The maximum amount of time is taken up by marches on which troops have to be reassembled daily by divisions or even by corps, and must then still go to their billets. This type of march is advisable only with a relatively small body of troops and in areas rich in resources; in that case easier means of obtaining provisions and shelter will compensate sufficiently for a longer period of exertion. There can be no doubt that the Prussian army, on its retreat in 1806, was mistaken in the practice of putting up the troops in billets every night in order to feed them. Supplies could just as well have been procured in bivouacs, and the army need not have made immense exertions to cover some 250 miles in no less than fourteen days.
All such standards of time and distance will undergo so many changes whenever one encounters poor roads or mountainous country that it will be difficult to estimate accurately the time a certain march should take—let alone to set up any general rule. The best a theorist can do is to point out the pitfalls that beset the problem. In order to avoid them the most meticulous calculations, as well as a large margin for unforeseen delays, are necessary. Weather conditions and the state of the troops must also be taken into account.
Once tents had gone out of use and troops began to be supplied by requisitioning food on the spot, an army's baggage shrank considerably. One would expect the most important result to be an acceleration of mobility and, as a consequence, an increase in the range of a day's march. But this will only occur under certain circumstances.
The change did little to accelerate marches in the theater of operations. The reason is the well-known fact that whenever in earlier times the situation called for an exceptional amount of marching, the baggage had always been left behind or sent ahead, and, in general, separated from the troops for as long as movements of this kind were still in progress. Baggage, in point of fact, rarely had any influence on movements; once it had ceased to be a positive encumbrance, no more notice was taken of it—regardless of how much damage it might suffer. So the Seven Years War produced marches that have still not been surpassed: Lacy's, for instance, in 1760, in support of the Russian diversion toward Berlin. He covered the 220 miles from Schweidnitz through Lusatia to Berlin in ten days—a rate of 22 miles a day, which would be astounding even nowadays for a corps of 15,000 men.
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