HOW OUR SOLDIERS

ARE FED

BY WILLIAM CARY SANGER

F

ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR

REDERIC THE GREAT, after years of experience in leading and fighting battles, said, "The art of armies winning victories is lost without the art of feeding the troops. And a French general said with equal truth, "War may be summed up in two words: Bread and powder."

The defeat of the enemy is the great end of war, but to attain this end the soldiers must be in such physical condition that they can win the battles. The best armament, the ablest leadership,

even personal courage, will not save the force which is without the food necessary to support life.

Wellington recognized the importance of keeping his men in good condition, and he said with proper pride that while many officers could lead men, he could feed them.

After the death of Wellington, England, in a fit of economy, abolished the transport train which he had organized, and the record of the Crimean War tells that if the work of supplying the army is not well done, needless suffering will surely result.

Sir Charles Dilke, in speaking of this war, said: "Our most advanced outposts of the Crimea were never a full day's march from the sea, and it would have seemed to be a simple task to provide for the army in the field, yet the whole of our plans utterly broke down. The horses of the cavalry and artillery were destroyed by doing common transport

work, for which they should never have been used, and the army of the richest nation in the world, commanding the seas, starved, almost within sight of its own ships, from want of proper arrangements as to food, rotted for lack of sanitary provisions, and, from the absence of that care which is the business of a general staff, became a wreck of itself."

There is a touch of pathos in the statement made by Lieut. José Muller y Tejeiro, second in command of the naval forces of the province of Santiago de Cuba, in a report on the battles and capitulation of Santiago, that “if there had been flour and bacon the soldiers might not have become weakened and sick."

The commissary and quartermaster departments are charged with the responsibility of procuring and getting to the troops the necessary supplies. It is of course comparatively simple to do this when the troops are in permanent camps,

but it is necessary that any fighting force should be ready to move at a moment's notice, and wherever the men go the supplies must follow.

The magnitude of this work is illustrated by some interesting facts which Colonel Sharpe of the commissary department has collected in his prize essay on the art of supplying armies in the field.

When Grant advanced upon Richmond after crossing the Rapidan the troops numbered about one hundred and twentyfive thousand men. There were four thousand three hundred wagons, eight hundred and thirty-five ambulances, thirty thousand cavalry, ambulance, and team horses, four thousand private horses, and twenty-two thousand mules. General Ingalls, on July 1, 1862, after an inspection of the Army of the Potomac, reported that it had three thousand one hundred wagons, three hundred and fifty ambulances, seventeen thousand five hun

dred horses, and eight thousand mules. In the Gettysburg campaign the trains numbered over four thousand heavy wagons.

The German troops which invested Paris required daily the following supplies: Four hundred and forty-four thousand pounds of bread, one hundred and two thousand pounds of rice, five hundred and ninety-five oxen or one hundred and two thousand pounds of bacon, fourteen thousand four hundred pounds of salt, nine hundred and sixty thousand pounds of oats, two million four hundred thousand pounds of hay, twenty-eight thousand quarts of spirits, and a large supply of coffee and sugar.

Colonel Woodruff, chief commissary of the Division of the Philippines, in a report from Manila for the year ending June 30, 1901, calls attention to the fact that "the command to be supplied extended from the great wall of China on the north to the Island of Borneo on the