Posted by Marie Brennan
https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-foraging-and-pillaging/
https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19960
The previous essay talked as if all armies are well-organized and supplied from home — but I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that isn’t always the case. Or, even if it is the case, the aforementioned problems with long supply lines or the disruption thereof may mean that an army has to fend for itself once they’re into enemy territory.
. . . or possibly in home territory, too. Poorly managed armies are absolutely not above looting their own countryside to make up the shortfall.
(Here I will pause to acknowledge that much of the following draws on Bret Devereaux’s exploration of pre-modern army logistics, particularly this essay, which goes into far more specific detail than I do here.)
When an army supplies itself off the surrounding terrain, we refer to that as “foraging” — a term that belies the violence usually involved. Water can often be obtained without much conflict unless you’re in an arid or drought-stricken environment (though whether that water is what we moderns would consider safe to drink is a separate question), and if you continually move to fresh pasture there might be sufficient grazing to keep your animals going (though they also need grain to be healthy). In many ecosystems, firewood is likewise reasonably available — remember how extensive forests used to be — though it would require a decent bit of labor to chop down enough for an army.
But while it’s not impossible that some foraging operations involve gathering wild foodstuffs, if you’re trying to keep hundreds or thousands of people fed, natural resources will not be enough. You’ll have to take those things from the surrounding population. Since they will very reasonably feel that they need those things in order to keep themselves supplied, this means foraging becomes a coercive process of extraction.
And a seasonal one, too. Pre-modern armies avoided waging war year-round not only because of weather concerns like mud or snow; they also had to consider the question of food supply, which above all means grain. Grain in the field is only useful to your soldiers if you have the organizational capacity to reap, thresh, and winnow it (though animals can eat it straight) — and not all armies are that organized! Even when you can do those things, it’s better to save time and effort by seizing control of unmilled grains, which you can boil into porridge; flour, which you can bake into bread; or the bread itself, which requires no additional labor (but also goes bad faster than flour, which in turn goes bad faster than unmilled grains). The exact timing of when food is most abundant will vary from region to region based on the crops they raise, but the general pattern holds that you most want to campaign when large amounts of food will be readily available for the seizing just as you run out of supplies.
So “foraging,” rather than evoking an image of soldiers digging up tubers or strolling through a forest picking mushrooms, should look more like the scene you’ve encountered in countless movies: armed men entering a village with little or no warning, while the civilians hide, plead for mercy, or attempt to bargain. What the movies tend to leave out is that the soldiers’ main goal is not general mayhem, wantonly burning down houses for no better reason than to show you they’re the bad guys; instead they are there for a purpose, and that purpose is food.
Which isn’t to say the general mayhem doesn’t happen. Soldiers in enemy territory have absolutely no reason not to nick any valuables they see lying around, and many of them have no problem with raping women for a moment’s diversion. Anyone who resists the incursion is likely to be hurt or killed, and fires can be either accidents or part of a campaign of terror against the general populace. A commanding officer who’s good at maintaining discipline will try to rein this in, but usually less out of compassion than out of practicality: soldiers who run off on their own to loot and rape are more easily targeted by resistance, and the longer the unit is out foraging away from the main body of their force, the higher the risk that they’ll wind up getting caught by the enemy. The officer should ideally want to get in, get what’s needed, and get out with a minimum of delay and fuss.
He has to be careful, though. I’ll get into the topic of discipline more specifically later, but several conditions are likely to worsen the violence of an army pillaging a civilian population, and one of them is brutal discipline within the ranks. It’s fine and in fact beneficial to maintain standards and impose consequences when they’re broken, but an army that flogs and executes soldiers for every infraction produces soldiers who look for any opportunity to pass the violence they’ve suffered along to someone else. Failure to pay your soldiers also results in atrocities — the Sack of Antwerp being an infamous example — as does a long siege, when the assaulting force finally enters the city that’s angered them by resisting.
But back to foraging. That risk of being caught by the enemy means that a foraging party will not generally be as small as that movie raid. Remember, they have to carry back enough grain (and other foods, and quite possibly some livestock herded alongside) to make a meaningful dent in the army’s needs! A foraging party often consisted of hundreds or even thousands of people, not all of them soldiers — we’ll be talking about the other people involved next week — along with carts, pack animals, and so forth. It’s a major operation.
One which slows the army down. If significant chunks of your overall force are ranging miles away from your central baggage train to scrounge for food and other supplies, you simply cannot move as fast as a direct, focused march toward your destination. This means that a defending army, which can send outriders ahead to tell (hopefully) friendly settlements to pull together supplies in advance of their arrival, can often cover more ground than the invading army which has to continually search a hostile neighborhood for food. Efficiency therefore matters a lot here, and a commander whose soldiers will get the job done and return quickly, or who has some amount of supply from home, or who’s willing to gamble on a fast march toward a rich target on the hope that he’ll be able to seize its resources before his current stock runs out, will get better results.
This also limits army size. After all, it does no good to muster a gobsmackingly large army if those guys are just going to starve a month into the campaign. And the larger your force, the slower you have to move in order to make sure you can forage the surrounding countryside intensively enough to keep everyone fed — which in turn makes your army more of a sitting duck for enemy action, and may the deity of your choice help you if for some reason you have to double back into an area you already picked bare. This is one of the reasons you will sometimes read of wars where multiple separate forces were sent under different commanders, approaching by different routes: instead of one logistically fragile forty-thousand-man army, you send two more resilient twenty-thousand-man units. Though that does introduce problems with coordinating the actions and objectives of the different groups . . .
Looping back to our previous discussion of supply lines, you can see how the advent of mechanized transport changes not only how many soldiers you can send where, but how they’re going to relate to the local populace. It becomes a lot more feasible to institute a “don’t target civilians” rule when the survival of your army doesn’t depend on raiding civilian settlements and taking away some or all of the food they need to survive. (Remember, these societies rarely have enough surplus to absorb big shocks well!) A pre-modern army could try to be “nice” to the people they intend to annex — goodwill is still useful to have — but that’s more likely to take the form of being generous to the elites who switch sides, while the common folk are expected to be grateful they got paid a pittance for the vital supplies the invaders took. Short of technology or magic intervening, foraging in enemy territory is never going to be a nice process.
https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-foraging-and-pillaging/
https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19960
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sartorias) wrote2025-09-13 06:26 pm
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