AN ARMY IN MOVEMENT.
1ATE wonder if any Commissariat or Transport officer has
ever studied professionally the feeding of London. It must appear to Min such a miracle. Here is a nation of four millions of people, 600,000 of them quite helpless, encamped on 120 square miles of ground, which does not of itself produce enough to feed an ordinary parish, with probably half a million of animals beside. Everything except water must be brought to them, and most things from scores of miles away. Yet they are all fed every day, three times a day, with what they like to eat, and fed so well and so easily that they never think about it, but regard the getting of money as abso- lutely identical with the getting of food. No one probably throughout London quite knows how it is done, how sufficient food trickles daily in by a thousand routes, how it is distributed, or what would be the precise result of a suspension of commu- nication with the external world, say through continuous snow, such as fell this year near Aberdeen, for ten days or a fortnight. Would London survive that experience unhurt P So silent is the action of that vast, unconscious, and perfectly free organisation by which London is fed, that the very notion of London being hungry never occurs to any one ; that the Home Office has never thought out the possibility, and that the Local Government Board never thinks, though it controls the food of a grand army of paupers, how their commissariat is supplied. If there is money, all is well,—though nobody ever ate sixpence. It is a standing miracle, and one which, to a few experienced Commissaries and Transport officers, must be a visible one, for they can realise as no one else does the almost endless difficulties of getting masses of supplies, even when they are collected, over the ground. Without the Railways and the River we may say blankly the work could not be done, and it is the Railways and the River which blind us to its difficulties. The roads would be insufficient, and without the roads there would be no movement at all even apparently adequate to the end. You could no more feed a camp of four millions by waggons moving across the open, than you could march an army of that number without officers from sea to sea. People talk very lightly of "supplying an army," as if it were an easy thing, and laugh- ingly suggest when England is at war, that Spiers and Pond should contract for the commissariat and transport ; but they never realise to themselves what is involved. Just let them try to take five waggons across a thousand acres of ploughed field. Let them remember how a Stuart King used to go a hundred miles out of London to the house of some great noble—say, Petworth—how provisions, and messengers, and servants were sent on horseback, how the inns were stocked in advance, and how even then coaches, built just like modern waggons, with top - heavy covers, were lumbered along, some- times at two miles an hour, and often stopping
altogether. Let them read the accounts that survive of one of these progresses, and then remember that the trans- port officer in charge of the baggage of a column in Zulu- land has to move, say, 250 Kings all at once, without horses, without inns, without roads, without bridges, and under such compulsion from circumstances that his King's coaches— the huge waggons—must every now and then—say at a ford, say at a pass, say at a point between woods, say on the side of a hill—all pass the same narrow place, as if they were getting
over a bridge. They cannot advance, even when there are no roads, as cavalry charge on a plain. We who write, though civilian ignoramuses, have seen it done often enough, but always on a well-bridged road ; and we declare we cannot, even with that experience, conceive fully how, without a road, it is ever done.—how the slow, persistent movement, with its unaccount- able halts, ever comes to an end. The officer, first of all, has to get his 250 huge waggons, with 1,700 oxen and 500 drivers, across the open, say, for ten miles, in a sort of stream, which, for ob- vious reasons, is as narrow as he can make it. The ground, unless unusually hard, rapidly becomes a quag ; every ascent takes hours and every ford cycles of time, at least to the General's mind, a big waggon in a deep ford seeming as im- movable as if nature had built it there, or some flood had left it, like a huge boulder, in a freak. Try to take a Pickford van, well loaded, straight across a bit of the Essex marshes. The beasts, always worn, for that terrible, incessant pulling " trains " them down almost visibly, get along, creep, creep, till at last the ascent is a little too steep, or the ground a little too heavy, or there is an alarm, and there is a stoppage, and half-mad drivers and wholly mad cattle are all in a scrimmage of efforts, and blows, and shouts, and bellowings together, and then the cavalcade is in motion again, and the Transport officer, if very fortunate, has not lost above two per cent. of his draught animals. It is three times that sometimes in India, where the camels, if over-urged, have a trick of " splitting up,"—that is, dislocating or slipping their thigh-bones out of the socket, in a way no veter- inary skill is able to repair ; and even in Zululand, and with oxen, the losses are sometimes extraordinary. The beasts die of heart-break, as much as anything. Then, when the whole day has been spent in moving, perhaps, eight miles, there are all the beasts to be fed and watered, if they are to be of any use next day. The forage may be scanty, and for some of them miles off. People in cities never think about water, still less of the quantities of water required by crowds ; but to supply even 5,000 troops and their train of baggage animals comfortably you require a running stream. If there are only puddles, as so often happens, they are so befouled with treading that the water seems to disappear, and it often takes hours before all the beasts can be supplied, or before all the men are relieved from what rapidly becomes torture. As the march continues day after day, the beasts become weaker and fewer, and the loads heavier, for the reserve cattle are exhausted, and the " spans " are incomplete ; yet the convoys must go for- ward, even though the animals can only drag them by more and more frequent halts. Stopping is stranding and destruc- tion. No wonder that the care of a convoy often costs a General more thought than the care of all the rest of his army, for merely to get it along takes most exhausting forethought, and arrangement, and physical exertion. We have heard it said that a Great Northern traffic-master could do anything, but let him just try to get 5,000 men with their baggage and animals, say, 250 Pickford waggons drawn by bullocks, for a hundred miles along his line, which is hard and level and straight, and see the time he will take about it; and let him then think what sort of an aggravation the total absence of his bridges, and the presence of steep inclines and rapid descents, would be to his troubles. Even if he did not report that the work was im- possible and the first stream a final obstacle, he would very soon acknowledge that a fortnight was the least he ought to have, and that the fortnight was the hardest spell of work he ever had in his life, even if everybody worked with him with a will, which, when the drivers are Zulus, or Beloochees, or Hindostanee cart-owners, burning, perhaps, with rage at being forced to go at all, is by no means the case. The transport officer who can organise and get full work out of his men and beasts, and keep his waggons on their track for days, and not spend a million a minute, deserves five times the credit he ever gets, and ought to be paid like the traffic-manager of a great railway.
Is it all necessary P Well, it always appears to civil observers that less brain has been applied to facilitate the movement of troops than to any other part of the economy of an army, and that nations in certain stages of civilisation do move about in a way which puts civilised soldiers to shame. Jenghiz Khan got across the world twice somehow, and great Tartar armies used to move about Russia ages before roads were, and in regions where they must have carried a large portion of their own sup- plies. The Turkish armies before Vienna must have been fed. The Asiatic monarchs made war with huge armies in roadless lands, and sometimes, as in Persia, where no kind of requisition would have produced supplies. The commissariat of Xerxes and Alexander, and Baber and Nadir Shah, was supplied somehow, and they all must have moved through very desolate regions. Of course the numbers attributed to Xerxes are pure nonsense. Nobody ever did or ever will march the population of London as an army straight on, and from any place to any place what- ever. Still, large armies have moved, very often in very desolate regions, particularly in Asia, without any of the difficulties being visible to historians which seem to paralyse Lord Chelms- ford. We think, however, it will always be found on examina- tion that there were certain peculiarities of such armies not tolerated now; that nobody cared who lived or who died; that the wounded and sick perished, or got through as they could, as Turkish soldiers do now ; that there was nothing to carry except bare food, and very little of that, except flour, each man carrying his own arms, and there being little artillery; and that scarcely any attempt was made at wheeled waggons. Whatever had to be carried was carried on camels, oxen, and above all, ponies, which were fed on anything, like the men, .over-driven, starved, and used up in great herds. Requisition did almost everything,—nobody was paid ; the man who did not get along was killed or left to die, and the track of the army was marked by skeletons for a quarter of a century after. The great difficulties of a modern army, expense and humane feel- ing, were entirely absent. We suppose Alexander cared for his Macedonian Hoplites, but everybody else might die, without attracting anybody's notice, except the vultures'; and if enough men are sacrificed, the elite can be carried along. Ryder Ali said he would have sent the Europeans to battle in palan- quins, so sacrificing eight non-fighters to each fighter; and in principle that is what the Asiatic warriors did -do, and so did the small Spanish armies which conquered the New World. If a regiment used up ten thousand Indians in a march—Mr. Helps puts the figures far higher—what did it matter P Give each European in Zululand a couple of slaves and a pony, and leave artillery behind, and the force would get along somehow easily enough. And then there is the element of time. The frightful expense of campaigning makes moderns impatient, but the old warriors and the Asiatic warriors knew no more of time than they did of clocks, and marched as the Chinese General in Kashgar does now, as if the proper way of spending life was to keep marching. He does not care if 200 miles take him two years, and on one occasion, if we remember Mr. Boulger's story aright, made a halt just to sow and reap a crop ! We cannot but suspect, if a few engineers and traffic- managers and people accustomed to popular demonstrations would give their minds to it, the movement of armies might be made easier ; but the best soldiers declare that supplies must be carried on wheels drawn by animals, and if they are so carried, transport will always be a most formidable difficulty. Artillery might be left behind, if the soldiers would bear the moral effect -of being without guns—for it is the rifle, not the cannon, 'which does the work—and baggage might be reduced to a minimum ; but there must be tents, if our few English soldiers are not to be squandered in bad climates ; and there must be food, and healthy food,—and healthy food, with vegetables, implies 30,000 pounds' weight per diem of actual edibles for every 10,000 men, and some liquor, however little, and .cooking apparatus, however rough. Three months' supply is supposed to be necessary, or is necessary, and so for every corps (raring° of 10,000 men there is an irreducible minimum of, say, 3,000,000lb. weight to be .dragged along. Double or treble that for the camp-followers' food, for tents, changes of clothing, ammunition, and powder and machinery, and we have ample means of understanding why, without railways or horses, it is the most difficult of earthly undertakings to move even a small army, and over a roadless land, why " a difficult country " means so much,—why it is such a temptation to Generals to cover enormous space, and even risk disaster, rather than overload the routes with men and beasts and wheels.
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