Well, actually,
yeah, policing an army is frikkin' hard. Like, in most armies throughout history, and even to an extent today, it's simply an accepted fact that once the battle is over, the looting begins. Not necessarily sacking the city (although that was common too in older times) but picking the battlefield and the immediate area clean, absolutely. It's actually one of the major things that slows down armies on the strategic scale, that the troops will spend hours after the battle picking over the bones instead of getting back on the march. Soldiers are poorly (and often unreliably) paid, often made cynical by frequent brushes with death, and in many cases join up explicitly for the promise of war spoils.
I mean, what's that Pratchett quote?
And, speaking from my conversations with medieval historians like
@Gargulec,
@100thlurker and
@EricD... Yeah! That's pretty accurate!
Soldiers are going to loot, and as a commander, there's very little you can do to stop this. Like, it is a common theme in depictions of old battlefields that after the fighting is over, the dead will be completely stripped bare. In 15th century France (smack bang in the middle of the era Warhammer apes, note), looters were called 'écorcheurs', or 'skinners', because they would steal literally everything off a dead man's back. You'd see corpses sprawled out on the field with only their underwear - if that. Looting parties ranging ahead were often pretty much the official scouts of an army. And this kind of thinking lasted for a
long time - the Battle of Gettysburg started based off a rumor of a town having a large supply of shoes the Confederates could loot.
This guy is about as cynical as I expect of a career soldier, but he's also uh, basically bang on point.
