“Napoleon did not win his battles with gunpowder, but with the legs of his soldiers,” ironically states the Australian historian Peter McPhee, biographer of Robespierre and author of The French Revolution. The speed with which the French emperor moved his troops often caught his enemies off guard and was vital to his victories. But it is evident that the Napoleonic armies could have done little without gunpowder...
And without alcohol. Wine, rum and spirits were necessary to liven up what the novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina captured so well in Warrior Ardor. It had been happening long before the wars of the first French empire: one way to encourage soldiers was to give them a double ration of alcohol. And it was not at all an exclusively French custom, as archaeologist Jordi Serrallonga knows very well.
Professor Serrallonga's latest work, A Nomadic Archaeologist in Search of Dr. Jones, includes a curious reflection on “the spiritual elevation that the British achieved with gin and tonic.” And all due to the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito, which causes malaria. Quinine, this researcher remembers, was a remedy used against this disease. But he had a problem.
Quinine appears in the composition of tonic water or tonic water. The general, aware of its benefits and concerned about the casualties caused by malaria, recommended the consumption of this drink. There was only one drawback: not everyone likes the bitterness of the tonic. The solution? Legend has it that many officers thus had the ideal excuse to add gin to the concoction and obtain the greatest of their victories: the gin and tonic.
Marcial said that Barcino wines “are so bad that they are only good for legionnaires,” explains archaeologist Carme Miró, who does not doubt the libations in the cohorts, but does doubt the bad reputation of the wines of Roman Barcelona. based on the latest archaeological sites and findings that demonstrate the importance of the wine industry in Iulia Augusta Faventia Paterna Barcino and in neighboring Baetulo or Badalona.
The British David Chandler, author of the Bonapartian summa Napoleon's campaigns, has highlighted the importance of alcohol in the wars that bled Europe until the 19th century. In the field hospitals the only anesthesia before the amputation of an arm or a leg was often a drink of rum... if there was still any. Numerous memoirs of the time criticize commanders who were drunk as a dime at the front.
The armies of other countries also learned in more recent times what a good curda was. University of Bristol professor Catherine Merridale, author of The Ivan War, recalls the terrible confession made by one of the veteran Soviet soldiers she interviewed: “We could have defeated the Nazis and won the war two years earlier.” “If we hadn’t been so drunk.”
Antony Beevor, former British soldier and historian, stated in his monumental Stalingrad and Berlin that many Russians in the Red Army died of poisoning when they mistook the bottles of antifreeze that the Wehrmacht abandoned in their flight for liquor. Others used the bottles for another purpose in an episode many prefer to ignore: the German rape plague that followed the fall of the Third Reich.
Let's go back to the past. In 1868, HM Majesty's Armed Forces had 186,508 men in its ranks. That year, more than 13% went to court martial. Behind most of his crimes and insubordinations was alcohol. In fact, the expression groggy, today almost limited to the field of boxing, comes from grog, a rum-based drink with which the Graceful Majesty's Navy encouraged the sailors before the cannonade.
Few armies like the British, the gin and tonic armies that the archaeologist and explorer Jordi Serrallonga commented on, have had the honesty to leave a documentary record of this problem and to open their archives to researchers. Alcohol abuse can be a flight forward to overcome cowardice or revulsion from the scenes that are experienced at the front. There can be as many reasons as there are soldiers. Or as drinkers.
A former political commissar who suffered the siege of Stalingrad and who later pursued the Nazis to Berlin told the aforementioned professor Catherine Merridale: “Constant drunkenness seemed to relieve us of the evil that surrounded us.” The same is argued by the American Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran and a great anti-war author, with titles such as The Things the Men Who Fought Wore and Chasing Cacciato.
Sometimes alcohol is not a choice, but an imposition. The troops that the United Kingdom sent to Crimea when it declared war on Russia in 1854 had to feed themselves on rum and biscuits, as well as spoiled meat. This conflict has gone down in history for the catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade in Balaclava, but it could also be remembered for the catastrophic ineptitude of the administration.
Battles loosen the sphincters of soldiers and the imagination of poets. What could the riders of the Light Brigade do against the Russian artillery? “Do your duty and die”, according to a famous poem by Lord Tennyson. “Bullshit,” according to the Italian journalist Stefano Malatesta, author of The Vanity of Chivalry. Only those who have never been stained with blood see glory and honor where there is viscera and suffering.
War is something else, as the Stendhalian protagonist of The Charterhouse of Parma suspects, who passed through Waterloo without knowing anything. The Englishman Geoffrey Regan asserts in his lucid work Wars, Politicians and Lies that “the idea that there is any nobility in war is absurd: battlefields are places full of blood, pieces of bodies, feces, and panic.” and the worst forms of instinctive behavior.”
