six days of travel. They were eating up the region, and by the following January, their search-and-plunder journeys could last almost a month, because teamsters and cavalry were going nearly 350 kilometers each way.

On the steppes of southern Russia, also sparsely populated, the light cavalry of the Crimean Tatars turned to an additional resource. They took along extra horses on campaign, to be used as food if the need arose. And Muscovy—we are still in the sixteenth century—was already posting granaries for its armies.

In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish army's marching route to Flanders took it from Milan to Savoy, over the Alpine passes, and then through Franche-Comté, Lorraine, Luxembourg, and into the Netherlands. Drawing on a practice begun by the French in the early 1550s, the Spanish used a system of
étapes
: stopping-off points at small
towns and villages, where food was distributed to the soldiers. The “Spanish Road” was a known and regular route, not normally subject to the tricky fortunes of war. Now and then, however, soldiers had to pay for the available food, and if they were short of money or had not been paid, they went hungry. Trouble for these troops really began once they reached the Low Countries, where wage money soon ran out and they had to move about in wartime.