Actu7ally, this is extremely true. Much of the core of the Southern army was made up of boys and men who had, at best, vague ideological support, but wanted to do something exciting. For most, the war promised travel and adventure, in a time when many people rarely did.
Lee made a huge mistake in ordering it, and more than a few people told him it was outright stupid, explained why, and painted a detailed picture of what would happen. Lee did not change his mind. At this point in the war he had seemingly come to believe he was going to win it single-handedly and could beat anybody in the field. But Meade (and later Grant) were not McClellan, Burnside, or Hooker. Longstreet had also previously argued against Lee’s plans at Gettysburg, but also obeyed and did exactly what Lee told him to do.
Southern soldiers were in fact notoriously undisciplined but had amazing morale. They quite frequently won by plain unshakable courage, at least in the East. They also had immense admiration for “Marse Robert” and would do nearly anything he ordered, including carrying out insane assaults. And these often worked for them, as even in the days of the rifle a charge, especially across broken ground or wooded terrain, was quite workable.
If Lee didn’t take a desperate gamble and win Gettysburg, and then march on DC, his other choice was to retreat while the Union continued to gain strength.
I’m going to go for Kursk as the answer to the OP.
Well, they could not have known something that isn’t true. Most of them didn’t die. Somewhere between 1000 and 2000 of the 12,500 men committed to the attack died; about 4000 were wounded, a thousand captured. That was a horrific loss by the standards of the time, but the lethality of battles then, while shocking to people then, was not at the level of wars of the 20th century. It is worthwhile to note that the Battle of Shiloh, fought in 1862, saw the Union lose 1800 men killed in two full days of fighting, and that was considered absolutely scandalous; Grant was raked through the coals of the media, and he was the guy who WON the battle.
We are again presented in this thread with the strange notion that military commanders in the past were all stupid, and that the idea of a frontal assault in 1863 was transparently insane and could never work. But frontal assaults DID work in 1863, just as they had worked in 1862 and would continue to work in 1864. Correctly prepared, at the right time and against the right position, a frontal assault could drive the enemy from his position and inflict enormous, disproportionate losses on the defender.
As it happens, Lee’s attack failed that day because he misread Union intentions and strengths, and the preparatory bombardment failed. But attacks had worked lots of times before, and would keep working lots of times after.
Such victories must have been at least a little pyrrhic: afterwards, you come to own a piece of land covered with mangled bodies. How does that get handled?
I’m not too versed in the logistics of, say, your average Roman legion, but I do know that in the High Middle Ages “one knight” (as reported by chroniclers and such) was really up to 20 or 30 people, all busy keeping their one dude on the horse in fit fighting shape. A knight’s train usually featured at least 5 or 6 horses, too (two battle horses minimum, a travel horse or three, pack horses, maybe a hunting horse too to pass the time between battles), plus whatever nags, donkeys or mules the servants could buy, beg or steal. Even the poorer, landless knights would typically have at least 3 or 4 blokes tagging along.
As for footsoldiers and mercenaries, their supply train was no less considerable as they too had plenty of needs : food and forage, armour, arrows by the cart, paymasters & assorted bean counters, surgeons, siege equipment & assorted engineering thingamabobs, trollops… An army on the march was pretty much a small, mobile town
In the British army, the sergeants walked just behind the ranks armed with revolvers. They would shoot anyone who turned round to run because if one got away you can be sure that many would follow.
50,000 men is a square about 225x225. Big but it would fit on a parade ground. The bigger difficulty would have been simply feeding armies that huge. Before mechanized transport, armies had to break apart into foraging parties and strip the land like locusts.
From Wikipedia, but still: “During the Thirty Years’ War, it could occur that a 1,000-man regiment would be accompanied by 500 women and 300 children.” Don’t know what the proportions would be during other wars, before or since.
Yes, many of them might not have even had many teeth!
But for a traveling soldier of that time, it was pretty common to carry all their accumulated wealth & valuables with them. (Where else would they put it. after all? There weren’t any banks. No post office to mail it home, and not even sure when or if they would get home.) So they carried it with them. If they had a wife/girlfriend among the camp followers, they probably left their money & valuables (other than weapons) with them. But many soldiers didn’t, so they would have had a purse of coins tied somewhere on their body. So looting after a battle was a profitable thing.
Don’t forget about the most important bartering items:
Nylon stockings, chocolate and cigarettes, very valuable in the dark days of WWII.
Interesting to notice that in the movie Dr. Strangelove those items were also part of the survivor kit the airmen had, it was assumed that in an emergency those items would be valuable again just like in WWII.
The last big battle before the Shogunate was established in Japan was Sekigahara. Roughly 75,000 on one side and 120,000 on the other. This is from a country rather smaller than the UK, since Hokkaido (about 20% of modern Japan’s land area, and about 3/4 of its arable land) was still held by Ainu until the 1800s, as was Okinawa. Keep in mind, logistical support would at least double, probably quadruple the number of actual people involved.
