to bring their companies up to strength again without courting financial ruin. A soldier killed in action would bring 33 guilders (later increased to 50 guilders); a trooper with his horse 150 guilders. This system was continued until the end of the Dutch Republic in 1795. Henceforth the government bore the "business risk" of war. In exchange the captains lost their entrepreneurial status and were transformed to professional officers in the modern sense, with all that entailed for tightened discipline. The advantage for the army was that its losses (for instance after battles) were much more rapidly replenished, enabling it to maintain a heightened state of readiness. Other reforms were of a more imitative nature. The reason for the lightning advance of the French army was its great superiority in numbers. An army of 125,000 French faced a Dutch field army of only 22,000. The difference in the total strengths of the two armies was not as large, as the Dutch had managed to double the size of the States Army from its peacetime strength of about 35,000 to about 80,000 in early 1672 through frantic recruitment efforts. Most of these additional troops garrisoned the many Dutch fortresses, however, which subsequently often surrendered without a fight to the French, or were simply bypassed. In any case, 22,000 was about the maximum the Dutch could support logistically in the field. The reason why the French were able to support a far larger field army was that they had developed a superior logistical system in the recent War of Devolution. Previous armies of large size, like the combined Franco-Dutch army of 50,000 that invaded the Spanish Netherlands in 1635 and subsequently almost starved, simply could not manage the strain of supplying the daily bread of the soldiers. The French Secretary of State for War Louvois had developed a system of forward supply bases, well-stocked with fodder for the horses and bread grain for the soldiers before the start of the annual campaign season. This not only kept the French well fed during the campaign in hitherto unsustainable numbers, but also allowed Louis XIV to start his campaigns while his opponents were still waiting for the grass to grow for their cavalry horses. The Dutch government now had to make an attempt to imitate this logistical reform to be able to equal the French numbers in the field. Unlike the French, they based