Furies

by Lauro Martines

  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.

  BILLETING

  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 w
e 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.

  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.

  DYING ARMIES

  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 no
t 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.