The proportion of wartime soldiers dying of disease as against
combat injury, ran at about 70-75 percent in armies campaigning in
Europe in the century and a half (1648-1789) between the end of the
Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. During this time, field
armies doubled in size and regimes usually fought for limited
territorial gains, so it was safest to `occupy, entrench, and
wait'. Consequently, this was an era of massive and protracted
encampments: the Christian army that sat down before Belgrade in
1717 had more mouths than any city within 500 miles, but lacked
basic urban amenities like regular markets, wells, privy pits, and
night soil collectors. Yet the impact of sickness on military
operations has been neglected. This study uncovers how many
soldiers sickened and died by consulting quantitative data, such as
casualty returns and hospital registers, generated by the new
state-contract armies which displaced the mercenary hordes of the
Thirty Years' War. As plague began to recede from Europe, this
study explains what exactly were these `fluxes and fevers' that
remained to afflict European armies in wartime and argues that they
formed a single seasonal continuum that peaked in late summer. The
isolation and incarceration of the military hospital characterized
the response of the new armies to `disorder' and to revivified
notions of contagion. However, the hospital often prolonged the
late summer morbidity/mortality spike into mid-winter by generating
`hospital fever' or typhus, the lice-borne disease that erupted
whenever the cold, wet, hungry, transient, and unwashed huddled
together. The cure was the disease. This scope of the study
includes French army operations in some of its contiguous
campaigning theatres, north Italy (1702 and 1734), the Rhineland
(1734), Roussillon (1674), possibly Catalonia (1693), and, further
afield, Bohemia (1742). The study also includes three case-studies
involving the British army that include Ireland (1689), Portugal
(1762), Dutch Brabant (1748), and the Rhineland (1743). The
outliers are studies of Habsburg operations in and around Belgrade
(1717 and 1737), and Russian operations in Crimea (1736).
General
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