When "living on the country" is no longer practicable, the only alternative for an army is, of course, that of sending supplies after it for the feeding of the troops; but when, or where, this has had to be done by means of ordinary road services, it has involved—together with the transport of artillery, ammunition and stores—(1) the employment of an enormous number of vehicles and animals, greatly complicating the movements of the army; and (2) a limitation of the distance within which a campaign can be waged by an army depending entirely on its own resources.
The latter of these conditions was the direct consequence of the former; and the reason for this was shown by General W. T. Sherman in an article contributed by him to the Century Magazine for February, 1888 (pp. 595-6), in the course of which he says:—
According to the Duke of Wellington, an army moves upon its belly, not upon its legs; and no army dependent on wagons can operate more than a hundred miles from its base because the teams going and returning consume the contents of their wagons, leaving little or nothing for the maintenance of men and animals at the front who are fully employed in fighting.
There was, again, the risk when food supplies followed the army by road either of perishables going bad en route, owing to the time taken in their transport by wagon, or of their suffering deterioration as the result of exposure to weather, the consequence in either case being a diminution in the amount of provisions available for feeding the army.
All these various conditions have been changed by the railway, the use of which for the purposes of war has, in regard to the forwarding of supplies, introduced innovations which are quite as important as those relating to the movement of troops—if, indeed, the former advantages are not of even greater importance than the latter.
Thanks to the railway, an army can now draw its supplies from the whole of the interior of the home country—provided that the lines of communication can be kept open; and, with the help not only of regular rail services but of stores and magazines en route those supplies can be forwarded to railhead in just such quantities as they may be wanted. Under these conditions the feeding of an army in the field should be assured regardless alike of the possible scanty resources of the country in which it is engaged and of its own distance from the base of supplies.
CHAPTER VII
Armoured Trains
In the issue of the now defunct London periodical, Once a Week, for August 13, 1859, there was published an article on "English Railway Artillery: A Cheap Defence against Invasion," in which it was said, among other things:—