 Before the advent of motorized warfare, campaigns usually resulted in tens of thousands of equine deaths; troops and civilians ate the carcasses, since troop logistics were often unreliable.Troops of Napoleon's Grande Armée killed almost all of their horses during their retreat from Moscow to feed themselves.In his biography, "Fifty Years a Veterinary Surgeon", Fredrick Hobday wrote that when his British Army veterinary field hospital arrived in Cremona from France in 1916 it was the subject of a bidding war (won by Milanese horse-meat canners) for salvageable equine carcasses.