Post by Ladorak on Mar 19, 2009 18:39:55 GMT -5
So here we go, compiled from that book I bought recently, and I tried to write it in more of a furry style to reflect our board. 
So hope you enjoy it all, it ain't as glamorous as you probably thought, but I think it will serve for good reference for RPs.
In many nations at this time military service is for life; the average ages of the officers and men in such armies is thus relatively high. This could become important once Rosferia begins conscription, as many of it’s soldiers and officers will be younger, and could play a factor in youth vs. age.
Recruitment:
In many countries, including Rosferia until the introduction of conscription, the normal method of luring peasants to become soldiers is for a regiment to send recruiting parties out into their designated cantonment. In feudal Delorn there is no such problem; the Empress decrees how many recruits are needed and the landowners will be told how many serfs to deliver.
A recruiting party will usually consist of an officer, a sergeant, a drummer and several beasts. The officer will be supplied with cash. In Galdea in this era, it’s customary for beast or kit to have committed himself to being a recruit when he accepted the King’s shilling. In these days to beasts of the lower classes, a shilling is considerable bait. To increase the success rate, the recruiting party will set up shop in an inn on the town square on market day. A drummer will attract potential recruits, who are often decked out with flowers and treated to a few pints of ale while being regaled with tales of exciting lands far away. Many young farm lads, bored and discontented at home, fall for the sales pitch, sign the roll and take the shilling. They are then whisked off to the local barracks, where the process of making soldiers out of them begins in earnest. There is no going back, and no opportunity for second thoughts.
Life in the Barracks:
The shock of being torn from your home (boring as it may have been) and of being shouted at and confined in the barracks for weeks on end is less traumatic for recruits than we know it as today in our modern, non-RP world. Alternative career prospects for most of these illiterates was not much better than the army; at least one gets paid, clothed and fed regularly. Each beast would be given a regimental number, by which he would be known and tracked for the rest of his service.
Life in barracks is regulated by signals given on drum and bugle; there are signals for everything from getting out of bed, falling in for parade, collecting meals and putting out lights before going to bed. Barrack rooms contain several wide, wooden beds, each built for two or three beasts and having straw filled mattresses and woolen blankets. In many barracks, each such large room forms what is known as a “mess” and food would be issued to them daily; they would normally take it in turns to cook. And then there was drill.
The purpose of drill in the armed services and other organizations was and still is to instill in the individual automatic responses to orders that might have to be given to them under conditions of extreme danger, when non-compliance might result in the entire regiment being destroyed or an operation miscarrying. The movements were practiced and practiced until each one became second nature. The recruits learned how to stand, march, turn in various directions, and to stop. When all these evolutions had been mastered, muskets were issued and the whole process began again, this time carrying and handling the weapons.
After all the recruits had become proficient in these exercises, they would be formed into platoons (normally about 50 beasts to a platoon) usually in three ranks, then in companies (100 beasts), then in battalions (1,000 beasts). Arms drill revolved around the tactics and use of the smoothbore musket for the infantry, the loading and cleaning of cannon for the artillery, and the use of the sword and control of the horse for the cavalry.
Then there was the cleaning of kit. The buttons, buckles, belt plates and shako plates had to be polished every day. The white belts had to be pipe-clayed at least twice a week; black belts, shoes and boots were polished daily. Muskets also had to be cleaned. The inside and outside of the barrel (and the bayonet) had to be kept shining and free of rust; the stock was to be polished and waxed; the nooks and crannies of the lock all had to be free of rust and powder residue. Galdean soldiers’ fur has to be powdered, rolled backwards to face the flanks or rear, and queued to regulation length. This was best done by a section of beasts in a circle; one behind the other; each dressing the fur of the beast in front.
Life on Campaign:
Where possible, armies billeted their soldiers on the populations of the areas through which they passed. In earlier times, tents would have been carried in the regimental baggage train, but for this time period these have largely been scrapped as being too cumbersome. If the line of march led through uninhabited regions, the soldiers would be forced to bivouac. In theory, before an army moved, the exact stages to be covered every day would have been planned by the general staff. Ideally, the soldiers would be accommodated in houses, as this kept sickness rates down and meant the location of all units was known to the commander. The daily march distance might be modified to take advantage of the available towns. A normal day’s march was 12-15 miles; it began usually early and ended in the afternoon. An army would usually march for 10 days then rest for two days.
Despite aiding the speed of an operation, bivouacking had many negative effects on an army; the beasts soon became filthy; they dispersed in an uncontrolled manner in all directions and were difficult to recall. In order to find or make shelters, the soldiers would often force their way into houses, barns and churches and take whatever they needed. The misery of trying to sleep in the open, in the winter, when one is cold, wet and hungry, is easy to imagine. Discipline also suffered, as the soldiers were often tempted to steal.
Discipline:
In most armies of this period, flogging was the usual form of punishment. Imprisonment was also used, and in the worst cases, offenders would be shot. This seems barbaric…and it was….but must be seen against the national criminal justice systems of the era, which were no less brutal. In Continental armies it was common for officers guilty of serious offences to be confined for months or even years. The exception to this is Revolutionary Rosferia, where flogging has been abolished and its place taken by confinement, carrying a ball and chain, or being posted to a punishment battalion.
Rations:
Rosferian Army rations in this era consist of bread and soup, supplemented with wine and vinegar, as an antiscorbutic, to prevent scurvy. Theoretically all armies of this period have ration scales for the soldiers, and most of them go to considerable lengths to supply the goods. This meant a system of supply of pre-stocked food from magazines by commissary wagons, which impeded the mobility of the army and clogged lines of communication.
However, as a rule, most armies encouraged foraging and living off the land they passed through. Cash would be supplied to buy local produce and meat at market rates. Daily rations normally consist of 1 pound of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat, fresh or salted. No wine or spirits were issued if the meat was fresh; if salted then a quarter pint spirits or 1 pint wine would be pawed out. Also each soldier was entitled to 3 pounds firewood. Females traveling with a regiment were allowed a half ration and kits a quarter ration; but no wine or spirits for either. Horses had 10 pounds hay and 10 pounds oats for each day and 10 pounds straw for bedding. If oats were not available they received 14 pounds maize or barley, and 10 pounds straw.
Sickness and Disease:
Life was tough for almost everybody in this era by our standards, even the better off had so much less than we do now. It will therefore come as no surprise that soldiers on campaign either became a hardy lot, or fell sick and often died.
Diets were usually poor and gave only a fraction of the nutrition that we receive today. Hygiene was basic and soldiers on campaign often had few opportunities to wash well. Typhus was an everyday danger for all armies on campaign, particularly when they were billeted with the civilian population for long periods and overloaded the already fragile and inadequate sewage and drinking water supply systems. Ignorance compounded the problems and thousands died needlessly (for example, and yes this is a little gross so don’t read it if don’t want to, but after wiping up after going to the bathroom most people had no idea about bacteria and such, and wouldn’t wash their hands or paws. So later on, when going to eat with those same hands or paws, bam! Automatic dysentery right there).
Wide areas of the continent are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and malaria was an additional hazard for the soldier on the campaign (and yes, my character Ladorak contracted malaria, but not on the continent. This was down in the tropics leading an attack on an Ferlusan fort. You have malaria for life, and if you survive the first attack it will crop again infrequently over the years, but fortunately it’s very hard to spread from one person to another, and can be treated (but not cured, even today there’s no cure) with a dose of quinine, normally found in tonic water which is mixed with gin for the drink we know today as the Gin and Tonic). But if the continent was a relatively hazardous place then, the Mandates put things in perspective. Yellow Fever, another mosquito bred disease, runs rampant there, and one frigate was effected and the Admiral described the effects. Once again, not recommended for those with a sensitive stomach. In all, 47 of the officers and men of the ship died in this brief outbreak. Thirteen of his crew, including himself, fell ill and were in hospital for several weeks. When they left the wards, they were so weak that they could scarcely stand. Sometimes, the flesh of the patients began to rot as they lay there. The Ferlusan name for the disease was then “the black vomits”, for, once a patient had begun to emit such vomit, death was almost certain.
Treatment of Wounds:
Wounds were caused by three types of weapons: muskets and pistols, sabers and bayonets, and artillery (solid shot (an non-exploding round ball), canister (basically turns the cannon into a giant shotgun that shoots out musket balls), and shell (explosive shot)). All wounds could be fatal, even if small; the high fatality rates were due to two main causes, lack of hygiene, and shock.
Anaesthetics were not used in the operating theaters of the day, and the “operating theater” for the wounded soldier might be an old door in a cold, dirty barn. At the most, the unfortunate patient might be given a swig or two of brandy, then he would be held down by two or more orderlies whiles his wounds were probed with anything from tweezers and scalpels to the surgeon’s filthy and bloody fingers and claws. The purpose of probing was to locate and remove (if possible) any foreign object such as musket balls, bone, canister and shell fragments, scraps of uniform or equipment. These, it was known, would cause infection, which was so often the fatal gangrene. The surgeon’s tools (Skipper and anyone else who has surgeon characters might want to note this stuff) included two saws, for cutting bones in cases of amputation, a hammer and chisel for the same purpose, and various knives, scissors, tweezers, probes and arterial forceps.
The fate of a wounded soldier, even if he was recovered from the battlefield promptly by his comrades, was bleak. Often he would have to wait for hours in the cold and wet….or in the blazing sun…..before enjoying the indifferent attentions (not because they were jerks, but often because by that time, unless you were the first 10 or 20 in line for treatment, the surgeon would be exhausted after working for hours on end, and sometimes would have been up for close to 48 hours mending the wounded) of the regimental surgeon and being dumped in some ruin or corner to recover or die. Usually a wounded soldier was bereft of his friends and of the esprit de corps of his regiment and might well be unable to move at all. Nurses were non-existent; medicines, bandages, clean bed linen….any bed linen, any bed….a change of solid clothing just as rare.
All in all, the provision of medical care for the sick and wounded of all armies of the era was woefully inadequate. There was far less chance of a soldier being killed in action than there was of him dying of infected wounds, disease or starvation.
On the positive side of things: Even in most nations where nobles were automatically made top commanders, it wasn’t impossible for a peasant to reach the rank of officer, and officers’ pay was normally very good. If you survived several large battles and got promoted to the rank of officer, you would be making more than enough to support what was generally a large family back home and if you did choose to retire (but as said, retirement was rare as most soldiers stayed in the army for life) you’d find yourself living “the good “life” so to speak for a few years, or possibly even the rest of your life depending on how long you stayed in the service.
So why did soldiers fight? Many, many reasons. It mostly boiled down to the motivations of the individual. If there was conscription in the military like in Gradvar, then yes, there was no choice in the matter, but in every other nation (save for Delorn, where peasants are forced into the military) the reasons for enlisting varied. There was a sense of patriotism and duty to one's country, especially in time of need. For many it was a test of courage, and proving you could make the transition from boy to man. Others (mostly officers) had sworn fealty to the state, and promised to defend the nation from all enemies foreign and domestic, similar to what we have today. Still others were lured by the chance at winning fame and glory on the battlefield. If one distinguished himself well enough, one could come home to find himself a national hero, and many hunted this prestige that most would never have been able to attain otherwise in their regular lives. Still others fought for vengeance or vindication, to punish the enemy for a past wrong or problem and inflict maximum damage on them by killing as many as they could. And yet others fought simply to defend their homes and livelihood if their country was threatened with invasion. The reasons are really as diverse as there are people on this planet, and each would have their own reasons for fighting (provided they weren't dragged off to war and had a say in the matter).
Hope this helped for those of you who were interested!
So hope you enjoy it all, it ain't as glamorous as you probably thought, but I think it will serve for good reference for RPs. In many nations at this time military service is for life; the average ages of the officers and men in such armies is thus relatively high. This could become important once Rosferia begins conscription, as many of it’s soldiers and officers will be younger, and could play a factor in youth vs. age.
Recruitment:
In many countries, including Rosferia until the introduction of conscription, the normal method of luring peasants to become soldiers is for a regiment to send recruiting parties out into their designated cantonment. In feudal Delorn there is no such problem; the Empress decrees how many recruits are needed and the landowners will be told how many serfs to deliver.
A recruiting party will usually consist of an officer, a sergeant, a drummer and several beasts. The officer will be supplied with cash. In Galdea in this era, it’s customary for beast or kit to have committed himself to being a recruit when he accepted the King’s shilling. In these days to beasts of the lower classes, a shilling is considerable bait. To increase the success rate, the recruiting party will set up shop in an inn on the town square on market day. A drummer will attract potential recruits, who are often decked out with flowers and treated to a few pints of ale while being regaled with tales of exciting lands far away. Many young farm lads, bored and discontented at home, fall for the sales pitch, sign the roll and take the shilling. They are then whisked off to the local barracks, where the process of making soldiers out of them begins in earnest. There is no going back, and no opportunity for second thoughts.
Life in the Barracks:
The shock of being torn from your home (boring as it may have been) and of being shouted at and confined in the barracks for weeks on end is less traumatic for recruits than we know it as today in our modern, non-RP world. Alternative career prospects for most of these illiterates was not much better than the army; at least one gets paid, clothed and fed regularly. Each beast would be given a regimental number, by which he would be known and tracked for the rest of his service.
Life in barracks is regulated by signals given on drum and bugle; there are signals for everything from getting out of bed, falling in for parade, collecting meals and putting out lights before going to bed. Barrack rooms contain several wide, wooden beds, each built for two or three beasts and having straw filled mattresses and woolen blankets. In many barracks, each such large room forms what is known as a “mess” and food would be issued to them daily; they would normally take it in turns to cook. And then there was drill.
The purpose of drill in the armed services and other organizations was and still is to instill in the individual automatic responses to orders that might have to be given to them under conditions of extreme danger, when non-compliance might result in the entire regiment being destroyed or an operation miscarrying. The movements were practiced and practiced until each one became second nature. The recruits learned how to stand, march, turn in various directions, and to stop. When all these evolutions had been mastered, muskets were issued and the whole process began again, this time carrying and handling the weapons.
After all the recruits had become proficient in these exercises, they would be formed into platoons (normally about 50 beasts to a platoon) usually in three ranks, then in companies (100 beasts), then in battalions (1,000 beasts). Arms drill revolved around the tactics and use of the smoothbore musket for the infantry, the loading and cleaning of cannon for the artillery, and the use of the sword and control of the horse for the cavalry.
Then there was the cleaning of kit. The buttons, buckles, belt plates and shako plates had to be polished every day. The white belts had to be pipe-clayed at least twice a week; black belts, shoes and boots were polished daily. Muskets also had to be cleaned. The inside and outside of the barrel (and the bayonet) had to be kept shining and free of rust; the stock was to be polished and waxed; the nooks and crannies of the lock all had to be free of rust and powder residue. Galdean soldiers’ fur has to be powdered, rolled backwards to face the flanks or rear, and queued to regulation length. This was best done by a section of beasts in a circle; one behind the other; each dressing the fur of the beast in front.
Life on Campaign:
Where possible, armies billeted their soldiers on the populations of the areas through which they passed. In earlier times, tents would have been carried in the regimental baggage train, but for this time period these have largely been scrapped as being too cumbersome. If the line of march led through uninhabited regions, the soldiers would be forced to bivouac. In theory, before an army moved, the exact stages to be covered every day would have been planned by the general staff. Ideally, the soldiers would be accommodated in houses, as this kept sickness rates down and meant the location of all units was known to the commander. The daily march distance might be modified to take advantage of the available towns. A normal day’s march was 12-15 miles; it began usually early and ended in the afternoon. An army would usually march for 10 days then rest for two days.
Despite aiding the speed of an operation, bivouacking had many negative effects on an army; the beasts soon became filthy; they dispersed in an uncontrolled manner in all directions and were difficult to recall. In order to find or make shelters, the soldiers would often force their way into houses, barns and churches and take whatever they needed. The misery of trying to sleep in the open, in the winter, when one is cold, wet and hungry, is easy to imagine. Discipline also suffered, as the soldiers were often tempted to steal.
Discipline:
In most armies of this period, flogging was the usual form of punishment. Imprisonment was also used, and in the worst cases, offenders would be shot. This seems barbaric…and it was….but must be seen against the national criminal justice systems of the era, which were no less brutal. In Continental armies it was common for officers guilty of serious offences to be confined for months or even years. The exception to this is Revolutionary Rosferia, where flogging has been abolished and its place taken by confinement, carrying a ball and chain, or being posted to a punishment battalion.
Rations:
Rosferian Army rations in this era consist of bread and soup, supplemented with wine and vinegar, as an antiscorbutic, to prevent scurvy. Theoretically all armies of this period have ration scales for the soldiers, and most of them go to considerable lengths to supply the goods. This meant a system of supply of pre-stocked food from magazines by commissary wagons, which impeded the mobility of the army and clogged lines of communication.
However, as a rule, most armies encouraged foraging and living off the land they passed through. Cash would be supplied to buy local produce and meat at market rates. Daily rations normally consist of 1 pound of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat, fresh or salted. No wine or spirits were issued if the meat was fresh; if salted then a quarter pint spirits or 1 pint wine would be pawed out. Also each soldier was entitled to 3 pounds firewood. Females traveling with a regiment were allowed a half ration and kits a quarter ration; but no wine or spirits for either. Horses had 10 pounds hay and 10 pounds oats for each day and 10 pounds straw for bedding. If oats were not available they received 14 pounds maize or barley, and 10 pounds straw.
Sickness and Disease:
Life was tough for almost everybody in this era by our standards, even the better off had so much less than we do now. It will therefore come as no surprise that soldiers on campaign either became a hardy lot, or fell sick and often died.
Diets were usually poor and gave only a fraction of the nutrition that we receive today. Hygiene was basic and soldiers on campaign often had few opportunities to wash well. Typhus was an everyday danger for all armies on campaign, particularly when they were billeted with the civilian population for long periods and overloaded the already fragile and inadequate sewage and drinking water supply systems. Ignorance compounded the problems and thousands died needlessly (for example, and yes this is a little gross so don’t read it if don’t want to, but after wiping up after going to the bathroom most people had no idea about bacteria and such, and wouldn’t wash their hands or paws. So later on, when going to eat with those same hands or paws, bam! Automatic dysentery right there).
Wide areas of the continent are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and malaria was an additional hazard for the soldier on the campaign (and yes, my character Ladorak contracted malaria, but not on the continent. This was down in the tropics leading an attack on an Ferlusan fort. You have malaria for life, and if you survive the first attack it will crop again infrequently over the years, but fortunately it’s very hard to spread from one person to another, and can be treated (but not cured, even today there’s no cure) with a dose of quinine, normally found in tonic water which is mixed with gin for the drink we know today as the Gin and Tonic). But if the continent was a relatively hazardous place then, the Mandates put things in perspective. Yellow Fever, another mosquito bred disease, runs rampant there, and one frigate was effected and the Admiral described the effects. Once again, not recommended for those with a sensitive stomach. In all, 47 of the officers and men of the ship died in this brief outbreak. Thirteen of his crew, including himself, fell ill and were in hospital for several weeks. When they left the wards, they were so weak that they could scarcely stand. Sometimes, the flesh of the patients began to rot as they lay there. The Ferlusan name for the disease was then “the black vomits”, for, once a patient had begun to emit such vomit, death was almost certain.
Treatment of Wounds:
Wounds were caused by three types of weapons: muskets and pistols, sabers and bayonets, and artillery (solid shot (an non-exploding round ball), canister (basically turns the cannon into a giant shotgun that shoots out musket balls), and shell (explosive shot)). All wounds could be fatal, even if small; the high fatality rates were due to two main causes, lack of hygiene, and shock.
Anaesthetics were not used in the operating theaters of the day, and the “operating theater” for the wounded soldier might be an old door in a cold, dirty barn. At the most, the unfortunate patient might be given a swig or two of brandy, then he would be held down by two or more orderlies whiles his wounds were probed with anything from tweezers and scalpels to the surgeon’s filthy and bloody fingers and claws. The purpose of probing was to locate and remove (if possible) any foreign object such as musket balls, bone, canister and shell fragments, scraps of uniform or equipment. These, it was known, would cause infection, which was so often the fatal gangrene. The surgeon’s tools (Skipper and anyone else who has surgeon characters might want to note this stuff) included two saws, for cutting bones in cases of amputation, a hammer and chisel for the same purpose, and various knives, scissors, tweezers, probes and arterial forceps.
The fate of a wounded soldier, even if he was recovered from the battlefield promptly by his comrades, was bleak. Often he would have to wait for hours in the cold and wet….or in the blazing sun…..before enjoying the indifferent attentions (not because they were jerks, but often because by that time, unless you were the first 10 or 20 in line for treatment, the surgeon would be exhausted after working for hours on end, and sometimes would have been up for close to 48 hours mending the wounded) of the regimental surgeon and being dumped in some ruin or corner to recover or die. Usually a wounded soldier was bereft of his friends and of the esprit de corps of his regiment and might well be unable to move at all. Nurses were non-existent; medicines, bandages, clean bed linen….any bed linen, any bed….a change of solid clothing just as rare.
All in all, the provision of medical care for the sick and wounded of all armies of the era was woefully inadequate. There was far less chance of a soldier being killed in action than there was of him dying of infected wounds, disease or starvation.
On the positive side of things: Even in most nations where nobles were automatically made top commanders, it wasn’t impossible for a peasant to reach the rank of officer, and officers’ pay was normally very good. If you survived several large battles and got promoted to the rank of officer, you would be making more than enough to support what was generally a large family back home and if you did choose to retire (but as said, retirement was rare as most soldiers stayed in the army for life) you’d find yourself living “the good “life” so to speak for a few years, or possibly even the rest of your life depending on how long you stayed in the service.
So why did soldiers fight? Many, many reasons. It mostly boiled down to the motivations of the individual. If there was conscription in the military like in Gradvar, then yes, there was no choice in the matter, but in every other nation (save for Delorn, where peasants are forced into the military) the reasons for enlisting varied. There was a sense of patriotism and duty to one's country, especially in time of need. For many it was a test of courage, and proving you could make the transition from boy to man. Others (mostly officers) had sworn fealty to the state, and promised to defend the nation from all enemies foreign and domestic, similar to what we have today. Still others were lured by the chance at winning fame and glory on the battlefield. If one distinguished himself well enough, one could come home to find himself a national hero, and many hunted this prestige that most would never have been able to attain otherwise in their regular lives. Still others fought for vengeance or vindication, to punish the enemy for a past wrong or problem and inflict maximum damage on them by killing as many as they could. And yet others fought simply to defend their homes and livelihood if their country was threatened with invasion. The reasons are really as diverse as there are people on this planet, and each would have their own reasons for fighting (provided they weren't dragged off to war and had a say in the matter).
Hope this helped for those of you who were interested!
