denisonh
Posts: 2194
Joined: 12/21/2001
From: Upstate SC
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Attrition should refer to losses of available strength due to reasons other than combat.
Since a majority of casualties during the Napoleonic period were due to reasons other than combat, it is a big category of losses.
Given the French army, at least early on, subject to less desertion and was adept at foraging. This resulted in the French suffering less attrition than it's opponents.
Still, they suffered from disease, the number 1 cause of casualties, like anyone else.
As for statistics and record keeping, only anal-retentive nation of shopkeepers armies kept good records as to strength and losses. It is the only army you can track strength by battalion/squadron on a regular basis to derive effects of non-combat losses.
Other armies it is detective work to find the numbers, and they will be estimates. It can be done, and some realtively accurate estimates generated. You will not get a by the man accounting for any army, but it is not a requirement when analyzing statistcis of a large organization. I would suggest far more soldiers died of disease than doing something like "trade their orders mid-route with someone". In looking at the army as a whole, I would suggest that that particular scenario if far less common and "statistically insignificant" when drawing conclusions about non-combat losses. Dysentery, frostbite, hypothermia, and desertion were probably hundreds or thousands times more common.
Suffice to say, disease being the biggest cause of casualties, not modeling it appropriately for all armies as "attrition"would be a major historical inaccuracy.
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 "Life is tough, it's even tougher when you're stupid" -SGT John M. Stryker, USMC
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