How Soldiers Ate During The First World War

Which soldier fights better - full or hungry? The First World War did not give an unequivocal answer to this important question. On the one hand, indeed, the soldiers of the defeated Germany were fed much more modestly than the armies of most of their opponents. At the same time, throughout the war , it was the German troops who repeatedly inflicted devastating defeats on armies that were fed better and more refined.

Patriotism and calories

History knows many examples when hungry and exhausted people, gathering strength of spirit, defeated a well-fed and clothed, but aimless enemy. A soldier who understands what he is fighting for, why it is not a pity to give his life for it, can fight without a kitchen with hot food ... A day, two, a week, even a month. But when the war drags on for years, you won't be satisfied with one belief - you can't fool physiology forever. Even the most sincere patriot will simply die of hunger and cold. Because the authorities of most countries preparing for war approach the issue in the same way: a soldier must be fed, and fed well, at the level of a worker engaged in manual labor. What were the soldiers' rationsduring the First World War ?

At the beginning of the 20th century, a soldier of the Russian army was prescribed the following daily ration: 700 g of rye crackers or 1 kg of rye bread, 100 g of groats (even 200 g in the harsh conditions of Siberia), 400 g of fresh meat or 300 g of canned meat, 20 g of butter or lard, 6.4 g of tea, 20 g of sugar, 0.7 g of pepper. Also, a soldier was given about 250 g of fresh or about 20 g of dried vegetables (a mixture of dried cabbage, carrots, beets, turnips, onions, celery and parsley) per day, which were mainly used in soup. Unlike today, potatoes were not so common even 100 years ago, although when they entered the front, they were also used in soups.

During religious fasting, meat in the Slavic army was usually replaced by fish (mainly river fish, often in dried form) or mushrooms, and butter by vegetable oil. Cereals in rations were added in large quantities to first courses, in particular, to vegetable or potato soups, and they were used to cook porridge. Oat, buckwheat, barley, millet groats were used in the 100-year-old army. Rice was distributed only in the most critical conditions.

The total weight of all the products that the soldier ate per day was close to 2 kg, the calorie content was more than 4300 kcal. Which, by the way, was more filling than the ration of the Red and Soviet armies (20 g more protein and 10 g more fat). And for tea, a Soviet soldier generally received 4 p. less - only 1.5 g per day, which was clearly not enough for 3 glasses of normal brew, which a "tsarist" soldier was used to.

Crackers, corned beef and canned goods

In the conditions of the beginning of the war, the soldiers' rations were initially increased even more (in particular, for meat - up to 615 g per day), but a little later, as the war moved into a protracted phase and resources were depleted, it was again reduced, and fresh meat was all more often replaced with corned beef. Although, in general, until the revolutionary chaos of 1917, the Russian leadership barely managed to maintain the food standards of the soldiers , only the quality of food deteriorated.

The issue here was not so much the destruction of villages and the food crisis (the same Germany suffered from it many times more), but the eternal Slavic misery - the undeveloped road network along which quartermasters had to deliver supplies. In addition, in those days, the refrigeration industry was still quite undeveloped: cow carcasses, vegetables and grain in colossal volumes had to be somehow preserved from spoilage, stored and transported. Therefore, situations similar to the bringing of rotten meat to the battleship "Potemkin" were a frequent phenomenon and not always only due to the evil intentions and thefts of quartermasters.

It was not easy even with soldier's bread, although it was baked in those years without eggs and butter, with only flour, salt and yeast. But in peacetime, it was prepared in bakeries (in fact, in ordinary ovens) located in places of constant deployment of units. When the troops advanced to the front, it turned out that it was one thing to give a soldier a kilogram loaf in the barracks, and quite another in the open field. Modest field kitchens could not bake a large number of loaves, it remained at best (if the rear services were not "lost" on the way) to distribute breadcrumbs to the soldiers .

The soldier's rusk of the early 20s is not the usual golden rusk for tea, but, roughly speaking, dried pieces of the same simple loaf. If you eat only them for a long time, people begin to suffer from vitamin deficiency and serious disorders of the digestive system.

The harsh "dry" life in the field was somewhat diversified with canned goods. For the needs of the army, the industry of that time already produced several varieties of them in cylindrical tin cans: "roasted beef", "beef stew", "shchi with meat", "peas with meat". Moreover, the quality of "royal" stew differed for the better from Soviet, and even more so, modern, canned food - 100 years ago, only high-grade meat from the back of the carcass and shoulder blade was used for its production. Also, during the years of the First World War, during the preparation of canned meat, the meat was pre-fried, not stewed (that is, put in cans raw and boiled together with the can, as today).

French cuisine

Despite the outflow of most workers from agriculture and the food industry, developed agrarian and industrial France during the First World War was able to avoid famine. Only some "colonial goods" were missing, and even then these interruptions were of an unsystematic nature. A well-developed network of roads and the positional nature of hostilities made it possible to quickly deliver products to the front.

However, as historian Mykhailo Kozhemyakin writes, "the quality of French military food at different stages of the First World War varied significantly. In 1914 - at the beginning of 1915, it clearly did not meet modern standards, but then the French quartermasters caught up and even surpassed their foreign colleagues. Apparently, none of the  soldiers during the Great War - not even the American ones - ate as well as the French.

The main role here was played by the ancient traditions of French democracy. It was because of her, paradoxically, that France entered the war with an army that did not have centralized kitchens: it was considered that it was not good to force thousands of soldiers to eat the same thing, to impose a military cook on them. Therefore, each platoon was given their own set of kitchen utensils - they said that the soldiers prefer to eat what they would prepare for themselves from a set of products and parcels from home (they had cheeses, sausages, and canned sardines, fruit, jam, sweets, cookies). And every soldier is his own cook.

As a rule, ratatouille or another kind of vegetable stew, bean soup with meat and the like were prepared as main dishes. However, natives of each region of France tried to bring something specific from the richest recipes of their province to the field cuisine. But such democratic "self-activity" - romantic fires at night, boiling cauldrons on them - turned out to be fatal in the conditions of a positional war . But German snipers and artillery gunners immediately began to focus on the lights of French field kitchens, and the French army initially suffered unjustified losses because of this. Military suppliers had to unify the process and also introduce mobile field kitchens and roasters, cooks, food carriers from the near rear to the front, standard rations .

The rations of French soldiers since 1915 were of 3 categories: normal, reinforced (during battles) and dry (in extreme situations). The usual consisted of 750 g of bread (or 650 g of crackers-galettes), 400 g of fresh beef or pork (or 300 g of canned meat, 210 g of corned beef, smoked meat), 30 g of fat or lard, 50 g of dry concentrate for soup, 60 g of rice or dried vegetables (usually beans, peas, lentils, "sublimate" of potatoes or beets), 24 g of salt, 34 g of sugar. The strengthened provided for an "increase" of another 50 g of fresh meat, 40 g of rice, 16 g of sugar, and 12 g of coffee.

All this, in general, resembled the Russian ration , the differences were in coffee instead of tea (24 g per day) and alcoholic beverages. In Russia, half a glass (a little more than 70 grams) of alcohol was given to soldiers before the war only on holidays (10 times a year), and with the beginning of the war , a dry law was introduced in general. Meanwhile, the French soldier drank from his heart: at first he was prescribed 250 g of wine per day, by 1915 - already a half-liter bottle (or a liter of beer, cider). By the middle of the war, the norm of alcohol was increased one and a half times - to 750 g of wine for a soldierexuded optimism and fearlessness as much as possible. Anyone who wished was also not forbidden to buy wine with their own money, which is why soldiers met in the trenches until the evening , who could not connect two words. Also, the daily ration of a French soldier included tobacco (15-20 g), while volunteers collected donations for tobacco for Slavic soldiers .

It is interesting that the enhanced wine ration was intended only for the French: yes, the Slavic soldiers who fought on the Western Front were given only 250 g of wine each. And for the Muslim soldiers of the French colonial troops, wine was replaced with additional portions of coffee and sugar. Moreover, as the war dragged on, coffee became increasingly scarce and began to be replaced by substitutes made from barley and chicory.

The dry ration of a French soldier consisted of 200-500 g of galettes, 300 g of canned meat (they were brought all the way from Madagascar, where a whole production was specially established), 160 g of rice or dried vegetables, at least 50 g of soup-concentrate (more often chicken with pasta or beef with vegetables or rice - 2 briquettes of 25 g each), 48 g of salt, 80 g of sugar (packaged into 2 servings in bags), 36 g of coffee in compressed tablets and 125 g of chocolate. Dry rations were also diluted with alcohol - each division was given a half-liter bottle of rum, which was at the disposal of the sergeant.

The French writer Henri Barbus, who fought in the First World War, described the food on the front lines as follows: "The main meal of each day, which should have been called "soup", consisted of meat with pasta, which fell into a lump, or with rice, or with with beans, more or less cooked, or with potatoes, more or less peeled, which floated in a brown liquid covered with spots of congealed fat. There was no hope of getting either fresh vegetables or vitamins."

In calmer areas of the front, soldiers were more satisfied with their food . In February 1916, the corporal of the 151st line infantry regiment, Christian Bordeschien, wrote in a letter to his family: "During the week we had pea soup with corned beef twice, sweet rice milk soup twice, beef soup with rice once, beef soup once — green beans and once — vegetable stew. All this is completely edible and even tasty, but we scold the cooks a little so that they do not relax."

Instead of meat, fish could be served, which usually caused extreme dissatisfaction not only among mobilized Parisian gourmets - even soldiers recruited from ordinary peasants complained that after salted herring they wanted to drink, and it was not easy to get water at the front. After all, the surrounding area was plowed over by shells, littered with waste from the long stay of entire divisions at one point and the undressed bodies of the killed. All this smelled like trench water, which had to be filtered through cheesecloth, boiled and then filtered again. In order to fill the soldiers' flasks with clean and fresh water, military engineers even laid pipelines to the front line, into which water was supplied by means of sea pumps. But German artillery often destroyed them.