Bonus: What food dish was created to commemorate the battle of Waterloo? What is it?
Planning for boxing? Napoleon'south your man. Planning for breakfast? Not then much. Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard Laissez passer, 20 May 1800/Musee de l'Histoire de France/Corbis hide caption
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Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard Pass, 20 May 1800/Musee de fifty'Histoire de France/Corbis
Planning for battle? Napoleon'due south your man. Planning for breakfast? Not and so much.
Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard Pass, 20 May 1800/Musee de l'Histoire de French republic/Corbis
On the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte's virtually celebrated statement about food and warfare — "An army marches on its stomach" — is worth recalling.
Except there is no record of him maxim it. Simply equally there is no record of Marie Antoinette maxim, "Let them eat cake."
If he did say information technology, the words would have been every bit hollow as the stomachs of his soldiers. Though one of the greatest military generals of all time, Napoleon was surprisingly negligent about feeding his army.
His orders for the Grande Armée's rations were ample enough: "Soup, boiled beef, a roasted joint and some vegetables; no dessert." But bad roads and poor weather often prevented supply wagons from reaching campsites in time.
During the Italian campaign, in which the 27-year-sometime Napoleon made his proper noun as a general by defeating a much larger Austrian army and its allies, his men simply foraged off the land or plundered nearby villages — a mutual military practice and then.
Even while fighting the Russians in a poor country similar Poland, atmospheric condition, though difficult, even so allowed for sense of humour. As valet Louis Constant Wairy wrote in his memoirs, the French soldiers learned what he referred to every bit Polish words: Kleba? Nie ma." Significant, "Bread? In that location'south none." One twenty-four hour period, every bit Napoleon passed a cavalcade of infantry, a hungry solider cried out, "Papa, kleba." "Nie ma," he shot back. "The whole cavalcade burst into shouts of laughter," Wairy wrote, "and no further request was made." (As some commenters take pointed out, Wairy'south Smooth and Polish spelling may take been off.)
But the suffering Napoleon's army underwent on his hottest and coldest campaigns — in Egypt and Russia — was no laughing matter.
The 1798 Egyptian misadventure was launched with such speed and secrecy, writes historian Philip Dwyer in Napoleon, The Path To Power, at that place was no time even to outcome h2o canteens. Every bit a result, the 55,000-strong army had to suffer a 3-twenty-four hours march from Alexandria to Cairo through burning sands, in thick European uniforms and carrying heavy armor. Thinking they would be able to forage like they had in Italy, many had thrown abroad their hard biscuits. Scores died of rut and thirst, while others, driven mad by hunger, thirst, sandstorms and Bedouin attacks, simply put a bullet through their own brains. When the ground forces reached the Nile, at that place were water and food, simply, furious and embittered, the men went on a killing and looting rampage.
Napoleon's last g attack at Waterloo. Life of Napoleon Bonaparte past William Grand. Sloane hide caption
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Life of Napoleon Bonaparte by William M. Sloane
Napoleon's final m set on at Waterloo.
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte by William M. Sloane
Despite this harrowing tutorial in thirst, Napoleon embarked the very next year on an even more foolhardy x-day march from Cairo to Syria. Again, there wasn't enough food. Water, carried in goatskins on camel dorsum, was, co-ordinate to ane sergeant, "hot, bellicose and muddy, similar water from a cobbler's tub." And soldiers began to commit suicide. A stampede at a solitary well killed thirty. The desperate men dug ocean sorrel, ate it and adult dysentery.
And all for goose egg. In Syria, the plague awaited them, and at the small but stubborn fortress at Acre (now in Israel), a coalition of Ottomans and English gave Napoleon his starting time gustation of defeat, forcing him to retreat.
Every bit grotesque was the 1812 Russian federation campaign. The Grande Armée was annihilated more past starvation and cold than by the Cossacks. With absolutely no food supplies and temperatures at twenty beneath cypher, the ravenous men ate horseflesh seasoned with gunpowder, often fighting over a fallen horse's flank to tear out its liver, sometimes even before ascertaining whether the fauna had died. Through the campaign, flocks of buzzards feasted on corpses of soldiers on the roads and battlefields.
The buzzards were not the only ones who ate well.
The belatedly French historian Andre Castelot wrote in Napoleon that through the famine, Napoleon continued his daily repast of "white bread, Chambertin, beef or mutton, and his favorite rice with beans or lentils." But the valet Wairy claimed that his distraught master, who ranted at his officers for non securing enough rations, ate like an ordinary soldier.
True, Napoleon was an indifferent eater (though captious about bread). He ofttimes skipped meals, eating only when hungry — commonly calling for roast chicken, a dish he seems to take enjoyed. In the kitchens of his Tuileries Palace at Paris, chickens were constantly roasted on spits to suit his erratic hunger pangs. When he rode out of Cairo on Christmas Eve to survey the Suez isthmus, the only provisions he took were three roasted chickens wrapped in paper.
He had a soldier's impatience for fussy dinner rituals and "lacked much of eating decently; and always preferred his fingers to a fork or spoon," writes his valet. Nor did he have a nose for fine wine, existence perfectly content to drink Chambertin diluted with water. At camp at Boulogne, he asked a marshal at his tabular array what he thought of the wine beingness served. The marshal replied with tactful candor, "There is better," making the emperor and other guests smile.
Only afterwards his defeat at Waterloo, when he'd been permanently stripped of power, did Napoleon seem to revel in its mealtime trappings. On the island of St. Helena, every bit a prisoner of the British, he was served dinner every dark by a uniformed butler who announced, "His Majesty is served." As footmen served soups, entrees, roasts, side dishes and sweets on rare porcelain and argent plates, Napoleon — surrounded past a modest group of officers in full apparel uniform, with their wives in décolleté dresses — played the part of the emperor he no longer was.
What a change from the human being who had bolted his breakfast in viii minutes, and dinner in 12. He normally ate his breakfast solitary, but on that fateful, rain-soaked morning time of June 18, 1815, he called what came to be known as his Breakfast Briefing.
As the Knuckles of Wellington'south redcoats waited outside the hamlet of Waterloo, in present-day Belgium, Napoleon summoned his generals to the farmhouse where he had spent a sleepless dark. Wellington, he told them with trademark blowing, was "a poor general." The English were "poor troops." His officers were unconvinced. But the emperor assured them it would all exist over by lunchtime.
Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/18/414614705/appetite-for-war-what-napoleon-and-his-men-ate-on-the-march
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