: Food isn't the only supply a moving army needs, though.
: Clothing, ammunition, luxury items (for morale), mail
: (probably not a big deal for a largely illiterate
: army, but still) as well as more strategic stuff:
: intelligence and reconaissance all have to travel
: along supply lines. Magic might provide some of these
: but probably not all. Then there's shelter--you can't
: ask the army to spend the winter in bivouac and expect
: enough of them to survive to fight in the spring.
Myth armies don't seem to carry much clothing for themselves; if they had had an extra parka or two along, presumably the Berserks wouldn't have been dropping like flies while they were operating in the Cloudspine. And the ability of fairly small armies (like the diminished Legion toward the end of TFL) to operate at maximum effectiveness for months in hostile regions with no human presence whatsoever indicates that they're much more self-sufficient than real-life armies of that technological level, and less reliant on supply lines. We know that the Myth armies gratefully receive gifts of food and supplies from the villages they pass (as in "Crow's Bridge"), but they don't seem to be reduced to looting when such gifts aren't forthcoming.
So I think most maintenance stuff (sock-darning, weapon-polishing, etc.) is probably taken care of by the soldiers between battles, while wizards supply clothing and other necessities just as they supply food. This actually explains why, in spite of the fact that we know there were Light wizards in the TFL armies, and that Alric would presumably have hired/recruited more in the next 60 years, we almost never see them in combat; the wizards were much too useful as supply conduits and sources to be risked in direct battle. Wiping out the mages of a Light army may be equivalent to destroying its supply line.
Strategic information and communications are probably fairly easy to convey when every major military division has at least one archmage at the head. The backup method (as we see toward the end of TFL when most of the Nine is dead) for conveying info and important items seems to be by individual couriers, such as unmounted Berserks (over long distances, humans can actually travel faster on foot than by horse). And I don't think any Legionnaire spends much of his time worrying about mail. :-) Lastly, even if bulk supplies can't be created or teleported by mages or scavenged from the environment, there's always the World Knots to use. Until destroyed, they'd still take the place of a continuous supply line, and they'd make it a lot harder to block an enemy army's access to supplies; you'd have to take control of every single World Knot which was close enough to the enemy for supplies to conceivably transported from it.
The Province's clement weather seems to make winters less of a problem than you'd expect; the only regions where it'd be difficult to survive are the northlands (which are populated and guarded year-round by the Berserks) and the Cloudspine, which doesn't have to be guarded in wintertime anyway since the passes are closed off. Judging from TFL and GURPS, the armies just head down to the flatlands during winter and stay over in relative comfort (except for the poor sentries who are guarding the pass and getting stepped on by Trow and so forth).
: Until the twentieth century, armies were often more
: dangerous to their homelands than to the enemy. There
: were three reasons for this: the first is that an
: army, which produces nothing but corpses and wounded
: (and therefore has a negative effect on production of
: goods and supplies) requires far more energy than your
: stay-at-home population and can therefore decimate a
: cottage industry-based economy.
The Province seems to avoid this particular problem, since a) magic can back up mundane agriculture and textile-making to some degree, so that there are at least enough resources to feed the entire army in theory, and b) because almost all the known human lands are under the control of a single power, there's no issue of not being able to afford to purchase those resources. There aren't any rival states whose economic success harms the Province, nor any states which the Province has to pay for food and supplies for the army. It's somewhat analogous to the Church in the Middle Ages; everyone tithed a good chunk of their ownings and managed to get by on the rest. The economy continued to function; it was just scaled down to the processing of of the remainder of the available resources.
: Secondly, soldiers were always notorious for losing their
: inhibitions while on campaign--a farmboy surrounded by
: a close-knit community would know better than to steal
: an apple, say, but give him a spear and suddenly he'll
: not only steal the apple, he'll cut down the tree,
: make bootleg hard cider and get drunk, light the barn
: on fire, chase the farmer's daughter around the
: smoking wreckage, and then run away back to his unit
: where all will be forgiven because his Captain needs
: every pair of hands he can get. Plus, armies tended to
: live in VERY unsanitary conditions (pretty much
: impossible to avoid when your only latrine is a slit
: trench dug by a tired grunt at the end of a forced
: march) and therefore carried every possible disease
: with them.
Well, on the issue of army behavior; as I said, Myth soldiers certainly seem to behave more decently toward civilians than the members of almost any real-life army, past or present. They occasionally make a somewhat selfish decision--like guarding the village that gives them the most pigs--but raping and looting and so forth is surprisingly absent. The main reason for this is probably that it's a fantasy world, where men are good and monsters are bad and so forth, but it probably also stems from rational methods of army selection and training in such a world. Whereas in a real-life army they generally have to beat down your sense of ethics a bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say that the average US soldier is a "conscience-free killing machine", but your training definitely involves getting you to do things you'd normally feel leery about,) there's no question in the Mythworld--at least at present--that the war you're fighting is right. You're either battling human murderers, rapists and thieves, or genocidal Dark sorcerers, or blood-maddened nonhuman monsters, or mindless undead. As such, one might even guess that the first steps in recruiting and training a Myth Legionnaire are finding someone with a very strong conscience and strengthening it still further so that when he sees the forces of evil, he fights rather than flees. (And in fact we know from GURPS that the Legion doesn't take just anybody--their recruiters work very hard to make sure only the bravest and most virtous souls are inducted.) In the Mythworld, the soldiers are the nice guys, and as such they rein in their inhibitions even more than the civilians do.
There are also non-ethically-oriented ways of making an army want to behave itself. For one thing, the closer a soldier feels himself to home, the better his behavior. One of the reasons the Roman army was so little trouble to the civilian population--at least in the Republican phase and early days of the Empire, thanks to the Julio-Claudians--was that there was a very strong sense of community throughout the occupied territories, and the soldiers tended to treat perceived fellow Romans more decently. In regions that were Rome-occupied but weren't really thought of as Roman--such as Palestine--there was a lot more military misbehavior than there was in regions like Gaul. Similarly, the entire sphere of Legion operations is generally under a single culture and a single ruling power, and so a Legionnaire would be fairly unlikely to abuse a civilian who was a cultural brother, a fellow worshipper of Wyrd, and a fellow subject of Alric. They probably wouldn't feel so much kinship with Dwarves and Northmen, but any Legionnaire who chases a Berserk's daughter or burns down a Dwarf's house has a very limited lifespan in any case.
Furthermore, the Province's Legion, like the Roman army, employs the stabilizing tactic of putting nobly-born and high-status young folk (like Cruniac) in fairly low and dangerous positions. This more or less assures that every group of soldiers (say approximately 30 men, like Cruniac's unit) has a commander and a few members who have a strong, selfish interest in making sure their unit's behavior is exemplary. A captain may need every pair of hands he can get, but if he's "more interested in political maneuvers than military ones," he's not going to tolerate behavior that makes him look bad and kills his chances for a promotion and social recognition.
: The third reason armies were so dangerous to their own
: rulers was that after they were demobilized they
: remained tricky to deal with. You have a mob of men
: who suddenly have no interest in farming and feel like
: they're owed something for their military service
: (often this was true, since pre-modern armies weren't
: paid until after the fighting, if at all). These are
: hard, bitter men who've seen the world ("how do
: you keep them down on the farm, once they've seen gay
: Paree?" comes out of this exact situation) and
: remember all those farmer's daughters (not to mention
: camp followers) that they... chased around the burned
: down barn, yes, that's it... and now you expect them
: to live their old, dull, miserable lives again. Add to
: this the fact that you've now spent all your money
: training them to be conscience-free killing machines
: and you have a tax revolt on your hands at the very
: least. Even if we assume that the troops of the Light
: are far more decent and Alric-fearing than troops in
: the real world (they were the Good Guys, after all) we
: know that some of these scenarios are going to be
: problems--for instance, how many ghost towns are there
: in the Mythworld, what with all the men who have
: nothing to go back to (their homes having been razed
: by Soulblighter) and who want to join the Heron Guard,
: or make new lives in the West, or whatever? I don't
: remember a single character/narrator/etc. in the game
: saying, "Thank Wyrd that's over--now I can get
: back to hardscrabble farming and my old life as a
: potato peeler."
: Add it all up and you've got a very volatile situation on
: your hands. There are some exceptions in ancient Earth
: societies, like the Spartans--militarily based
: societies which trained their men to be fighters and
: farmers at the same time, and therefore would escape
: some of the worst effects I've described above. The
: Berserks would probably fit into this mold, and maybe
: even the dwarves (who had a more high-tech industrial
: base to start with, and therefore a slightly less
: boring and certainly far more prosperous home life to
: return to, kind of like Our Boys coming home after
: WWI--who even still spawned the Lost Generation). On
: the other hand, the Warriors of the Legion sound much
: more like Roman soldiers who, Russel Crowe
: notwithstanding, had to be kept on constant campaign
: lest they come home and start tearing up the joint.
Well, (again, in Rome's heyday), the Roman Legions really weren't kept out simply because they'd cause too much trouble if they were returned to civilian life. The Legions did some vital work out there during peacetime; they were policemen, and infrastructure construction crews, and messengers all rolled into one. Also, individual Legionaries weren't kept on constant campaign; indeed, you only *had* to serve a few years and then you could come home if you wanted and never see the inside of a helmet again. It's just that a good fraction of the Legionaries found they preferred the life of the career soldier. By giving the soldiers the choice of whether or not to return to civilian lives, you give the disgruntled soon-to-be-deserters a chance to leave honorably, and allow those who don't want to go back to potato peeling to remain in the army and benefit the community.
A similar situation seems to prevail in the Province. The Legion is fully active during peacetime, policing the land and defending against Brigands and Ghols and the like. Following a war, no one gets kicked out unless they actively want to leave. (Similarly, they don't seem to recruit a whole bunch of new people when a war starts--they just merge with nobles' private armies and with the Zerk and Dwarf forces). So I think most Legionnaires tend to end up as career soldiers.
That's not to say there aren't ex-military troublemakers out there; GURPS tells us that the most dangerous Brigands are the well-trained Legion deserters. But in order to become a problem, you have to have seemed much more ethical and brave than you really were when the recruiters came by and you were fourteen, *and* you have to have resisted the Legion's rigorous character-building efforts over the last few years, *and* you have to have become dissatisfied with military life, *and* you have to also be unwilling to return to a steady civilian job. Which means that criminal ex-Legionnaires are few and far between, for the most part.
(GURPS suggests that this *could* change if, in the future, the Legion starts downsizing and Legionnaires are unwillingly returned to civilianhood. On page 106 it gives the idea for a Pulp Fiction-style scenario with rival ex-Legion drug-running gangs and the like).
: Wow, sorry--I got off topic there, but I hope it's
: interesting stuff all the same.
Nope, dead boring to me, sorry. Why, I could barely rouse myself to write a word or two in response.
--SiliconDream
