Furies (25 page)

Soldiers often came upon households exempted from billeting. In France particularly, entire towns and villages enjoyed this privilege,
thanks either to having paid out protection money or because an influential nobleman, or an official with good contacts, had cast his protective mantle over the area. The same was true of individuals with the right connections: They bought or solicited the immunities in question. But in addition, whole classes of individuals were ordinarily exempt from billeting: noblemen, clergy, town councillors, tax collectors, and holders of royal office. Exemptions of this sort were common, running right across the face of Europe.

In October 1678, the French town of Vervien, with a population of about sixty-five hundred souls, had to offer quarters for a short period to as many French soldiers. An average of four persons per family—to take a reasonable figure—meant that the town had about 1,625 households. If the soldiers were equitably distributed, then each of the different households took in four soldiers. However, since some of the leading townspeople would have claimed immunities from billeting, many houses were forced to take in five, six, or more soldiers. The bottom line was that the poor and the modest paid beyond their means, for even if soldiers, as was the custom, slept two and three to a bed, in wartime their bullying demands multiplied.

We need not add that officers got the best accommodations. The social pyramid was, if anything, more entrenched in Europe's armies than in the civilian world. Whenever possible, officers slept in towns, while soldiers—to spare the influential burghers—were lodged in the villages. In upper Italy, around 1500, troops were nearly always quartered in the countryside, rarely in the cities.

In the practice of billeting, civilians carried the armies of Europe on their backs. A Russian saying held that “soldiers were hung around the neck of the peasant.” Billeting went on into the eighteenth century, until after the building of barracks began to be more vigorously pursued in France, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries. Yet in the seventeenth century, whenever possible, villages and market towns more often bared their teeth and resisted the demands of soldiers. In parts of wartime Germany, country people banded
together, in cross-village alliances, and sought to kill their oppressors. The consequences could be dire. In the 1620s and 1630s, mass peasant revolts were savagely put down in different parts of Germany and Austria.

France, in the southwest, in the Périgueux and Begerac areas, was the ground of at least forty different revolts against mounted companies of billet-seeking French soldiers. Well organized, the revolts relied on lookout points, warning bells, fortified churches, militias, peasants armed with muskets, occasionally the sound of drums, and even the cooperation of local officials. Revolt, in short, could lead to outright battles, as armed peasants attacked soldiers at town gates or ambushed them in the countryside, on their approach to the host village. In August 1636, the Périgueux town militia (five hundred men) drove a cavalry unit out of a market town that lay within Périgueux's jurisdiction. At Dorat, in the Marche region, in August 1639, the villagers beat back a company of horsemen, “peppering them” with shot from arquebuses. At “Abjat in May 1640, at Grandignan in May 1649 and at Cheronnac in August 1649,” villagers rebuffed cavalry units by relying on their fortified churches. Indeed, in the 1640s, for at least five years, the little town of Abjat, in the Grange-sur-Lot area, held out by armed means against arriving companies of the king's cavalry.

The historian of these events, Yves-Marie Bercé, summed up his take on peasant revolts against soldiers by contrasting the work ideals of rural communities with the nomadic, aggressive, idle, and live-for-today life of the soldier.

In 1660, the town of Sancoins, in the Bourbonnais, refused entry to three thousand troops, claiming, it seems, an exemption from billeting. Using “treachery to break into the town,” in John Lynn's account, the soldiers then did “as they pleased, raping, pillaging, and
robbing.” They stole horses and even forced women to pay for the babies that had been snatched away from them. More common by far than this atrocity was the intimate outrage of raping women in public, in the streets of little towns and villages.

And yet for all their flashing of brute muscle, the wartime armies of early modern Europe were fragile. They could be destroyed by disease or famine. Their raw power in the villages was not a specter; it was only too real. But their explosive violence was the mark of their frailty. Soldiers robbed and tormented the innocent because so often they themselves verged on being exterminated not in combat but by their own feeble health. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the mortality rate in French armies, even in peacetime, could attain a yearly average of 25 percent, while, for the entire century, European armies in general seem to have been ravaged at the rate of about 20 to 25 percent per year. By contrast, the annual death rates for civilian populations were in the range of 3 to 4 percent, or even very much lower among young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six.

The theme of dying armies, yoked to the poor populations whose hard destinies they shared, runs through this book like a refrain. Often trapped in freezing weather and, like their horses, undernourished or teeming with lice in the summer heat, soldiers were a ready target for epidemic diseases. These circumstances suggest that the dying of a large army could be dramatic, especially when it occurred over the space of two or three weeks. We came on such a case in the first chapter, with the army of the French general Lautrec, as it laid siege to Naples in the summer of 1528. Suddenly typhus raced through the ranks of the besiegers, killing them right and left, and in August, in about three weeks, they were transformed into the besieged. The trapped Italian and Spanish soldiers, who were themselves drinking “vile” water and eating “stinking” bread, now came out of Naples to encircle, kill, and scatter the survivors of a once proud army.

There was yet another way in which armies died, more metaphorical but leading just as surely to their undoing: by desertion. Soldiers might desert quickly, even en masse, or in lesser numbers, their flight eating steadily away at the large body of men until it disintegrated as a fighting unit. The causes of desertion were always the same: lack of pay, hunger, disease, abuse by officers, no hope of a leave, or stubborn resistance to having been grabbed by a pressgang. Briefly, in late August 1632, Gustavus Adolphus brought together at Nuremberg an army of forty-five thousand men. Within three weeks, about eleven thousand deserted.

The history of war reveals that European armies were never more wracked by desertion and mutinies than those of early modern Europe. Spain's Army of Flanders led the way, having the most troubled record, with forty-five mutinies between 1570 and 1606. But the large Swedish and Imperial forces of the Thirty Years War came next, and the royal armies of the French Wars of Religion lagged not far behind, as they crumbled, unpaid and miserable, halfway through campaigns.

IN 1552, THE EMPEROR CHARLES V had just over fifty thousand troops at the siege of heavily fortified Metz, an Imperial free city recently seized by the French. In two months, November and December, this army imploded. Half of it was wiped out by “desertion, disease, and disablement.” Scurvy, dysentery, and typhus especially were the main killers. The siege was raised in January. All told, disease had eliminated about ten thousand men. Defection and physical impairment—wounds and loss of limbs—took another fifteen thousand. At one point, two hundred were dying every day.

King Louis XIII began his long campaign against the remaining colonies of French Protestants in the late summer of 1620. His army started with an attack, in the southwest, on the Protestant city of Montauban, which was under the control of the dukes of Rohan. Before the end of September, after only six weeks, that “army had
been reduced by disease and defection to a quarter of its original size.” But commanders hung on until the third week of November, when the siege was finally abandoned.

Before we look at the spectrum of diseases that waylaid armies, the larger scene calls for more fixing.

Numbering about sixty thousand men in the early spring of 1576, the Army of Flanders, under Don John of Austria, could muster only eleven thousand men eight months later, “and they were isolated in a few strong points such as Antwerp and Maastricht.” Defection and death had eliminated the rest. If conditions ever got much better for Spain's troops in the Low Countries, rounding up the proof would not be easy. The troubles were best seen at the company level, the smallest unit. Thus “the Walloon company of Captain Pierre de Nervèse began life with eight officers and 134 men in August 1629.” Ten months later, “only seven officers and thirty-six men appeared at the muster—a loss of 70 per cent.”

In July 1586, writing from the Netherlands, the Earl of Leicester confessed to the privy councillor, Sir Francis Walsingham, “that 500 men had deserted in the space of two days, including ‘a great many to the enemy.'” Later, two hundred of the deserters were captured on the Dutch coast, trying apparently to get back to Britain, “and ‘diverse' were hanged as an example.” The undermining of Leicester's army was not the work of disease but of desertion, of impressed men running away, and of hunger, the best explanation for defection to the enemy ranks.

Spain's Army of Flanders always included large numbers of Italian soldiers, and their misfortunes were likely to match those in the Spanish regiments. “In 1587 some 9,000 Italian infantry marched to Flanders, but a year later there were only 3,600 left, the others having died or deserted.” If disease constituted the biggest mortal threat, acute discontent also had its part in the collapse of armies, as in the mutinies of six Italian companies in 1584 and 1596. Garrisoned in Aerschot, they had not been paid for six or seven years.

Ireland in 1600 was the ground of a collapse connected strictly
with disease. In that year, four thousand recruits arrived from England to man the Derry garrisons. A year later, only fifteen hundred remained, the rest having succumbed to dysentery and typhus.

The crowded garrisons of early modern Europe, sleeping two or three soldiers to a bed, were nurseries of disease, no less so than armies on campaign. In the Thirty Years War, many more of Sweden's conscripted youth would be killed by bacilli in garrisons than by weapons in combat. But out in the field, a diseased army could implode in wholesale disaster.

Gearing up for action in and around Nuremberg in June and July 1632, Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein maneuvered for a decisive engagement, while also seeking the advantage in numbers and position. Disease and desertion, however, spiked by the August heat, were undoing their armies. Commenting on Wallenstein's forces, one of the leading historians of the Thirty Years War, Peter Wilson, notes that “the concentration of 55,000 troops and around 50,000 camp followers produced at least four tonnes of human excrement daily … [in addition to] the waste from the 45,000 cavalry and baggage horses. The camp was swarming with rats and flies, spreading disease.” But the regiments of the king of Sweden were no better off. His army of many thousands was holed up in Nuremberg, along with the city's forty thousand inhabitants and one hundred thousand refugees, all of them prey to disease and hunger. If we reflect for a moment on their access to clean drinking water, the imagination quails at any attempt to grasp at the unsanitary conditions of that mass of humanity. A minor battle nearby, at Alte Veste, on September 3–4, was won by Wallenstein, but had no marked importance, apart from exposing the myth of the king's invincibility. By the time Gustavus broke out of Nuremberg on September 15, he had lost “at least 29,000 people” to disease and famine, and meanwhile, in the space of two weeks, another eleven thousand deserted.

The two armies now drew away: Wallenstein's too sick to give chase, the king's beating a woozy retreat, despite having been newly supplied with reinforcements. Two months later, at the great battle
of Lützen (November 16), which ended in a draw, Gustavus Adolphus met his death and Wallenstein would never be quite right again, in going on to all but court his own assassination. But the numbers of men who fought on that cold November day were vastly diminished: Wallenstein, at the start of the battle, had just over twelve thousand men, and Gustavus about eighteen thousand.

Some three decades later, in the space of five months (by early August 1664), the Emperor Leopold's army, raised to fight the Ottomans and originally numbering fifty-one thousand troops, was found to have lost more than half that number to disease, desertion, and the need “to garrison border fortresses.” That army went on disintegrating.

THE GREAT CONTAGIOUS MALADIES OF the day were plague, typhus, and varieties of typhoid and dysenteric fevers. Contemporaries were of course inexact about their ways of referring to disease. When there was widespread pestilence, they frequently used the blanket word “plague.” But other terms, such as for typhus, were “warplague,” “soldier's disease,” “camp fever,” “head disease,” and “Hungarian fever.”

By tracking the movement of armies and infectious diseases, study has shown that soldiers were the foremost transmitters of deadly bacteria: of plague first of all, and then of the different mortal fevers. In Germany, the plague epidemic of 1632–1637 “began in the south with Bavaria, Württemberg, the Rhine Palatinate, and the lower Rhineland … along with areas of Saxony and Silesia bordering on Bohemia.” Later, the disease moved northeastward, down “the Elbe into Brandenburg,” and then east again to the Oder River and Pomerania. The path of the disease was “broadly similar to the main military movements of those years.”

Plague—bubonic plague, a rodent-borne disease—required the presence of the rat that carried the infected flea, and rats moved slowly. But men carried the flea—in their clothing, bedding, and
baggage—over long distances, so the causes of the moving path of the disease can be readily pinned down.