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I was browsing Gamesradar today and came across an article regarding their impressions on the new Napoleon: Total War game that’s in development by Creative Assembly (I’d provide a link, but WordPress is not cooperating with me at the moment).  I found some parts of this article rather interesting, particularly the part regarding logistics.  We literally just read a chapter of a book by historian Martin Van Creveld who covered Imperial France under Napoleon, examining his successful campaign in 1805 against the Austrians and the disasterous Russian campaign of 1812.  What struck me is that the game, in an attempt to model something that they have left out in the past, is actually distorting the historical record they’re claiming to adhere to.  I wouldn’t be bothered by this, except the article claims it’s their most realistic portrayal to date, and that is factually incorrect if I’m properly understanding their new attrition model.

My entire concern is based on the following paragraph:

“One of Napoleon’s most famous quotes, which conjures a lovely image of breakdancing soldiers invading a country by doing The Caterpillar, is that an army marches on its stomach. That’s the new aspect of Napoleon, which brings something to Total War that’s never been fully acknowledged: the effects of starvation, plague and general attrition on a troop. On the world map, the further your troops are away from home and supplies, and the more hostile the environment, the more their morale and numbers will be whittled away before they’ve even had a chance to run away, morale shattered, from a battle.”

Besides the questionable comedic value of the opening line, this entire premise is based on a fantasy, something of a modern take on an older period.  Today we’re accustomed to the concept of long lines of supply, with ships, trains, and aircraft carrying weapons, fuel, munitions, and all other various and sundry that is produced in the home country.  Among these are the military rations (K-rations in WWII, MREs today).  We’re used to the supply line starting in the home country and extending all the way to the front.

This was not, however, the way they fought in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  Yes, nations at war generally depended on the home country for uniforms, ammunition, and weapons.  But Napoleon’s comment was about the food the men eat, and that was something that was assumed to be found in the enemy’s territory while on campaign.  Napoleon’s campaign of 1805 had a terrible hodge podge of a logistics system, with each of his separate corps acquiring what they could from the countryside they marched through.  Half of the wagon train was appropriated by the artillery which was, numerically speaking, the smallest of the combat arms.  This is part of the reason that Napoleon’s corps independently whenever possible (the times they shared the same road generally resulted in food shortages, especially for horses).  The fact of the matter is that his campaigns succeeded whenever they marched through rich country with lots of food, and were hardest when the enemy destroyed crops or there were simply few people and farms in the first place (like the Ukraine).  Napoleon actually carried 24 days worth of rations in his trains when he began the Russian campaign, yet the first two weeks of the campaign were the hardest because many of his troops lacked discipline in consuming their supplies and the area they were marching through was already poor in foodstuffs.  The supply situation actually got better the closer they got to Moscow.

While I’m interested to see how this new attritional model works out, I’m concerned that it will be both tedious for the player and a departure from the history of the era.  As a side note, armies of the age never seem to have considered adequate ammunition supply to be a problem while on campaign; they always had enough bullets in the supply system, even if it wasn’t all in the cartridge boxes of the line regiments.

Here is a full citation for Van Creveld’s work:  Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40-74.  Our version was in an anthology prepared specifically for this class, so I don’t have the full work myself.

-A.C. Scrimshaw