Isegoria

After the Great War, the British Army’s Hygiene Advisory Committee researched how soldiers had been loaded through the centuries and published its findings in a pamphlet called The Load Carried by the Soldier:

In war, marching is unquestionably the military operation of first importance, involving as it does the transference of troops to the point where the Commander decides to strike with maximum effect; in other words, while fighting is the luxury of the soldier, marching is his daily bread. But if the stroke is to be delivered effectively, the troops must still—after the march—be in condition to continue great physical exertion, and perhaps to repeat the march for an indefinite period. In other words, the march must not involve complete exhaustion, and therefore justifies close scrutiny of all those factors which make for the production of fatigue. Of these, the principal are the length of march, the time taken to cover it (i.e., the rate, and the halts), the load carried and the men’s physical condition, the latter factor in itself complicated by questions of dietary, clothing, climate, disease, and “the psycho-physical state of morale.”

In The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation, then-Colonel S.L.A. Marshall cites the British work to demonstrate how “generals in all ages have been no respecters of the limitations of the human animal“:

The Roman legionary, recruited usually at twenty and selected from the peasantry on a basis of sturdy strength rather than height, carried eighty pounds on his body when he went marching on the smooth Roman roads.

Though that seems brutal, we should at least add the footnote that 2,000 years after the Legion, the American Army dropped men from Higgins boats and onto the rough deep sands of Normandy carrying more than eighty pounds.

The French soldier at the time of the Crimean War carried an equipment of seventy-two pounds. The British Redcoats carried eighty pounds when they stonned our Bunker Hill. At Waterloo British infantrymen carried sixty to seventy pounds, the French about fifty-five.

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The commission found that with few exceptions, the armies of the past had honored the principle that lightness of foot in the individual produced buoyancy in the attack more in the breach than the observance.

Philip of Macedon was a notable exception. He achieved his mobility around a light infantry — the hypaspistes.

Oliver Cromwell made his Roundheads fast of foot by reducing their equipment to less than forty pounds.

Stonewall Jackson created an infantry which maneuvered fast by keeping the individual working load to a minimum. His men did not carry extra clothing, overcoats or knapsacks. They marched with rifles, ammunition and enough food to keep going. Each man carried one blanket or rubber sheet; he slept with a comrade for extra warmth. The cooking was done at a common mess with frying pans and skillets. The ski1let handle was spiked so that on the march it could be stuck in a rifle barrel.

The commission found that in general, armies through the past 3,000 years have issued equipment to the soldier averaging between fifty-five and sixty pounds, and have tried to condition him to that weight by long marching.

Finally, it reached the absolute conclusion that not in excess of forty to forty-five pounds was a tolerable load for an average-sized man on a road march. More specifically, it stated that.on the march, for training purposes, the optimum load, including clothing and personal belongings, is one-third of body weight. Above that figure the cost of carrying the load rises disproportionately to the actual increment of weight.

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