Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 159
military organization had become apparent. One of these was the
difficulty of controlling the movements of an army of more than about
50,000 men.^13 Even with the help of galloping aides-de-camp a gen
eral could not usually know what was happening when a battle front
extended much further than a spy glass could distinguish friend from
foe; and tactical control, even when bugles supplemented shouted
commands, could not reach beyond the battalion level, i.e., 300–600
men. New forms of communication and accurate topographical maps
were necessary before effective command of larger field armies could
become possible.
Supply constituted a second and very powerful constraint on Euro
pean armies. The perfection of their drill gave European armies
unique formidability and flexibility at short range and for a few hours
of battle. But at longer range, force could be brought to bear in a new
location only by slow, sporadic stages. Available transport simply
could not concentrate enough food to support thousands of horses
and men if they kept on the move day after day. The Prussian army
under Frederick the Great, for example, assuredly the most mobile
and formidable European army of its day, could march for a maximum
of ten days before a pause became necessary to bring up bake ovens
and rearrange supply lines from the rear. Fodder for horses was the
most difficult of all, for it was too bulky to travel far. Frederick’s
soldiers, indeed, sometimes stopped to cut hay for the horses even
when bread supplies for their own nourishment were in hand.^14 Living
off the country was possible at appropriate seasons of the year but
risked loss of control over soldiers who might be expected to prefer
plundering unarmed peasants to deploying against the enemy. For this
reason, together with the realization that a devastated countryside
could not pay taxes, eighteenth-century rulers sought to supply their
armies from the rear, thereby submitting to drastic limitations on
strategic mobility.
Supply of weapons, gunpowder, uniforms, and other equipment did
- Maurice de Saxe held that no general could effectively control more than 40,000
men in the field. Cf. Eugène Carrias, La pensée militaire française (Paris, n.d.), p. 170.
Jacques-Antoine Hypolite de Guibert, Essai générale de tactique, in 1772 fixed 50,000 as
the ideal size of an army, and 70,000 as an absolute ceiling. Only so, he believed, could
real field mobility be sustained. Cf. Robert A. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic
Warfare: The Theory of Military Tactics in 18th Century France, Columbia University
Studies in the Social Sciences, no. 596 (New York, 1957), p. 164.
- Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp.
135–36. For French supply limitations see Kennett, French Armies in the Seven Years
War, pp. 100—111. For a general overview, Martin L. van Creveld, Supplying War:
Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 1977) also offers interesting data.
