[Discuss] Armies and food

[Timothy Collett]

On Monday, January 14, 2008, at 03:32PM, "Robert Croson, Jr" <robert at arcm.com> wrote:
>Is marching five times more difficult than plowing a field, or 
>spending every day from sunup to sundown working the land?

Who cares?

They are peasants.  We take food from them.  We don't care if they have enough left to get fat.  They are *not* soldiers, who need to be kept in prime fighting shape, and who are kept that way by ensuring that they get a steady supply of the best food.

It doesn't matter if what they're doing is 5 times harder.  I'm not even particularly married to the 5x figure, though I do think it's reasonable.

Note something that John said earlier, and that I just repeated above: the soldiers get the *best* food.  They get the **meat** for heaven's sake!  In some areas, peasants would be lucky to see real meat once a year!  

I'm not saying that, in volume or mass, the soldiers necessarily actually eat 5 times what an equivalent number of civilian peasants eat.  But I would say that, given *what* they eat, it is not at all unreasonable to count it as 5 times the amount of nutrition.

Timothy Collett
Anaris Family