Furies (24 page)

The same logistical limits applied to the large armies of the Thirty Years War. This fact throws light on their apparent rambles, as they sought out river valleys and fertile regions in their hunt for victuals and fodder. The Swedish armies of the 1630s and 1640s, under Banér, Torstensson, and Wrangel, were mammoth search-and-eat engines.

War horses were walked, not ridden, except in combat, in order to preserve them in health. So of all army horses, those of the elite cavalry units were the best cared for, the ones most likely to get their forage rations. Action in battle to one side, work horses, the pullers of guns and wagons, perished first.

In 1615, a German observer noted that “when you recruit a regiment of German soldiers today, you do not only acquire 3,000 soldiers; along with these you will certainly find 4,000 women and children.”

The remark singled out a general feature of European armies. Wives, other women, and children, trailing behind columns of soldiers, stood out in wartime landscapes. But varieties of servants, the lackeys of officers, and other helpers also traveled with armies. At the end of the fifteenth century, Charles VIII, the king of France, declared “that he fed 48,000 to 50,000 mouths a day to maintain an army of 20,000 combatants in the field.” Female companions of the soldiers were not necessarily their wives. Widows, concubines, and prostitutes were also part of the scene behind the winding columns of soldiers. In 1544, in the wake of King Henry VIII's invasion of France, large numbers of women crossed the Channel to join his forces.

Whether or not the tail of camp followers was longer than the beast itself, no one can say in the absence of sustained studies. In the Low Countries and in Germany, during the Thirty Years War, soldiers were sometimes outnumbered by their camp followers, but this was not generally the case. Geoffrey Parker's study of the Army of Flanders reveals that the tail might number anywhere from 8 to 53 percent of a combat unit. For the Thirty Years War, the best-informed recent view sees a camp-follower ratio that often attained parity: one noncombatant for every soldier.

Apart from women, children, and officers' lackeys, camp followers also included varieties of artisans, such as carpenters, wheelwrights, and smiths, in addition to sutlers (vendors of food and drink), pawnbrokers, medical quacks, old veterans, and all sorts of other hangerson. Here was the society of the early modern army, a community. But this itinerant city, with all its afflictions, could not have gone on for as long as it did without the solace, comforts, and family ways
provided by women. And rulers put up with it because they could not raise large armies, or hold them together, without a tail of camp followers. In this sense, government itself had given rise to that alien society, so wholly divorced from the ways of the everyday world of city, town, and country. Despised and universally feared, the “aliens” were seen as a godless and immoral rabble, and they were feared because they supposedly included thieves, thugs, whores, and killers, and carried infectious diseases.

After 1660, rulers and armies brought in stricter regulations against camp-following wives, as well as harsh laws against prostitutes, including—as the threatened penalties—the branding of the face or the slitting of the nose and ears. But camp following, though waning, passed into the eighteenth century, and garrisons had to make arrangements for the presence of wives and children.

If the women who traveled with officers rode in wagons, this was not true of most female camp followers, whose men were too poor to own a horse, unless plunder in wartime brought one into their hands. Need, however, would soon force the lucky man to sell it, as attested to in the diary of Peter Hagendorf, a soldier who lived through the Thirty Years War. Most women in the train of followers walked, loaded down with clothing, pots, and sacks of other things, while being sometimes accompanied by, or lugging, a child or two. Unless billeted with civilians, they slept in tents, flimsy little huts, or in the open; and so they had to be strong, or too soon they would die of exhaustion, illness, or in childbirth. In the course of Hagendorf's years of rambling with different armies (1624–1649), taking him over the face of Germany and beyond its borders, death claimed his first wife and seven children. When, instead, such a woman lost a husband or a partner to combat or disease, she was instantly cast into destitution, particularly if she had children. Now what? She would have to scheme to pick up extra work around the wagon train and perhaps beg, steal, and whore, or even find herself driven away. But to go where? Back home might be a possibility. Little boys, if she had any, the sons of soldiers, aspired to be taken on as officers' lackeys.
Others became petty thieves. Aging widows and old soldiers clung to the wagon train because they knew no better world, or had nowhere else to go.

The sexual partnerships of camp women were dearly paid for by the women. They toiled away at washing, sewing, cooking, hauling, scurrying for food, cutting deals with petty vendors, handling booty, working with forage parties, grinding grain with hand mills, and digging trenches. They did just about everything except fire weapons and wield pikes, though there were cases of this too: soldiers, dead on the battlefield, who turned out to be women. “The bishop of Albi, administering the last rites to the dying at Leucate in 1637, came across several women in uniform who had been cut down.”

And here was yet another of their services, one of the most important: The chronic shortage of field surgeons, who were paid little more than skilled craftsmen, put women into the front line of caring for the sick and bandaging the wounds of soldiers.

We can now see why women were at the heart of the wagontrain world. Many others there, such as wheelwrights and smiths, were also necessary; but women and children provided the air, the sights and sounds, that smacked of home. Historians have found, unsurprisingly, that in the course of the Thirty Years War, with its pitiless ways, civilians in the wagon trains more than doubled in numbers. If the dispossessed followed the exterminating soldier, the soldier in return looked for the moral propping up that could only be provided by women and children, as is clearly evident in Peter Hagendorf's wartime diary.

A KEY FIGURE IN THE world of the wagon train must not escape our notice: the sutler, a retailer of food, drink, tobacco, and other things as well, such as clothing, leather goods, and secondhand shoes. Peter Burschel has asserted that an army without sutlers was a poor army, an unpaid army, a hungry army, and—one might add—a wretched and dying army.

No army on campaign could do without the sale of such provisions. The well-off sutlers had their own wagons, but any one of them, poor or prosperous, could choose to leave an army and pass to another wagon train. Occasionally suspected of being spies, most sutlers seem to have been petty vendors of food, beer, and brandy. Women were prominent in the trade and, like the men, criers of their goods for sale in the early morning. Written around 1670, the novel by Grimmelshausen,
Courage, the Adventuress
—Bertolt Brecht's source for
Mother Courage
—is the portrait of such a woman. Although shot through with touches of exaggeration and fancy, the main lineaments of the character—if seen in the context of the Thirty Years War—come through with the morals of the age: abusive, extreme, cynical, and earthy. Forced to live by her wits, defiance, charms, spoils, and sexual availability, Courage—the name of her vagina too—has no choice but to be gutsy and ambitious. Yet she ends, of course, in disease and ugliness, like the war itself.

That most sutlers were petty traders is disclosed by the fact that large armies went into the field with hundreds of them in their coursing columns of wagons. An army of fourteen thousand men, say, in the middle of the Thirty Years War, might include 220 sutlers: an average of one for every sixty-four men, not counting camp followers. Regulations for the Spanish army limited sutlers to three per company. But a company never numbered more than three hundred men, and that number more often fell to about one hundred or less. In her most destitute time as a sutler, Courage was reduced to walking and hawking only brandy and tobacco. These she hauled around in a sack borne on her shoulders. In better times, she had a mule or a donkey, and in her prime she owned at least one wagon, like other well-off sutlers. These were the traders, the richer ones, who must at times have cast anxiety into the poor civilian populations. For they were the vanguard of an approaching army, the ones who rushed into the urban centers to buy up as much food as possible, quickly driving up the prices of meat, cheese, and other foods.

There were some traders who had little or no interest in the petty
retailing of food: the merchants, pawnbrokers, and moneylenders who trafficked in almost everything from stolen church bells to costly tapestries, herds of horses and cattle, luxury cloth, and jewelry. The canniest of them were likely to have more than a smattering of two or three languages—French, Spanish, and German chiefly, although a Slavic language would have gone far in parts of Germany. They were certain to have bagged a place in the trains of armies that were about to sack a city or a rich town. The expected booty could then be turned into enormous profits. So there they would be, paying out cash, buying up loot for relative pittances, and then carting it off to other towns to sell at prices closer to real market values. Soldiers wanted cash—cash to buy food and drink, clothing and shoes, and to put up front on the gambling table. They could not lug heavy items around when on the move, unless they had a horse or space in one of the wagons. The rich sutler as pawnbroker was only too happy to serve them.

Soldiers were often in debt to sutlers, a form of bondage that was all but inevitable in view of their poverty and reliance on credit. But one way or another, they would have to pay that debt, because sutlers were well protected both by officers and army regulations. That they were frequently insulted by their debtors is not surprising, particularly if they were Jews. But it was a serious crime for soldiers to assault sutlers. The rich ones were certain to have contacts in army headquarters. After all, in wartime and in their trade, it was their business to know all about the art of bribery. It almost goes without saying, therefore, that pawnbroking sutlers were hated by the common soldier. When caught up in the chaos and violence of battle, they were among the first to be robbed or killed. The rich and clever sutler toiled to be on the winning side.

Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the moneylending sutler was the key personage in the sale of a cascade of looted wealth, ranging from the carts and livestock of poor peasants to the glitter of crown jewels, libraries, and famous picture collections.

But merchants from neighboring cities usually skimmed off the most valuable lots of booty.

In a letter of 1637 to the Emperor Ferdinand III, the Duke of Bavaria, Maximilian, complained of the Imperialist soldiers in his duchy. When seeking quarters in midwinter, they took over the huts of dirtpoor peasants, pushing them and their families out into “the snow and woods … to die and rot of frost and hunger.” He wanted the emperor “to call a swift stop to the apportioning of winter quarters” while yet admitting that the soldiers were themselves outright “paupers, stripped bare, exhausted, starved and in such a condition that it is easy to commiserate with them.”

In 1594, in the face of unpaid, rebellious, and hungry soldiers, the commander of Spanish forces in Friesland (the far north of the Netherlands), Colonel Francisco Verdugo, could not keep officers from quartering several cavalry companies on people so poor that they had to “go out and beg for their own children and for the soldiers,” including even the soldiers' lackeys. The sight, Verdugo added, would have aroused pity in the cruelest of men, and yet the soldiers went on mistreating their wretched victims.

THE PRACTICE OF QUARTERING SOLDIERS on civilians—the most neglected topic in the history of war—was universal in early modern Europe. It normally called for the targeted household to provide a bed or beds, kitchen facilities, firewood, salt, vinegar, candles, and other items. In peacetime, on paper at any rate, this was all regulated, and civilians were meant to be reimbursed for their expenses, or to have these deducted from their taxes. In reality, reimbursement or satisfaction was likely to fall short even in peacetime; and anyway, who could guarantee the honesty, health, or humanity of soldiers?

But there was worse: war, which could easily turn the palpable strains of billeting into brutal episodes. Princes ran out of money; soldiers went unpaid and hungry, and the rules of billeting fell away. Now the unwanted strangers also wanted bread, meat, wine or beer, more beds, more firewood, more of everything. And resistance brought blows, wounds, and even murder.

The drama of the miserable soldier in wartime, joining or pushing poor folk out of their hovels in the winter, was to recur in scenes without end; and the poor went from hunger to starvation. But victims were not always cowed. The quartering of soldiers on civilians, as we shall see, could be so oppressive as to generate revolts and skirmishes.

“Contributions” could be as bad as billeting or worse. Citing the requisitions of the Swedish officer Georg Mittelstedt, in western Pomerania, in 1637, one historian has noted that a group of villages were ordered to provide the following daily rations: five casks of beer, two hundred pounds of bread, sixty bushels of oats, four wagon loads of “good” hay, “a variety of spices for me and my officers,” a quart of butter, half a bushel of salt, thirty candles, and also “for the kitchen of the cavalry captain and other officers, 2 sheep, 12 chickens, 6 geese, and 30 eggs.” If the villages failed to deliver these items on a daily basis, horsemen, they were told, would go out and collect them.

In November 1494, as noted earlier, the entry of a French army into Florence confronted the Florentine Republic with the fearful problem of having to lodge about ten thousand men. Distributed among hundreds of households, for ten days the soldiers would live and sleep in Europe's most famous Renaissance city. Although Florence and the king of France were allies, Florentines were pitched into a fervor of anxiety, in the fear that at any moment the entire operation could capsize into a bloodbath. They knew that troops could not be trusted in wartime.