On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern missile warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three hundred years, was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived not entirely off the country, for it always began with a reserve of provisions, but without any calculated reserve for a whole campaign, and necessarily in such times without any power of keeping essential nourishment for more than a few days. Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the march by far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern force, and you have the truth. You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will usually consist of waggons. The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column would be the large proportion of mounted men. Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important fighting units, mounted. Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things. From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of warfare. The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the year's rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one. He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these "men-at-arms" (the term is a translation of the French "gensdarmes," which means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers. Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a fourteenth-century force.