Sometimes I'll read about ancient armies where someone may have an army of 50,000 men on the move and I just dont understand logistically what this would be like. My hometown has a population of 32,000 and I can't even think of a clearing anywhere near the town that is vacant enough to get a mass of that size in formation to March. I mean there are trees, rivers, hills etc. I'm just curious what these massive ancient armies would look like on the move. Like in the Punic Wars apparently Hannibal marched his army across the alps or something and I just cant wrap my mind around the logistics of such a march regarding the actual marching itself, what are they eating and how is it effectively distributed amongst the men, where and how do they sleep, and just how many generals are needed to corral such a large mass of marching men and ensure they remain on the same page regarding pace or whatever else.
Check this post out. It has a couple good answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nf121/how_did_medieval_armies_handle_logistics_how/
/u/asiaexpert /u/spoonfeedme
Three good books are Jonathan P. Roth's "The Logistics of the Roman Army at War" (review), John W.I. Lee's "A Greek Army on the March" (review), and Geoffrey Parker's "The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road" which talks about the problem of moving troops from northern Italy to the Low Countries and keeping them from deserting once there. The first two are kind of expensive, but Roth's PhD thesis on the logistics of the Jewish Wars is available online. David Engels' "Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army" (1978) is cheap but some of his assumptions about wagons or ancient population density have not held up.
You might enjoy the blog post Mountain Passes Ancient and Modern which uses hiking- something we are all familiar with- to explore why some things work for an individual but not for a large army and why armies often follow similar routes.