Whenever I’m in an antique book store, I always hunt for titles on wine. Those old volumes show me how vintners once viewed their craft, how drinkers wove alcohol into everyday life and how critics assessed each vintage. Not long ago I unearthed Frank Hedges Butler’s “Wine and the Wine Lands of the World: With Some Account of Places Visited,” published in the early 1920s just after World War I. Butler was a Brit active on boards like the Royal Automobile Club and a wine exporter.

He wrote, “To drink too much wine is as bad as eating or drinking too much of anything else. One should not lay the blame on wine because some people do not know how to drink it moderately.” But moderation wasn’t on France’s front lines during the Great War. Butler reported that French military authorities requisitioned some 792 million bottles of wine for the troops—about thirteen times England’s annual consumption then.

The need was so vast the government effectively nationalized the wine industry to ensure no soldier went thirsty. In 1915 each man’s daily ration was a quarter liter; by 1917 it had risen to three-quarters of a liter—nearly an entire bottle per soldier every day.

Butler also wrote, “The Army Medical Staff, with their long and intensive experience, are under no illusion as to the value of wine in hospital practice. During the Crimean War, in 1854, my firm shipped a quantity of wines and spirits to Miss Florence Nightingale at the Scutari Hospital for the use of our wounded soldiers. And during the Boer War, in 1899-1900, the firm shipped more than one hundred thousand bottles of Port wine to South Africa, besides other wines and spirits, for hospital use.”

Military leaders may not have viewed alcohol as a true health cure, but they valued its capacity to bolster courage, lift morale, numb pain and supply quick calories and warmth in freezing winters—far better than what water fouled by corpses could provide. Perhaps that heavy reliance helps explain why France was overtaken so swiftly in World War II.

Even Napoleon carried his chosen bottles—Gevrey-Chambertin and Moët & Chandon—on every campaign, except when he missed a pickup before Waterloo in 1815, an absence some joke cost him the battle.

The French weren’t the only soldiers to insist on alcohol in battle. In World War II, Japanese soldiers received sake and beer before Banzai charges to steel themselves against Allied gunfire.

It’s hard to imagine modern-day drone pilots performing under that much alcohol.

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