The eating of horses (When fighting with Mongols)

[Vicccard]

Preparation. A good plan. Preparation.

French (and Allied) troops were incredibly badly prepared for the Russia campaign, mostly because Napoleon thought it would be a relatively short campaign. All he wanted was the Tsar to honour their agreements and remove his army from the border - He just needed a quick victory to show he meant business. Or so he thought.

Once again, I'm no expert and I'm mostly going on '1812' with this, but Napoleon could have saved tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, of lives if his men would have been trained in basic winter survival. Men did not know how to make proper shelters, how to survive an extremely cold night, and many didn't even know how to start a fire from scratch. Cavalrymen did not gave their horses winter horseshoes, even though the Poles warned them repeatedly to do so.

However, the campaign also started too early with many of the crops not yet being ripe, there were simply too many men on too little ground and the extreme speed in which horses died, especially in the opening of the campaign, crippled both his cavalry and his supply train. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly would have made a difference though. Napoleon being more realistic about what his army could take and the Tsar's actions would have helped.

 

[Almalexia]

Hm, so whats the best way to invade Russia?  Approach it from the east?  Bring a lot of horses?

Come on dude, this is a question that has been pondered for centuries. You're not going to get a simple answer, nor one that is guaranteed to bring success.

Getting back to the 1812 Campaign: so how did all those people die, if during the Summer and not the Winter? I always took the famous graph of the dwindling of the Grande Armee that it lost strength as it left more and more men behind to guard strongpoints and the supply routes.

 

[Vicccard]

Disease, falling behind, desertion, but also simply starvation. A study by a British historian came to the conclusion that French soldiers were being underfed even if they received full rations, and the digging up of mass graves full of French soldiers supports that hypothesis.

 

[Captured Joe]

AFAIK they died of typhus rather than starvation.

 

[Vicccard]

Highly possible, though I suppose that being chronically underfed doesn't exactly improve your health.

To give an idea on how quickly units would just dissolve into thin air, I once researched the Roll Call book of a Young Guard company that was organised in February 1814.
At the start, they had 164 NCO's and enlisted men - A month later, at the end of March, they had 20 men left. 2 were KIA, 12 WIA, 20 had been left in depot (presumably unfit for service) and no less then 110 'left behind', aka they just went missing.

Those 20 men included the Sergeant-major, all four of the sergeants, all of the six corporals and one drummer.

 

[Kharille]

Well, from what I know the Mongolians could survive the winters but thats normal for them.  I think the capital, Ulanbaatar drops to negative 40 C or something like that, quite rough compared to a -20 C for Moscow. 


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow
Ok, minus 10 in jan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulan_Bator
minus 25 in jan...

Maybe thats it.  Acclimitize  ... Acclimatize your troops at a more northern latitude and send them along with a lot of horses, drinking kumis and all.  They should make the khergits more resistant to weather effects...

Ah, theres a thought...  the weather in bannerlord...  more climate and meteorological effects would be nice... 

You know, it might help Napoleon if he trained his troops in eating the plentiful food that was 'disappearing'....  before they were 'left behind'....

 

[Bluehawk]

Dehydration was what afflicted many at first, with the unusually hot summer and many of the wells being drained by the enemy retreating ahead of them, and the combination of having weakened immune systems and exposing themselves to the worst stagnant waters in order to quench themselves helped disease spread rapidly. Poor variety of food from foraging the ransacked or "scorched earth" also weakened their immunity. A given parcel of land can only support so many humans at any given time, and the Grand Armée was too Grand for its own good.

Kutuzov's greatest strength was as a diplomat, quelling all the feuds and petty rivalries under his command and galvanizing their efforts against the enemy, he was immensely popular with the rank and file and most of the officers respected him though in Ermolov's memoirs he portrays him as being vain and manipulative. His sure hands guided the retreat out of Bavaria, brought an end to the terrible Wallachian campaign, and he succeeded again - most critically - during the 1812 retreat, when Bagration and Barclay de Tolly threatened to rip the army asunder. As for the retreat itself, it was absolutely necessary at the beginning when the Russian army was spread all across the frontier and interior of the country, it needed to be consolidated in order to give any effective battle to the French. Where Kutuzov's strategic mind fails is in the choosing of ground and exploiting changing situations. His dispositions at Borodino had several gaps where units found themselves fighting miniature battles without support and little was done to rectify it throughout the day. The 1st and 2nd Western Armies were almost fighting separate battles in parallel, which became problematic when Bagration's death shook up the 2nd W. A. from top to bottom. So although the leadership were unified under Kutuzov's command, they wound up operating in a fractured manner regardless.

The Russians came close to suffering their own casualties from the harsh winter were it not for the generous donation of funds from the state treasury and private donors among the nobility which procured heavier jackets and coats, including large stockpiles of the old fufayka which was discontinued in 1806. And the preservative effect of a proper diet can not be exaggerated when compared to the starving enemy. In essence, the Russian Army was, like the French, under-prepared for a severe winter but they had the population on their side and were in close proximity to supply centers, while the French did not and were not. Some of the Grand Armée were lucky enough to grab adequate clothing during the sacking of Moscow, but most had to prey on their own dead and dying if they wanted to augment their ragged kit.

As for acclimation, it's no coincidence that the majority of partisan bands were formed from Cossacks, and only a minority of the regular army hussars participated. The Don horses did not know the meaning of exhaustion.

 

[kurczak]

I'm aware that the (formerly nomadic) Turks were already working as mercenaries around the Levant area so i suppose based on what you say they probably took to eating horses after battle. But i'm more interested in what the Eastern Europeans and people from the Middle East and Persia thought about the eating of horse meat

Don't know about the middle ages, but today horse meat is relatively common in German, Italian and Eastern European cuisines. Quite possibly some other too. It's not that people it every day, all day, but horse certainly doesn't have the status dogs or cats  have.