Military animals

  Despite what some people might say, horses are still the most important military animals. Whether you like all the snob in the cavalry or not, it stays an essential military formation. But even more than that, horses are used to pull all the luggage trains of the army with the very important rations, the weapons, our families, the sophisticated device of the engineers and the resources of the Medical Corps. Without horses, war would look very different.   Horses provide a number of challenges for the army. They need to be fed, maintain and replaced when they die. In normal circumstances, the remount is done through the large number of national and private studs that produce young stock that itself provide good quality cavalry mounts. However, those horses need to be broken before they can be ridden, and this process takes 18 months to 2 years.   If more horses die than they are horses who have finished their training, the remount requires asking for volunteer horses among the population—mostly provided by the nobility and well-off population—or purchasing new horses already trained. Conscripting horses is another possible solution, but not a popular one with the French population. In addition, it has an impact on the productivity of the farmers and other workers left behind.   All of these remount methods create huge delays for the horse to arrive, often only for the army to realise that they do not fulfil the criteria of the contracts, forcing them to send the animals back.   All those horses not specially trained for use in the army have a big drawback: they have been pampered all their life in warm stables, with regular consistent feeds. Many do not have the stamina to survive the rigour of army life and the harsh treatment from inexperienced riders.

  Yet, many regiments and divisions are assigned a specific horse colour. The worse is the Artillery Corps! In 1812, King Napoléon decided that the 1st artificers would have whites, 2nd pales, 3rd red bays, 4th chestnuts, 5th bays, 6th blacks, 7th brown piebald, and 8th black piebald! So much troubles for so little achieved! Of course, as soon as war starts, all those considerations are forgotten...—at least by the officers with any good sense!

 

Having good messenger pigeons is an unfortunate requirement to send rapid, discreet messages, although thankfully this will not last for much longer as the telegraphs network continues to develop. In the meantime, we are reduced to send messengers on horseback for short distance and pigeons for longer ones. All magical means we have attempted to replace them have been too easy to intercept or block completely—a lot more than the birds at least.

Of course, the problem with pigeons is that they can only go in one direction—return to their pigeonnier—and so you need to have a variety of birds on hand to be able to send messages everywhere. In addition, they require training and care and all of that is wasted as soon as they get noticed and killed by the enemies... And a great favourite of all armies is indeed the peregrine falcons, bred and trained to intercept and kill all suspicious birds, as well as to bring back the corpses and their messages back to their masters.

France has a long and noble venery tradition, and the revolution has not changed any of that. The royal venery and the military kennels have had the good sense to resist the inclusion of those English foxhounds, contrary to some less discerning nobles in the country... The race we keep in the army is the St-Hubert, the same we have used for centuries! Bred and trained by our own, their sense of smell is even more acute and efficient in detecting any form of foreign and dangerous magic over a kilometre-wide radius—traps, potions and foreigners.     The division of the Engineering Corps that is stationed in Lyon at the military alchemy manufacture does not have their own dogs. The official reason is that the dogs' nose is clogged by the pungent smell of the enormous volume of alchemical ingredients, making them useless and an unnecessary expense. Their lack of warning during the near catastrophe of Lyon 20 years ago is pointed as a proof. The unofficial explanation is, of course, the Flemish birth of Colonel Adalinde.  

Leeches are small but very important workers inside the military. Those disgusting animals feed on our blood and the magic and nutrients it contains. People used to hunt leeches in swamps to sell them to doctors who have been using them in medicine for centuries. The principle is to use the leeches to get the blood flowing in—and out, of course!— of the body in order to avoid thrombosis and to rebalance the humours.   Since then, our doctors and scientists have been able to transmute leeches and give them a nudge in the right direction to get them to feed in priority on dangerous raw magic or poisons ,both chemical and magical, that would have found its way in our body. Thanks to careful breeding, those qualities have only been enhanced through time, resulting in an essential tool that all doctors keep around to treat numerous ailments.     The army has vats filled with the blood sucking creatures and never forget to store up on them before a big campaign. They have proved their efficiency in countering the effects of the soldiers' exposure to raw magic during battles, alchemical poisoning from enemies' ammunition, and even a basic cleansing of all wounds incurred so as to avoid gangrene. From time to time, one animal among the new generation is... faulty and does not feed on what it is supposed to. Those cases are never spoken of.  

The Engineering Corps has managed to get another animal on the pay roll: a fluffy black cat that was prowling for a while around the military alchemical manufactures in Lyon. Colonel Adalinde who is responsible for the oversight of the manufacture decided to adopt him and to make him the mascot of the division.   Thanks to her good rapports with her superiors, she managed to get the cat officially enrolled on the army payroll under the official role of mouser. After all, nobody would want a mouse to interfere with the alchemical vats or the numerous runes painted on the ground and cause a repeat of the near-catastrophe that almost completely destroyed Lyon 20 years ago! And since all the higher-ranking officers are in Paris and only come to Lyon for short visits, not one of them will ever notice that the cat in question is far too haughty—and lazy—to actually chase a mouse.   Meanwhile, Adalinde is keeping the cat in her private apartments and the army barracks, and the animal is deigning answering her regular apport of food and worship with a margin of loyalty.   Since the cat is our mascot and so loved by our superior, all the Lyon engineers are rivalling with each other to gain its affection. This is mostly done through making trinkets for him to play with or sleep on. But the little monster by far prefers the cloth collar made by Adalinde, as it allows him to control some form of wild magic to merge with the shadows... A very apt power for a beast named Abysse.