George Armand Furse K.C.B (1834-1906) wrote a series of books that mainly deal with military logistics. The following is based on the information in Modelling the Logistics of Mantzikert.

Furse was a modestly prolific author and wrote 13 books between 1877 and 1905. He is described in the frontispiece of The Art of Marching as ‘Late of the Black Watch’ and this, while correct, is a trifle understated as he enjoyed a long and fairly distinguished career. He was made an Ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned officer, in 1855. This commission was purchased, a practice which was subsequently abolished in 1871, but was the cheapest commission available giving some indication of Furse’s socio-economic background. Furse purchased his commission during the Crimean War at a time when the Siege of Sevastopol was underway. There was considerable domestic debate about the war and William Howard Russell’s pioneering war reporting had made the public aware of some of the conflict’s logistics-related disasters, so Furse’s deliberate involvement at this time could be considered as demonstrating a genuine enthusiasm for military life. After Crimea he served in India and the Gold Coast, being part of the First Ashanti Expedition led by General Garnet Wolesley. In 1878 while serving as aide-de-camp to Lt-General Sir C. Staveley, Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army, he published his first book, Studies on Military Transport. By 1882 when his second book, Military Transport, was published, he had been made a Lieutenant-Colonel and was Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General working from Horseguards Parade in London. He was promoted to Colonel for his service as part of Garnet Wolesley’s attempt to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 and was made a Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in 1888. It is notable that Furse’s output increases dramatically once he reaches 60 years old, implying that may have been when he retired from the army. Prior to 1894 he wrote five books but between 1894 and his death in 1906 he wrote eight.

The Art of Marching draws on Furse’s experiences as a quartermaster, often in countries far from Britain where conditions resembled those of the march to Mantzikert to some extent. He took part in campaigns in which mixed cavalry and infantry forces travelled long distances away from modern infrastructure such as railways and paved road surfaces. Crucially for our purposes, The Art of Marching includes specific organisational details required to move an army, along with detailed metrics such as the speed of individual troops, the carrying capacity of beasts of burden, the amount of stretching of the column of march to be expected and much more. The fact that the conditions in which Furse collected his observations were not so far from those that were likely to have existed during the Mantzikert campaign make The Art of Marching even more useful.

Interestingly, The Art of Marching was also the title of a talk at the Royal United Services Institute in London by Colonel E.T.H. Hutton in 1893, eight years before Furse’s book was published. Like Furse’s book, Hutton’s talk focussed on large-scale movements of troops with examples containing quantitative data. Hutton, like Furse, took part in the Nile Expedition in 1885 during which he commanded the mounted infantry. At the time of Hutton’s talk, March 15th, 1893, Furse was probably still working at Horseguards Parade in London. It is far from unlikely that Furse was in the audience when someone who was a likely acquaintance gave his talk on a subject that Furse had published books on, in the city in which he worked. If so, Furse may well have gained an approach, and a title, from Hutton’s talk, although the talk is much briefer than Furse’s book and its intention is to make the case for a systematic approach to organising strategic marches rather than to present a complete study of the topic.

Furse’s The Art of Marching does not simply draw upon his personal experience though. He is well read on the subject of military history, especially regarding logistics, and draws in materiel from earlier in the 19th century and further back, even to antiquity. An aspect of this which had considerable significance for the Medieval Warfare on the Grid project is that he referenced writers which were seldom read or referenced in modern academic papers. The Art of Marching does not stand alone as a useful book for the purposes of modelling an army on the march. It not only served as an introduction to Furse’s other books, but it also served as a gateway into an entire literary genre. Furse was far from the only author publishing on these subjects. Unbeknownst to the project’s members at the start of the project, the 19th century was the scene of a veritable explosion of military writing on a variety of subjects from a plethora of viewpoints. The search for useful details on which to build our model spread out from its origin in Furse, back in time through the 19th century and into the 18th and out across space from Britain to Continental Europe and America.

Furse is buried in Aldershot Military Cemetary. His published works are:

Studies On Military Transport, 1877
Military Transport, 1882
The Line Of Communications, 1883
Mobilisation And Embarkation Of An Army Corps, 1883
Embarkation And Disembarkation Of Troops, 1888
The Organization And Administration Of The Lines Of Communication In War, 1894
Information In War, 1895
Military Expeditions Beyond The Seas, 1897
Provisioning Armies In The Field, 1899
The Art Of Marching, 1901
Scouting, 1902
1800 - Marengo And Hohenlinden, 1903
A Hundred Years Ago. Battles By Land & Sea: Ulm, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, 1905