Doubtless at certain places--castles or fortresses--the actual munitions were stored. To these the armies must have either periodically gone to refit, or what answered to convoys, conveying absolutely necessary warlike stores, must have been formed for the specific purpose of replenishing the locally exhausted stores. All that was really required for the purposes of such wars must have been carried on the persons of the combatants, as seems generally to have been the case, or even on pack animals or country carts. The state of the roads and both their poverty and paucity must have rendered regular organised supply trains impracticable. Similarly as regards food supplies little could have been carried. Like the French about 1811 and 1812, necessity must have rendered the soldiers hardy and self-dependent, though of course at the cost of the civil population. Thus it is said of the French troops in 1811 that they “were trained to reap the standing corn, and grind it by portable mills into flour; if green, they mowed it down with equal dexterity for their horses; if reaped (and hidden away by the inhabitants), they forced it from the peasants’ place of concealment, by placing the bayonet to their throats.” And Wellington himself writes, that “the French armies in Spain have never had any secure communications beyond the ground which they occupy; and provided the enemy opposed to them is not too strong for them, they are indifferent in respect to the quarter from which their operations are directed, or upon which side they carry them on.” And, later, the French “live by the authorised and regular plunder of the country if any should remain; they suffer labour, hardships, and privations every day; they go on without pay, provisions, money, or anything, but they lose in consequence half their army in every campaign.” This accounts for the enormous losses of the rank and file in the early days of the nineteenth century, while the losses in the fifteenth century, with little or no medical or surgical knowledge for the aid of sick and wounded, can only be surmised. History, military history especially, always repeats itself in pointing out the necessary results of such unsystematically organised systems. [Illustration: _Half Armour (Circa 1640)._] CHAPTER III THE PURITAN HOST