The First World War

by John Keegan

British, after the experience of long marches across the veldt in the Boer War, had adopted the “scientific” Slade-Wallace equipment of canvas webbing, designed to distribute weight as evenly as possible over the body; even so, it dragged on the shoulders and waist. The Germans clung to leather, with the greatcoat hooped outside a stiff back-pack of undressed, and so water-repellant, hide. The French piled everything into a mountainous pyramid, “le chargement de campagne,” crowned with the individual’s metal cooking pot; gleams of sunlight from such pots would allow young Lieutenant Rommel to identify and kill French soldiers in high standing corn on the French frontier later that August.16 The Russians rolled their possessions, greatcoat and all, into a sausage slung over one shoulder and under the other arm. However arranged, no infantryman’s marching load weighed less than sixty pounds; and it had to be plodded forward, mile after mile for an expected twenty miles a day, in stiff, clumsy, nailed boots—“dice-boxes,” brodequins, Bluchers, to the British, French and Germans—which were agony until broken to the shape of the foot.