The century between Napoleon's fall and the outbreak of World War I saw a notable spreading of military conscription and the steady growth of large standing armies. Firepower increased enormously, while the revolutionary changes in the means of transport made for the first time for the rapid assembling and moving of vast contingents of men. Armies became highly organized and specialized bodies complete with their general staffs, their logistic support and supply departments. Military doctrine everywhere developed along parallel lines and strategy was taught as a (more or less) exact science. Militarists and antimilitarists disagreed strenuously about virtually everything, but on one point there was grim unanimity, a universal recogniton that the coming war would be a war of masses, with the outcome hinging on which side could get fastest with the greatest quantity of men and materiel to the particular area of operations. Pacifists, such as Jean de Bloch, argued that the immense improvement in the mechanism of slaughter and the unbearably high cost of modern war would lead to its abolition. The militarists put their own firm faith in the decisive value of bold leadership and maximum organization.
In the light of all this, it is hardly surprising that scant attention was paid to the possibility of guerrilla warfare; it seemed that, with the invention of the machine gun and the swift evolution in communications, the age of partisan warfare had come to an end. Small bodies of soldiers, or of civilians acting behind the enemy lines, could perhaps have a certain nuisance value, but it was unthinkable that they could effectively influence the result of a battle, let alone a campaign or a war. European armies, in short, prepared for nothing but regular warfare.
Such single-minded concentration on war between great masses of men and the unwillingness to consider any other possibilites seems nonetheless a little curious in retrospect, for between 1815 and 1914 there were only very few major wars but a great many guerrilla campaigns. Even the major wars (such as the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871) had been accompanied by partisan operations. Most of the campaigns throughout the British Empire and in Latin America were waged against (or sometimes between) irregular forces. Guerrilla tactics figured prominently in the Polish insurrection, the Italian and Greek wars of independence, as well as in the Spanish civil wars, in the resistance of the Caucasians against the Russians and of Abd el-Kader against the French in North Africa. This list, though by no means complete, shows a discrepancy between military reality and strategic doctrine. All the stranger considering that the regular armies unprepared for irregular warfare had themselves suffered nasty surprises on more than one occasion: the Germans in 1870 were convinced that the war was over after they had defeated the regular French armies; the British in South Africa had similar illusions after the capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria. In the event, the Germans and the British found it more difficult to cope with the irregulars, and this despite the fact that partisan warfare was almost unplanned and uncoordinated. Surely such experiences should have induced military leaders and theorists to give at least a passing thought to the possibility, however remote, that guerrilla warfare still had something of a future.
One does not have to look far for the reasons for such blindness. There was, to begin with, instinctive resistance to the employment of forces that could not be fitted into the framework of organized and disciplined armies. Guerrilla warfare was erratic, unprofessional, unpredictable; it violated all established rules. It might dovetail neatly with right- or left-wing anarchist thinking, but it was altogether alien to the makeup of the military mind. To conduct guerrilla warfare was a counsel of despair, an ultima ratio, to be applied by a weaker army in the case of occupation; to prepare for such an eventuality was tantamount to defeatism. It could be argued, in addition, that most nineteenth-century guerrilla wars had taken place outside Europe, between or against backward nations that were as yet incapable of conducting any other form of warfare. It seemed only natural to assume that with the spread of civilization — or, to be precise, with the spread of modern technology — guerrilla warfare would disappear even in distant and underdeveloped lands. Finally, there was the indisputable fact that, with very rare exceptions, partisans, guerrillas and franc tireurs had invariably been defeated in the end, however brave and well led, unless they had fought in conjunction with regular armies. If in later perspective the nineteenth-century strategists were mistaken in belittling or altogether ignoring guerrilla warfare, there were certainly weighty enough reasons at the time to bolster their attitude.
But even it guerrilla warfare was deemed a thing ot the past, it was still very much in evidence, and it is to its more important manifestations in the last century that we next have to turn. Among the many guerrilla wars of the period it is impossible to find two that were identical; each had its own specific character and political context. In Italy and Spain, in Poland and Greece, regular and irregular warfare were intermingled, professionals applying unorthodox tactics, andguerrilleros playing regular soldiers. Guerrilla campaigns in Latin America differed in basic respects from jungle, mountain and "savage" warfare in Asia and Africa. There were some striking resemblances between Shamil's and Abd el-Kader's campaigns — and not alone because both leaders were pious Moslems — but the political, cultural and physical backgrounds had little in common; one war was conducted in the mountains, the other mainly in the desert, of necessity making the tactics used by and against the guerrillas in each case markedly dissimilar. The history of guerrilla war, in brief, varied from country to country, and sometimes even from province to province. To attempt in these circumstances to formulate a definitive theory of guerrilla warfare is a vain undertaking.
Latin America is the guerrilla continent par excellence. In the entire history of Central and South America it is difficult to point to more than a handful of full-scale, regular wars; on the other hand, there were countless external and internal guerrilla wars, too many, in fact, for enumeration. This can be laid, to a certain extent, to their own particular history and geography — the wide-open thinly populated spaces, the governments which were too poor to afford sizable regular armies. It had long been the Latin American military disposition in any event to incline more to the convention of small flexible fighting units than to large, rigidly disciplined armies. Moreover, army and politics have been traditionally closer linked in Latin America than in other parts of the world; the armies were on the whole more politically oriented, and political life more militarized than elsewhere. The dividing line between guerrilla war, banditry, the regular army and politics was, in fact, altogether blurred.
The Latin American tradition oi guerrilla warfare predates the wars of independence. In the Andean regions a small white minority ruled the exploited and mistreated native Indians who periodically revolted against their masters. The most widespread risings were those of Tupac Amaru (1781-1782), who claimed to be of royal (Inca) descent, and of Pumacahua (1814-1815) — also apparently of Inca ancestry,1 Tupac Amaru's revolt, which almost two centuries later inspired the Uruguayan urban guerrillas, began with a successful ambush in which twelve of his men captured the local corregidor and seized a quantity of guns. His following soon swelled to forty thousand and later to sixty thousand men who were, however, not much of a fighting force; undisciplined and poorly equipped, careless and often drunk. Tupac Amaru made a halfhearted, if somewhat unavailing, attempt to attract a few whites and the Negro slaves, and with his nonetheless still growing army, tried to defeat the enemy in frontal assaults by sheer numbers (the siege of Cuzco). But these operations failed and in the end the Indians were decisively defeated by a slow-moving seventy-year-old Spanish general commanding untrained troops, numerically far inferior to the Indians.2 Tupac Amaru was sentenced to death and his body dismembered, he first having been compelled to watch the execution of his wife along with all his relatives. After his death the rebellion continued under Diego Tupac Amaru. This was the bloodiest period of the rising, the policy of the Indians being to kill all whites and mestizos. They besieged La Paz and Puno but could gain no major victory. These were curious battles accompanied apparently by more noise than actual fighting; the operations were stopped from time to time by agreements which neither side had any intention of keeping.
The same pattern recurred in the Pumacahua rebellion; he had been a commander in the Spanish army in the campaign against Tupac Amaru. His one advantage was that he had Creole support, and his force, unlike that of his predecessor, succeeded in occupying several important towns such as La Paz, Arequipa and Puno. But discipline among his troops, too, was lamentable, and once the Spanish had managed to concentrate a small force, they defeated him with the greatest of ease.3 There were other risings but they all failed, primarily because the Indians made the same mistake as the European peasants in the Jacqueries; they were moderately successful while fighting in small groups, but the moment they tried to concentrate their forces and to imitate regular armies, they became a target that could only too easily be outmaneuvered and destroyed. The Indians fought bravely, but they needed the Creoles for military leadership and organization. In general, whenever Indians and Creoles made common cause, the prospect for victory was immeasurably greater.
What has been said about the Indians applies a fortiori to the Negro slave revolts of which there were several, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century, partly under the influence of the French Revolution.4 With one famous exception they all collapsed for lack of internal solidarity, lack of weapons, insufficient military know-how and, above all, the absence of effective military leadership. The striking exception was, of course, Toussaint l'Ouverture's rising in San Domingo. It succeeded because it had a leader of genius, and because the general level of education under French rule was higher than elsewhere; no Indian leader would have been able to compose beautiful declamations in the style of the French Revolution. Toussaint also received foreign help, mainly from the British, and the French forces sent out against him were decimated by tropical disease. But insofar as guerrilla warfare is concerned, the war waged by the "Black Jacobins" offers little of interest; they did not, as a rule, conduct guerrilla warfare but defeated the French precisely because their leaders were able to establish a fairly effective regular army with all its trappings.
The officers called themselves generals, colonels, marshals, commanders, and the leaders decorated themselves with scraps of uniforms, ribbons and orders, which they found on the plantations or took from the enemy killed in battle. . . . The insurgents had developed a method of attack based on their overwhelming numerical superiority. . . . They placed themselves in groups, choosing wooden spots in such a way as to envelop their enemy, seeking to crush him by weight of numbers.5
Héedouville, the French commander, was a veteran of the Vendée campaign, and if he found coping with the insurgents so difficult, it still stemmed principally, their greater numerical strength notwithstanding, from their not behaving like Chouans. After Toussaints treacherous arrest by the French, the movement degenerated into a race war culminating in the massacre of the white inhabitants of the island.
The Latin American wars of independence involved much guerrilla fighting; "pure" guerrilleros were rare, but then regular warfare was also quite irregular by European standards. More often than not the campaigns consisted of a mixture of regular and guerrilla warfare. Among the more prominent guerrilla bands were the montoneros of the La Plata region, the Almeydas of New Granada, the guerrilla bands of Central and Upper Peru, and the units commanded by José Antonio Paez in Venezuela.6 They varied greatly in outlook and social background; the montoneros were mostly gauchos following their local leaders, the Almeydas were the private army of a Creole clan, while the guerrillas of Central Peru consisted similarly of middle-class Creoles and Mestizos whose property and families had suffered at the hands of royalists and who sought revenge. "They were joined by delinquents, by bandit chiefs and their followers . . . who used guerrilla operations as a means of personal plunder."7
Paez, one of Bolivar 's most able commanders, started his military career in mid-1809 when, while driving a herd along a highway in Venezuela, he encountered a slave revolt. He joined them, became their leader, and eventually had some two thousand lancers under his command. These savage bands were held together by no ardent idealism or ideology but simply by the prospect of plunder, a fact freely recognized by their leaders. Bolivar temporarily dominated the guerrilla bands by promising them land after victory, but they still went on robbing and plundering without waiting for war's end.8 Slogans such as "independence" meant not so much national independence and unity, but independence from Spanish law and taxation; it was a rebellion against authority in general and it resulted in the transitory emergence of dozens of small, short-lived, semianarchist republics. Their revolutionary convictions were not always very deep; the great guerrilla leader Bores went over to the royalists from one day to the next without much compunction. The contribution of the guerrilleros to the war effort was on the whole a modest one, with the possible exception of Venezuela, where Bolívar succeeded in coordinating their operations during the crucial years. What the guerrillas lacked was not so much arms and provisions — the Spaniards were not much better equipped — but staying power, elementary discipline, cohesion, and leadership. They operated haphazardly, and whether, on balance, more for harm than for good remains debatable. Looked at in historical perspective, their chief significance lay in their setting a pattern for many years to come. A few hundred peons led by their hacendado or a local caudillo armed with machetes would rise against the local government; there were many variations on this theme, but usually those who followed him were mainly out for plunder. The political label was of importance, for it provided immunity against capital punishment.9 European commanders quickly adjusted themselves to local customs. Garibaldi's biographer'notes, quite matter-of-factly, that his hero "remained for 36 hours in Gualeguaychu [in 1845]. For the inhabitants, they were 36 hours of terror, about which their descendants still speak to day. Garibaldi's men looted the town, causing great destruction."10 In Italy, Garibaldi would have shot soldiers found looting.
Guerrilla warfare frequently was the high road to political and economic power; yesterday's brigand could well become tomorrow's government minister, amassing a fortune on the way. The spoils were, of course, shared with his followers and the great prize was always land. This is not to say that patriotism or social protest were totally absent as motivating forces; as far as the leaders were concerned, political goals and ambitions always featured prominently. But, on the whole, political motivation played a lesser role among guerrilla movements in Latin America than in Europe.
There were some signal exceptions, above all the Mexican revolts between 1810 and 1815 led by two clergymen, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José Maria Morelos.11 They fought not only for national independence, but also for far-reaching social reforms, such as the abolition of the tribute paid by the Indians, and the establishment of a republic. While the bulk of the army — "Generalissimo" Hidalgo had an army of sixty thousand — was Indian, the leadership was Creole (native-born of European descent), and the religious element was a factor of considerable importance. (The battle cry was "Long live our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government.") Hidalgo and Morelos were eventually captured by the royalist forces and executed. Both were posthumously rehabilitated; Hidalgo has forever been inscribed in the history of his homeland as the "father of Mexican independence," Morelos had a province named after him, which one hundred years later was to become the scene of Zapata's operations. Great popular leaders, their genius was not in the military field, and it is doubtful whether it is really permissible to regard them as guerrilla commanders at all, as some historians have done. They would, in fact, have fared much better if they had applied guerrilla tactics instead of besieging (or defending) big cities. The forces under them, however, were more numerous than the enemy's and the temptation must have been great to defeat the other side in a few decisive battles rather than in protracted partisan warfare. But irregulars cannot as a rule seek conclusive battles; the failure to accept this simple truth has spelled doom time and again to popular movements in Latin America just as in other parts of the world.
Fifty years later, Mexico again became the scene of a major war. The Spanish and French armies which invaded Mexico in 1861-1862 encountered resistance from Mexican irregulars almost from the beginning (the blockade of Santa Cruz by Juarez's forces). The French contingents were led by veterans of the North African campaigns such as Bazaine, and before long counterguerrilla units were set up under the command of Stoecklin. Their anabasis to Mexico City was beset by every manner of hazard — rain, bad roads, shortage of supplies, yellow fever — but the capital was taken in June 1863, and by the end of the following year about three-quarters of the country was in their hands and they controlled all major cities. Only the state of Guerrero was still held by Juarez. Juarez's forces, weak as they were, adhered to time-honored guerrilla tactics, harassing the French lines of communications, refusing to accept battle, always retiring, biding their time.12
The subsequent course of events need not be retold in detail. Napoleon III decided to withdraw his forces in January 1866; poor Maximilian, a charming man but weak and vacillating, lost control and was eventually captured and executed. Napoleon's decision came not because his army had been defeated; their losses had been insubstantial. The Mexican forces improved somewhat in the course of the war and they received considerable help from the United States, while Escobedo, one of Juarez's generals, was the first to use the machine gun in battle. But the Mexican soldiers, often unpaid, lacked both training and fighting spirit, the various guerrilla units would not coordinate their efforts, and individual marksmanship was poor. Not that French morale was very high either; Porfirio Díaz, subsequently president of Mexico, had three hundred French deserters in his little army. During the last phase of the war there was a tacit understanding between the French and Profirio Díaz that the former should not be molested during the evacuation. The French, in short, suffered no military defeat and the Mexicans were lucky in that the French emperor changed his mind in midcourse about what was anyway for him no more than a minor adventure. Maximilian could have fortified his position by calling for equal treatment to be granted to the Indians and by building up a new regular army, but he failed to do either. Having outlasted the enemy, Juarez returned in triumph to his capital.
It would be tedious to enumerate the long series of armed conflicts in Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century. There was much guerrilla activity in Venezuela in the 1860s; when Crespo entered Caracas in 1892, his forces were composed mainly of guerrilla units. Again, in the Brazilian civil war in the 1890s, guerrilla warfare was the rule rather than the exception; passing reference need only be made to Gumercindo's hit-and-run attacks, and his raid of seven hundred and fifty miles to Santa Cater-ina.
The Peruvian general Andrés Caceres fought a three-year guerrilla war against the victorious Chilean army in the Andean regions of Peru from 1881 to 1883 (Campaña de la Brefia); this campaign was later studied in the Austrian war academy as an excellent illustration of successful mountain warfare.13 But the most protracted guerrilla war took place in Cuba; it lasted from 1868 to 1878 and again flared up in January 1895, leading eventually to war between Spain and the United States. In the Cuban war more than national independence was involved; the neglect of the smaller farmers was an important issue, the question of slavery being another. Like all Cuban guerrilla wars including Castro's campaign, Oriente, the eastern province of the island, was the central scene of operations. The rebels numbered some ten to twenty thousand men and, unable to face the Spanish army in open combat, engaged for the most part in acts of sabotage. "It was less a war than a breakdown of order . ., a formalization of the violent banditry that had gone on through much of the early 19th century."14 Two outstanding leaders emerged, the mulatto Antonio Maceo, and Maximo Gómez. This inconclusive war lasted for a decade; despite some initial successes, the rebels failed to raise the standard of revolt in prosperous western Cuba. As the war continued, dissension spread in the guerrillas' ranks, and by concentrating strong forces and conceding some of the rebels' demands, the Spanish induced them to accept an armistice.
When, two decades later, fighting broke out again, the old military leaders Máximo Gómez and Maceo were still very much to the fore. But the inspiration for the independence movement now came largely from the ideologists, from José Martí most especially in his North American exile. Nonetheless, the moment fighting started, effective control passed into the hands of the guerrilla captains. As in the 1870s, the insurgents depended to a great extent on money and arms from the United States. In contrast to the desultory fighting of 1868, the guerrilla war in 1895 was far more ferocious; the insurgents were stronger—numbering about thirty thousand men organized in some thirty bands. They threatened to burn down the plantations and to make the island uninhabitable. Eventually, some forty thousand guerrilleros faced eighty-five thousand Spanish troops, of which, however, only about half were battle-ready, the rest suffering from yellow fever and other diseases. (About two thousand Spaniards were to die in battle but many more of this or that tropical sickness.) The war went badly for the Spanish until General Valeriano Weyler, the toughest and most effective Spanish soldier of his time, was made commander in chief. Weyler responded to terror with counterterror, sealing off the eastern part of the country more or less effectively by means of ditches, walls and blockhouses; he used reconcentraciones (concentration camps) to remove civilians from the battle areas. From a purely military point of view, Weyler was winning the war by 1896, but it was by no means total victory and, as far as Spain itself was concerned, the war had gone on for too long already and become too costly. The economy of Cuba, above all the sugar crop, was in ruins under the double onslaught of guerrillas and the government troops. There was anti-Weyler campaign in Madrid, and, more damaging yet, he had an exceedingly bad press in America, preparing the ground for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Eventually Weyler had to go and Blanco, his successor, was easily defeated by the American expeditionary force in 1898. Antonio Maceo was killed in the fighting, but Gomez lived to become a general and to enter Havana at the head of his troops. As peace came, the politicans once more took over and the guerrilla army was disbanded.15
Guerrilla warfare in Latin American history took many forms: wars of national liberation; struggles of landless peasants and small farmers against large landowners; fighting between local chieftains for political power. A remarkable example of the Vendean type of guerrilla warfare against political and social change with strong religious undertones is the affair of Antonio Conselheiro in Canudos.16 Conselheiro was a primitive mystic who fell out with the Church authorities and attacked the Brazilian Republic because it had arrogated to itself jurisdiction over marriage and burial. He regarded the victory of the Republic in 1889 and the proclamation of religious tolerance as the work of Satan in the guise of Masonry, Protestantism and Positivism, about which admittedly, he had only the haziest notions. In 1893, at the age of sixty, he decided to seek refuge in a little place in the Brazilian hinterland about two hundred miles from Bahia where the police would never be able to find him. This was Canudos, formerly an old cattle ranch which had become a miserable shantytown of several thousand inhabitants virtually cut off from the outside world. Two Italian Capucine monks who visited Conselheiro and his followers in May 1895 reported that it was the hotbed of a dangerous political as well as a religious sect. The Rio de Janeiro republicans came to look on it as the center of restorationist plots which had to be destroyed.17 In truth, Conselheiro's followers, thejaguncos (a term originally meaning ruffians), were not so much fanatic royalists as adherents of a messianic folk movement, caring only about their "simpleminded, visionary religion, a crude mixture of Catholic rites, African witchcraft and Indian superstition." The population was made up, according to da Cunha, of the most disparate elements, ranging from the fervent believer who had voluntarily given up all the conveniences of life elsewhere, to the solitary bandit who arrived with his blunderbuss on his shoulder in search of a new field for his exploits. "Under the spell of the place, all these elements were welded into one uniform and homogeneous community, an unconscious brute mass."18
The clash with the authorities began with a quarrel about cheap building material for a church which the jaguncos had appropriated; a small force of about one hundred soldiers sent out by the governor of Bahia was surprised by the rebels and routed. The governor asked for federal help, but a second expeditionary force of some five hundred and forty men fared even worse. They were ill prepared for a long march through unfamiliar country and faced the accurate fire of snipers whom they could not even see in the impenetrable undergrowth:
The army has come to feel that its very strength is its weakness. Without any maneuverability, in a state of continual exhaustion, it must make its way through these desert regions under the constant dread of ambuscades and be slowly sacrificed to a dreaded enemy who does not stand and fight but flees. The conflict is an unequal one, and a military force is compelled to descend to a lower plane of combat; it has to contend not merely with man but with the earth itself; and, when the backlands are boiling in the dry summer heat, it is not difficult to foresee which side will have the victory.19
The greatest disaster was the defeat of the third expeditionary force under Colonel Moreira César, a tough soldier subject to epileptic fits. His force included a squadron of cavalry and a battery of artillery. For the first time there was a clear military plan but it was a crude one — "to hurl a thousand-and-some bayonets against Canudos in double-quick time" (da Cunha). The enterprise was carried out in great haste, and all the past mistakes were repeated. Meanwhile, the people of Canudos had dug an elaborate system of trenches in and around their small capital; they were not badly armed for guerrilla warfare with their scythes, "scraping knives," muskets, shotguns and blunderbusses. Gunpowder they had bought in the neighborhood or manufactured themselves. They received reinforcements from all over the province — the "badmen from the backlands congregated in and around Canudos. The expeditionary force managed to reach the town, but in the ensuing assault it got literally lost in the labyrinth of lanes and alleyways. Cesar was mortally wounded in the attack and soon his soldiers were in full flight, rifles abandoned. The insurgents seized a great quantity of arms, including four Krupp field guns. The jaguncos took no prisoners — wounded soldiers were beheaded; later on the army retaliated with similar acts of cruelty.
This defeat caused a major crisis in Brazilian politics. "Patriotic passion was verging on insanity," is the way da Cunha put it. The fourth expedition was headed by General Artur Oscar who had been previously engaged in guerrilla warfare along the Rio Grande. But neither his own past experience nor the lessons of the previous campaigns against Canudos were heeded and on his first major encounter with the rebels he was surrounded and lost almost all his reserve supplies. Another army column saved him from complete destruction; but this force, too, had to retreat, decimated by hunger, thirst and disease. To vindicate his defeat, General Oscar claimed that the insurgents were armed with the "most modern weapons' which had allegedly been smuggled from Europe. Eventually, Canudos was destroyed but only after all the country's military resources had been mobilized and after it had been besieged from every side. Conselheiro died on 22 September 1896; on 5 October the fighting was over. "Canudos did not surrender. ... It held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on 5 October, towards dusk — when its last defenders fell, dying every man of them. There were only four of them left; an old man, two other full-grown men and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers."20
Guerrilla warfare in post-Napoleonic Europe was limited mainly to the south and east of the continent; more often than not it occurred in the wider context of wars of national liberation or civil wars. This applies, for instance, to the first and second Carlist wars in Spain (1833-1840 and 1872). These dynastic wars were at one and the same time conflicts between a backward countryside resentful of change and the modern town, and between the clergy and the freethinkers. The Basques' desire to maintain their traditional privileges against central state power was also a factor of some importance. The Carlists, broadly speaking, were fighting for tradition and the old Spain, and the Cristinos (with the help of a British legion and other foreign volunteers) for change and modernism of a very moderate variety. The larger cities usually supported the Liberals, while much of the countryside sympathized with the Carl ists. It may be recalled that the guerrilla leaders of the war against Napoleon found themselves here in opposite camps, Merino, the priest, fighting with the Carlists, Mina throwing in his lot with the government forces. But these were no longer the prime leaders; the military command was by now in the hands of men of another generation. Two of them in particular distinguished themselves — Colonel Tomas Zumalacarreguy, who had begun his military career under a minor guerrilla leader in 1810 and led the Carlists until his death in 1835, and Ramon Cabrera (the "tiger of Maeztrazgo"), who then took over; having married an English woman, Cabrera was to spend his declining years as a liberal country gentleman near Virginia Water.21
Zumalacarreguy, who had at the start no more than a mere few hundred ill-armed adherents, forged them gradually into an effective fighting force. He subdivided his little army into battalions, which would occasionally meet for some major action, but most of the time acted independently. By 1835 he was strong enough to engage in regular warfare and force a decision, but Carlos, envious of his general's popularity, ordered him to seize Bilbao rather than march on Madrid, Zumalacarreguy was wounded in die fighting for Bilbao and died soon after from his wounds. With the demise of its most gifted soldier, the Carlist cause, already undermined by internal intrigues, suffered a lasting blow. Cabrera, his successor, had been trained as a priest, but even his closest friends would not claim that Christian charity was his outstanding virtue. Under his leadership, acts of atrocity became ever more recurrent in a war which had been cruel from its inception. Prisoners were frequently shot, and after the Cristinos had killed Cabrera's mother, he no longer showed any restraint whatsoever. His skill as a guerrilla leader was undoubtedly considerable. If he suffered a reverse, he would send his troops to rest for a fortnight "to change their shirts. Soon afterwards they would reassemble and fight again."22 His aides, Batanero (yet another priest) and Miguel Gomez, would engage in long penetration raids from Biscay to Old Castile or even to Gibraltar and back. But apart from showing the flag and engaging in brigandage, these ventures were militarily without value and they clearly pointed to the limitations of guerrilla warfare. Defeated by the Cristinos, Cabrera crossed in 1840 into France with the remnants of his forces. In 1848 fighting in the mountains of Catalonia, he made a short-lived and ineffectual comeback. Once more he had to leave his native country and toward the end of his life, much to the disgust of the diehard Carlists, he made his peace with the Spanish government.
The Carlist wars were demonstrable proof that the guerrilla tradition had become deeply rooted in Spain; it was no mere coincidence that its principal bases of operations were yet again in the northern regions such as Navarre, Catalonia and the Basque mountains, But despite superior leadership, guerrilla tactics were in the last resort less than effective in this prolonged conflict. In the Greek War of Independence they proved on occasion more successful, and this for all the absence of good commanders. Applying guerrilla methods, the Greeks contrived to liberate part of their country in the early phase of the war (1821-1822). Later on they tried to transform their bands into a regular army with the help of some European well-wishers. The results were disastrous; they suffered an almost unending series of defeats. The discipline, the drill, the organizational effort were not to the liking of the Greeks who were saved in the end from almost certain defeat only by the intervention of the European powers.23 But nor is it certain that they would have fared any better had they stuck to their initial tactics. They succeeded in the first stage of the war because their attacks took the Turks by almost complete surprise. Once the element of surprise was gone and the Turks had dispatched new forces to the field, the Greeks simply had no answer. Happily for them, their war differed in one essential respect from other such campaigns and this helped to some extent to restore the balance. The distinctive element lay in sea power; whatever their weaknesses on land, the Greeks proved more than a match for the Turks at sea.
If the Carlist wars were scarcely marked by compassion, the Greek War of Independence was almost genocidal in character, the Greeks' premise being that if they exterminated the Turkish communities in their midst, they would eventually be masters in their own home. As in the Iberian peninsula, the clergy took a prominent part both in the fighting and the atrocities. The Greeks had the enthusiastic support of most of Christian Europe, and there was a steady flow of volunteers and money. Later, many of their erstwhile supporters turned against them, some even to become their worst enemies. The Greek intellectuals living in exile who had first lifted the banner of independence were not military men, and the leadership in the war passed to Klepht chieftains like Kolokotronis who were no budding Napoleons either. That brigands were potentially excellent guerrilla leaders is a well-known fact, but an analysis of the battles of the Greek War of Independence (such as Kaki Skala, Elaphos and Trete) makes plain that the Klephts never really had any coherent policy on what kind of war they intended to fight. They had no plan or general strategic concept, nor were they very good at improvising. Their experience was limited to the command of smaller bands; they were simply not accustomed to cooperating within a larger framework. Much of their time was spent quarreling, both with the government and with each other. Many of them had been reluctant to join the rising in the first place, preferring the certainty of an arrangement with the Turkish authorities to the doubtful proposition of a civil war.
Kolokotronis, who was the most prominent of the Klepht leaders, came from a family which had engaged in officially licensed brigandage for several generations. A historian of the Greek Revolution wrote of him that he could never distinguish very clearly right from wrong, and that he had an instinctive aversion to order and law. "His patriotism was selfish and his occasional acts of magnanimity cannot efface the memory of his egotistical ambition and sordid avarice during the period of his greatest power."24 At the head of a band of some three hundred warriors, Kolokotronis enlisted the local peasants at Karitena and eventually had some six thousand men under his command. But this formidable force could still not resist the onslaught of five hundred Turkish horsemen and Kolokotronis even lost his rifle in the affray. These and similar such encounters left him with a great deal of contempt for the military qualities of the peasantry, ascribing all the successes in the war to the prowess and the fighting experience of the brigands and armatoli. But this judgment has not been generally accepted. "A careful study of the history of the Revolution has established the fact that the perseverance and self-devotion of the peasantry really brought the contest to a successful termination. When the Klephts shrank back, and the armatoli were defeated, the peasantry prolonged their resistance, and renewed the struggle after every defeat with indomitable obstinacy."25 The Greek War of Independence was essentially a series of uncoordinated operations carried out by irregular troops. The Peloponnese (Morea), where most military actions took place in the early phase of the war, had been classic brigand territory since time immemorial; hilly northern Greece offered even better protection to large guerrilla units. It was in the north that under Karaiskakis, a former officer of Ali Pasha of Janina, some of the major guerrilla operations took place in the later years of the war. But, whereas in the early days the Klephts had the sympathy of the rural population, the depredations of the bands antagonized so the peasants that when the Turks returned to Central Greece in 1824 they were frequently welcomed as liberators.
Attention has been drawn more than once to the often decisive importance of intervention by outside powers: what happened if other powers would not, or could not intervene is well illustrated by the Polish example. The three Polish insurrections (1793, 1831 and 1863) were a blend of regular and guerrilla warfare. In some measure they were a people's war, but the support of the peasants waned in the course of time. Many thousands of peasant scythemen in their white cloaks fought under Kosciusko in 1793, but peasant participation in 1831 was lukewarm at best, and in 1863 only the cities, broadly speaking, responded to the revolt. This erosion of peasant support was the result of the reluctance of the "Whites," the Polish aristocratic party, to carry out any agrarian reform. In Galicia, the Austrian authorities effectively thwarted a rebellion by inciting the peasants to kill the landowners and to turn against the middle-class revolutionaries. There was not much guerrilla fighting in the 1793 rising save for some sniping from Warsaw windows and rooftops. Kosciusko, the military leader, based his strategy on the experience of the revolutionary war in France — massed attacks and bayonet charges.26 Politically the Poles were isolated; the French stayed clear of any active help, Austria took a benevolent attitude but left it at that. The international constellation in 1831 and 1863 was, if possible, even worse. Britain and France made perfunctory representations to the Russian capital, but the Prussians, alert to the direct and decidedly undesirable repercussions a Polish victory could have in their eastern districts, closed the borders to the rebels. The Russians always had numerical superiority; there had been some hundred thousand Russians against the Poles' sixty thousand in 1793. Diebitsch, in 1831, had 127,000 men at his disposal, and in 1863 the Poles were much of the time outnumbered by as many as ten to one. But the Russians had to keep their forces dispersed over the entire country for fear of the revolt spreading; there were local uprisings in 1863 in distant Polish Lithuania and Livonia. In 1831 the Russian forces were reduced to half their strength by hunger and disease. Polish leadership was bad in 1831 and indifferent in 1863; furthermore, there were unending internal squabbles among the insurrectionist leaders. Many Polish officers serving with the Russian army refused to join the rebellion in the first place because they saw no possible chance of their country winning independence in an armed struggle against Russia.
Large parts of Poland are quite flat and provide little effective cover for guerrilla operations. Only in the east and the north were conditions more favorable and it was there that small Polish units caused considerable damage to the Russians in 1831 (Worcell near Lutsk, Puschet and Selon in the forests of Augustowo, the partisan bands in the Bialowicza forest on the road to Brest). In 1863 Augustowo again became an important theater of guerrilla warfare, but there were also sizable operations in the Radom district (under the command of Langiewicz who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy) and near Wengrow.27 The insurgents were on the whole meagerly armed, "raw and undisciplined levies, no more conversant with war than are English yeomen and shopkeepers."28 Only few had muskets, most of them having to make do with pikes, scythes and sticks. The Poles would launch a surprise attack against the Russian units from the forests, then disperse and return to their hideouts. These small skirmishes were often successful, whereas the major battles were always costly and usually ended in a Polish defeat. A hostile observer noted that it was one of the primary mistakes of the Poles that they did not stick to small-war tactics but tried to act like a regular army. In the process, he went on, good partisans became bad soldiers who fled whenever they suffered a setback. Following the Polish concentration of their forces, the Russians were able to withdraw their units from various parts of the country and to crush the insurrection by delivering a massive blow to the Polish force.29 The Polish leaders were ambivalent in their attitude to guerrilla tactics. Mieroslawski, one of the leaders of the "Red" party, who for a short while in 1863 served as "dictator" of Poland, wrote that it was dangerous to stick too rigidly to partisan warfare, that it should always be closely coordinated and should never clash with the general, overall strategy.30 He "hated" partisan warfare, he wrote, but nonetheless did not deny that it could be very useful, given political control and good leadership. After the failure of their insurrections the Polish veterans saw action in revolutionary wars all over Europe — Mieroslawski in Baden and Sicily, Dembinski and Bern against Austria in 1848, the poet Mickiewicz in the short-lived Roman republic. Usually they were on the losing side and were employed as general military experts rather than as specialists in guerrilla warfare which they regarded as of marginal importance only. Their inclination was to apply Napoleonic tactics in wars of national liberation, and for this reason, if for no others, they stood no hope of winning.
The Italians, in contrast to the Poles, had a base for their military operations — Piedmont. Victor Emanuel II and Cavour had grave reservations about Garibaldi's exploits; they never gave him all he demanded to launch his spectacular, if not always well-conceived campaigns. When Garibaldi returned to Italy in 1848 from a long stay in South America, he already had the reputation of a great guerrilla leader as well as a daring naval commander. He certainly was a brave man and a born leader; whether his guerrilla reputation is entirely merited is a moot point. For the kind of cavalry charges he had specialized in, with the lance as the favorite weapon, was not really in true guerrilla tradition. During the next two decades he emerged as Europe's most dashing and admired revolutionary hero, but it was only on rare occasions that he engaged in battle against forces greatly superior to his own, applying guerrilla tactics. The exceptions were the retreat from Rome in 1848 and the battle for Palermo when his forces were greatly outnumbered. Commenting on Garibaldi's exploits in 1848 in Upper Italy (from a base in Switzerland), a critic wrote that he was not really a good guerrilla leader, because he exhausted his men by long, pointless marches, made inadequate provisions for feeding them, and when he found a good, defensive position, waited there for the enemy to attack, instead of attacking the enemy.31 It is only fair to add that, like the Polish insurgent leaders in their combats, Garibaldi found little patriotic enthusiasm among the rural population. The peasants were reluctant to cooperate or even to provide food. Nor was the quality of his soldiers outstanding; more than once he was to complain that his Italians were not as good as the Latin American gauchos. The first Italian legion of 1849 was composed chiefly of artisans, shop assistants and a great many students. There were also a few convicts for—shades of Fanon! — "to fight for Italy would cure all moral diseases."32 The composition of the "thousand" with whom he conquered Sicily and Naples was similar. There were a hundred and fifty lawyers, a hundred doctors, a hundred merchants, half were workingmen, but there was not a single peasant.33 The Garibaldini about to enter Palermo looked like scarecrows, "resembling in appearance a Boer commando towards the close of war" (Trevelyan), limping, and their clothes in tatters. They had bad weapons (smooth-bore muskests which were just about accurate at fifty yards) and antique artillery. But they were enthusiastic young men, they had a leader who had learned from previous mistakes, and the morale of the Neapolitan soldiers facing them was very low indeed. Twenty thousand Neapolitans evacuated Palermo, unable to resist the onslaught of a far smaller attacking force. Garibaldi had the support of some local squadri, but they were only of scant use because they lacked the sang froid to participate in a bayonet charge and in any case preferred to return home after a few days.
Garibaldi's military career, after the March of the Thousand, came as an anticlimax. In Mentana in 1867 the better equipment of the French forces was telling, and at Dijon in January 1871 he and his sons fought the Germans without conspicuous success, even though Victor Hugo wrote that Garibaldi was the only French general (he was holding a French command at the time) not to be defeated in the Franco-Prussian war. His soldiers were not considered guerrillas by the Germans, who drew a distinction between franc tireurs on the one hand, and the Garibaldini on the other. The former when captured were to be shot, the latter were treated as prisoners of war.34
The element of political propaganda and indoctrination in Garibaldi's campaigns foreshadowed guerrilla wars of a later age. But Garibaldi's inclination to give battle and to attack frontally rather than to harass the enemy in less forthright ways was hardly in the guerrilla tradition. Garibaldi's conspicuous white poncho and the red shirts of his soldiers would have been shunned by a true guerrilla. Needs of necessity vary with the circumstances, and customary Spanish guerrilla methods would not have been feasible in Italy; the Spanish guerrilleros of 1809 had their cardinal support in the countryside,with the urban population on the whole anything but enthusiastic. In southern Italy, to the contrary, the "reactionary" peasants were slaying the "liberal" landlords just as sixty years earlier they had attacked urban republicans and democrats. In addition, the Italian clergy was deeply hostile to the insurgents, while the Spanish guerrillas had the solid encouragement of the priests. In general, then, Garibaldi could not expect much assistance in or from the villages. He was, however, in a more fortunate position than the Poles who received only a trickle of supplies via Cracow, whereas his forces had the direct support of the Piedmontese, and indirect aid from Britain and other European powers. The political situation, in brief, was more auspicious than in Poland in 1831 or 1863, and in view of the different social character of the movement, predicated a strategy different from the guerrilla war in Spain.
During the period of imperialist expansion the European colonial powers faced resistance frequently in the form of guerrilla warfare by native tribes or peoples. Russia, expanding in an eastward direction, and the United States, opening up the West, both fought wars on their frontiers. It usually proved easier, however, to conquer new colonies than to hold them against a hostile population; the occupiers were few, the natives many, climatic conditions were adverse and the Europeans had little immunity against indigenous diseases. In retrospect, it is surprising that the imperialist powers suffered in the event only temporary setbacks. But then, more often than not, they faced disunited tribes, lacking modern arms and reliable supply lines. Guerrilla warfare waged by them was usually of the most primitive kind, deficient in leadership, direction and endurance; it was only seldom that an inspired leader would emerge in Asia or Africa to offer effective defiance. Our knowledge of these wars is mostly based on accounts by the invaders, which does not necessarily mean that it is one-sided; Shamil and the Boers were folk heroes all over Europe, and the French had considerable respect for Abd el-Kader.
The two longest and in many ways most interesting guerrilla wars were those waged in North Africa and the Caucasus. France had had its eye on Algeria for a long time and in 1827 an expeditionary force of twenty-seven thousand was sent to the country by Charles X. The French behaved with scant regard for local customs and mores, occupied land, seized property, and soon found themselves under attack by the tribes of western Algeria led by Abd el Kader, the newly elected twenty-four-year-old emir of Mascara. The North Africans would lead the invaders on wild-goose chases into mountainous country or the desert; the French would never even spot the enemy, and thirst and exhaustion would claim countless victims. They were not mobile enough and had no system for controlling the country they had seized. Abd el-Kader's columns would appear suddenly and hit at them. Small French detachments were surprised, escorts carried off,-depleted garrisons destroyed, provisions were cut and there were no regular communications even between the principal towns. Victory bulletins were dispatched to Paris, but at the same time there were constant requests for further reinforcements. Thus, the Algerian war proved to be far more costly than the French had bargained for. A static fortifications system a hundred and twenty miles long and consisting of a hundred and sixty blockhouses and ditches was built, but it proved to be ineffective. The situation changed only with the arrival of General (later Marshal) Bugeaud in 1836. In his first address to his officers he told them bluntly, "Messieurs, vous aurez beaucoup à oublier." He was new to Africa, but it was immediately obvious to him that their methods of pursuing the Arabs were wholly unsatisfactory. He had campaigned in Spain in 1812 and found many analogies between the war there and in Algeria. The French columns would have to be broken up, disencumbered of artillery and heavy baggage. In sum, the French troops would have to be free in their movements.35 There was some muttering among his lieutenants — their men would lose confidence without artillery — but Bugeaud made short shrift of these objections.
He requested mules rather than horses tor desert wartare and divided his army into eighteen flying columns, each consisting of two battalions of chasseurs, a battalion of Zouaves, one or two squadrons of native levies (Chasseurs d'Afrique) and two pieces of small mountain artillery. Bugeaud taught his soldiers to travel light; instead of the old heavy campaigning bag, they should pack their few belongings in a piece of canvas (which, joined to similar pieces, would form a tent), dress in loose clothing, not take along spare shoes. The columns would start well before daybreak and make a halt every hour.36
A French officer provided a vivid account of guard duty while on a razzia:
Passing the night on guard, to one who knows not by experience what war is, especially partisan war, awakens only the idea of a certain number of men sleeping at 200 or 300 paces distance, with a small band in advance, one of whom walks up and down with a musket on his shoulder. It is thus that we are represented in the theatres at Paris; but in Africa the night guards are as unlike this picture as possible. No one sleeps, everyone watches. If the rain falls, if the north-wind blows ice in your face, there must be no fire to warm the limbs fatigued by the day's march. A fire may betray the post. Everyone must be on the alert constantly, close to his arms; and those who are on sentry, crouching like wild beasts among the bushes spying out the slightest movement, listening to catch the slightest sound, are glad to do all this to keep their eyes, heavy with sleep, from closing. The safety of all may depend on their wakefulness. Further, should the enemy attack, no firing; the bayonet is for defence; no false alarms; the sleep of the bivouac must on no account be disturbed. Such is the point of honour.37
Bugeaud clearly recognized that strategies appropriate for European theaters of war were not suitable in North Africa. It was pointless to seize the centers of population, of trade and industry in Algeria, because there were none. The right approach, as he explained in a speech in the French parliament, was to keep a flying column of seven thousand well-led soldiers operating razzias near the desert. This was sufficient to beat the largest possible collection of Arabs who were nothing but a "tumultuous gathering," a multitude of very brave individuals without the capacity for united action. He would give orders to his commanders not to pursue the fleeing tribesmen — which was useless — but to prevent them from sowing, reaping the harvest and pasturing their cattle. "The Arabs can fly from your columns into the desert, but they cannot remain there, they must capitulate."38 Bugeaud's predecessors had been in a constant state of alarm, whereas the new commander, in the words of an admiring junior officer, Saint Arnaud (who was to command the French forces in the Crimean war), "se bat quand il veut, il cherche, il poursuit l'ennemi, l'inquiete, il sefait craindre." Abd el-Kader's tactics, in a nutshell, were turned against him, although it still took quite a while before the new approach was to show results. Another junior officer serving at the time under Bugeaud, Trochu (the future commander of Paris in 1870-1871), wrote that "this campaign has not been the most fruitful in dangerous and brilliant combats, but the most extended, the most active and the most effectual. . . . Marches and counter-marches, crushing fatigue, unheard-of efforts, were exacted from all; but no one had any serious fighting with the enemy, for not having any organization they remained invisible and could not be caught." In the event it was by sheer accident that one of the flying columns consisting of six hundred soldiers stumbled on Abd el-Kader with five thousand of his men at Temda and inflicted a crushing defeat on him from which he was not to recover. Abd el-Kader crossed into Morocco, which provided a temporary sanctuary. But then Bugeaud routed the sultan of Morocco's army at Isly. (He was subsequently made due d'Isly.) Again on the run, Abd el-Kader eluded the French for three more years, but he was no longer a serious threat.
There was less cruelty in the campaigns of North Africa than in most colonial wars. The French esteemed Abd el-Kader as a fighting man; Bugeaud once met him during a short truce and reported to the Minister of Foreign Affairs that the rebel chief was "pale and a good deal resembles the portrait often given of Jesus Christ."39 When he finally surrendered in December 1847, he was exiled to Damascus, given a pension and toward the end of life made his peace with the French, saving many Christians at the time of the Damascus riots of 1860. The unexpected resistance the French encountered in North Africa was motivated by Muslim fundamentalism, a rudimentary form of patriotism, and hatred of the foreigners who had appropriated the best parts of the land. Brigandage was also a factor of some importance. Some native tribes supported Abd el-Kader but others opposed him, there was no close cooperation between Arabs and the Kabyles, this lack of unity contributing its share to his ultimate defeat.
If it took the French some fifteen years to "pacify" Algeria, the Russians had to fight twice as long to subdue the Caucasian tribes from the time of Kazi Mulla's first appeal for a holy war in 182g to Shamil's final capitulation in 1859.40 The conquest of the Caucasian mountains began with the arrival of General Ermolov (a cousin of Denis Davydov) in 1816, but Russian military occupation was limited at first to the main strongpoints. General Paskevich, like Bu geaud's predecessors in Algeria, had proposed a network of forts and blockhouses to control the area, but since the fighting tribesmen were not confined in their operations to the main roads (of which there were very few), it was clear that this system was not well suited to local conditions. The Russians were fully conscious of the soldiering qualities of the enemy. "The mounted natives," wrote General Velyaminov, "are very superior in many ways both to our regular cavalry and to the Cossacks, they can ride between dawn and sunset one hundred miles. They are born on horseback, their weapons, carefully selected, were private property and kept in excellent state." Ermolov's tactics were ruthless; when he commanded the Russian army, many mountain villages (auls) were destroyed and the inhabitants killed. These outrages precipitated a general rising of the mountain people against the Russians; Ermolov "conquered the mountains but the forests defied him."41
The Shamil rebellion coincided — and was to a large extent connected — with the rise, in the Daghestan mountains, of Muridism, a revivalist movement derived from Sufi'ism, an Islamic religious trend. Shamil, who became the leader of the movement, strictly enforced the Shari'at, the law of Islam. His reputation both among his fellow tribesmen and some of the Russians was that of a superman. He could make himself invisible, and on several occasions is said to have jumped with ease over a ditch twenty-seven feet wide, which, if true, would have stood as the world broad jump record for more than a century. In 1839, after the surrender of Akhoulgo, a costly battle for both sides, the Russians thought the war was over, but Shamil escaped from the besieged fortress and most of the fighting was still to come. There were years in which the Russian forces lost up to twenty thousand men in the struggle against this invisible enemy.42 Exact figures do not exist; Allen and Muratoff maintain that the Russians lost some five thousand men in 1840-1842, but they counted only battlefield casualties, not those who succumbed to disease.43 Ermolov had been the first to use flying columns, but this strategy was given up because the Russian soldier, accustomed to fighting in the plains, proved to be inept in mountain warfare. He needed to see his neighbor and was short on initiative if left without explicit orders from his superior officer. Marksmanship, too, was bad — the Russians all too often fired without even bothering to take aim. It was only in the later years of the war that General Voronzov again reinstated the mobile columns with greater effect. By that time the Russian army had adjusted itself to the technique of mountain warfare, it was better equipped and it had even greater numerical superiority (a hundred and fifty thousand). Voronzov and Evdokimov, unlike their forerunners, realized that the intelligent course was to exhaust Shamil gradually, rather than seek to destroy him with one numbing coup. The new Russian strategy frustrated the Caucasians. "When time after time they found that in fact they could never come to blows, their weapons fell from their hands. Beaten they would have gathered again on the morrow. Circumvented and forced to disperse without fighting, while their villages were occupied without opposition, they came in next day and offered their submission."44
The Shamil movement has remained a bone of contention to Russian and Soviet historians to this day. Some praised him as an opponent of feudalism and imperialism, a revolutionary democrat and a fighter for national liberation. After 1947, there was a reversal in the party line and Shamil was condemned as a religious obscurantist, a reactionary and a hireling of foreign imperialism. In the post-Stalin period a compromise was reached: Muridism is still considered essentially reactionary, but while the Caucasian aristocracy is said to have been opposed to everything Russian, the masses had great love for the Russian people; that, despite the involvement of foreign intrigues, their struggle was anti-Tsarist, not anti-Russian in character. As a compromise formula the new version had much to recommend it; whether it corresponds to historical truth is a different question altogether.
In 1846, at the height of his power, Shamil had some twenty thousand men under him, subdivided into units of either a thousand or five hundred warriors. All of them were horsemen, who could be assembled and dispersed in a very short time. There were no baggage trains, every mountaineer carried with him what he needed. The men wore yellow robes and green turbans, the officers black robes with cartridge cases of silver sewn across their chests. The Circassians' rifles were of better quality than those of the Russians, and the Caucasian shashka was superior to the Russian sabre. In 1847 Shamil acquired some artillery, most of it captured from the Russians, but it was of no great service to him; it may, in fact, have hampered his movements. He was at his best in surprise attacks against small Russian depots or forts, in disrupting their lines of communications, and denying them local supplies until the Russians, in the words of a historian, "might as well have been in the middle of the Sahara. Shamil had taken or destroyed everything eatable by human beings for miles round."45 He was a superb commander of five hundred raiders; five thousand he found unwieldy to handle and coordinate. With his primitive religious fanaticism he showed surprising sophistication in conducting political warfare, encouraging desertion from the Russian ranks; deserters were well received, joined his small army, and those who had fled because they were ill treated by Russian officers became the staunchest and most implacable of fighters. From time to time Shamil ventured into the plains in an effort to raise the Kabardins and other tribes, without, however, any pronounced success, the "lowlanders" being too exposed to Russian reprisals to dare join the revolt. During the Crimean War Shamil was Turkey's ally and indirectly also that of Britain and France, if the help he either obtained or himself gave here was all but negligible. On the other hand, he was never entirely cut off from the outside world, and arms and supplies continued to reach him all along. Shamil surrendered in August 1859, lived in fairly comfortable exile, first in Kaluga, later in Kiev, and died in 1871 while on a pilgrimage to Medina. Some of his followers emigrated to Palestine and Jordan and settled there. Shamil's regime was harsh, even despotic; perhaps it was the only possible way to spur the mountain people into battle, though in the long run it certainly did not make for unity in his ranks, or for solidarity between the mountain tribes. But Shamil's warriors, however brave, would have been defeated in any case because the odds were too heavily against them. Russia was so much stronger both in numbers and materiel and it could not possibly be deflected from expansion. The wonder is not that Shamil was vanquished, but that he held out for so long.
Compared with the battles for the Caucasus, the Russian expansion in Central Asia was a walkover. True, the Turcomans occasionally put up stiff resistance. A correspondent of the New York Herald has given the following account of the kind of skirmish General Kaufmann encountered on his march to Khiva:
"Gotovo, charge," shouts the Prince and we are down on them like an avalanche. A cloud of dust, the panting of horses, the rattle of harness, a flash of sabres and we are there.
But the Turcomans are not. Three hundred yards further on we see them, they are going in a gentle canter, not seeming to be in the slightest hurry, and evidently not in the least apprehensive of our overtaking them. We continue the chase a short distance with no result. It is exasperating. We may as well charge a flock of wild geese and we give things up.46
The Russians were exasperated, but not for very long. The Turcomen were excellent horsemen, brave in individual combat. But like the Red Indians, indeed like all primitive people, they were incapable of fighting in large units, and since guerrilla operations, no less than regular warfare, called for an overall strategy and careful organization, they never had a chance.
During most of the nineteenth century Great Britain engaged in what some contemporaries termed, crudely but not altogether inaccurately, "nigger bashing" — small, and not so small colonial wars in various parts of the empire. Each of them came into its own due share of publicity at the time; there are many streets in London named Magdala, Gwalior, Cawnpore and Khartoum after the sites of notorious battles fought there, and as many after the generals who led the British troops. (There are four Outram streets in the British capital, five were named after Kitchener, three in honor of Brackenbury.) Up to about 1860-1865, the majority of these wars took place in Asia, subsequently the scene shifted primarily to Africa. Most of them were not really guerrilla in character; the Afghans whom the British fought thrice had a regular army, so had the Egyptians, and even the Zulus, and the Mahdi in the Sudan. The native armies were ill equipped and their leadership was usually not very competent, but they nonetheless practiced regular, not guerrilla warfare; the British commanders were frequently surprised by the lack of enterprise they displayed. In the Abyssinian campaign, as an example, the British expeditionary forces under Sir Robert Napier eventually reached Magdala, a seemingly unassailable fortress, Napier himself writing later that if old women had been at the top and, hiding behind the brow, had thrown down stones, they would have caused any force a serious loss.47 The British were still, however, defeated on more than one occasion — in the Afghan wars, for instance, the Zulu wars, and against the Boers at Majuba Hill — this usually as a result of underrating the opposition's numerical strength or fighting qualities. During the Indian Mutiny there were incidents of guerrilla warfare, such as Tantia Topi's raids, especially in the later stages of the rebellion. The talukhdars attacked British convoys, surprised small detachments and engaged in general brigandage. But this was the exception, not the rule, and many observers, including Marx and Engels, expressed astonishment that guerrilla warfare had not been more widely applied by the insurgents; in view of the wide spaces of India and the small number of British troops, guerrilla warfare would have been infinitely more effective than sieges and open field battles. But the mutiny lacked a broad popular base, and the precondition for a successful people's war did not exist.48
The forces facing the British in India were numerically quite strong — perhaps sixty thousand men in the second Sikh war; the British had to fight fifty thousand dervishes near Orndurman, and forty thousand Zulus, But invariably the natives were subdued in the end, again for the standard reasons of poor leadership and the needed discipline for fighting in large platoons. They were incapable of carrying out any complicated maneuvers once the battle had started. Whenever, on the other hand, a colonial army had to cope with guerrilla tactics, the war was likely to be undramatic, costly and prolonged. The Pathans went on fighting in the Northwest Frontier region for many decades, while the French needed a long time to "pacify" Indochina until at last Gallieni and Lyautey hit on the right tactics in the 1890s — surprise raids by converging columns along with simultaneous doses of political warfare, aimed at depriving the rebels of the support of the local population. Often the colonial armies were hampered by adverse conditions. Wolsely, for one, found the going rough in the steaming jungles of Ashanti-land, what with the Ashantis harrying the British lines of communications, and the Black Watch prone in the confusion to mistake the Welch Fusilliers for the enemy.
The Maori wars in the north of New Zealand went on for twelve years from 1860 to 1872 and, more perhaps than any other, bore the characteristics of a guerrilla war. It had begun, strictly speaking, even earlier, with the Wairam incident in 1843 when white surveyors were killed as the result of an incident which they had unnecessarily provoked. The white settlers bitterly complained about the "brutal tortures of the cruel Maoris," but the war had certainly not been started by the Maoris. It was a conflict over the ownership of land, and the local whites were far more avid to attack the Maoris than were the military authorities and the British government. The Christian missionaries, too, sympathized with the Maoris. The British troops soon found that regular army tactics such as fixed bayonet charges were of little avail in this war. The Maoris skillfully used the high grass as cover and built ingenious fighting positions in the form of trenches (pas), access to which was barred by felled trees and other obstacles, and designed not as fortresses but to impede the advance of the British troops and to inflict losses on them.49 The Maoris were led by a gifted chieftain, Tito Kowaru, "the De Wet of the Maoris," who still could not prevent his followers from being gradually pushed back.
British soldiers saw combat in the jungle, the bush and in mountain passes; the Shundur Pass which was the scene of much fighting in the Clitral campaign (1895) is situated twelve thousand feet above sea level. The Dutch encountered armed resistance in Sumatra (Achim), the French in Tonkin (1882-1895), in Madagascar (1884 and 1895), and in Tunis, the Germans in Southwest Africa (the Herero revolt), the Spanish in Morocco (1892-1895), the Americans in the Philippines (1899-1902). There were many other armed conflicts, some involving small detachments, others, thousands of men. Sooner or later these insurrections were suppressed, sometimes by brute force, on other occasions pacification coming about as a result of combined military and political action.
These exotic wars frequently caught the contemporary imagination, stirred by what seemed like nothing so much as glorious adventure, laced even with a certain romanticism, at least from a distance. The same applies, a fortiori, to the Indian wars in the United States. But they were only seldom guerrilla wars, and sweeping statements such as "the Apaches were in fact guerrillas,"50 are of not much use toward an understanding of the specific character of these wars. It is perfectly true that the Indian braves showed great resources of courage, that they engaged in hit-and-run attacks, that they were past masters in woodcraft, and at ambushing. But in other essential respects they were anything but guerrilleros. They hardly ever operated in the enemy's rear, certainly not in any systematic way; whenever they could, they refrained from night attacks; their frontal assaults, in wave after wave, were often suicidal owing to the far greater firepower of the enemy. With a few exceptions, Tecumseh paramount among them, the Indian chiefs were quite incapable of leading sizable contingents in their campaigns. The Red Indian tactics, as Fletcher Pratt has noted, were those of the squad — they could not combine their operations and were unable to think in larger terms. The U.S. Army, like the British in Asia and Africa, met with the occasional defeat, as on the banks of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Custer made the fatal mistake of sending out units that were too small and when he declined to take his Catling guns which might have made all the difference. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Indians were not yet outnumbered by the white man, such reverses were less uncommon. Major Dade's whole force was massacred by Seminole Indians in the swamps of Florida in December 1835. But the forces involved at the time were small; there were altogether only 536 U.S. soldiers in the entire state of Florida.51 The Seminole wars are of interest, be it solely because they cost in their seven-year span more U.S. soldiers' lives than all the other Indian wars of the nineteenth century put together, plus the staggering sum of forty million dollars.52 In the end some eight thousand men and naval support ships had to be concentrated to subdue the Seminoles. Patrolling, "blind raids," and bloodhounds had proved unproductive; the campaign succeeded only after the troops were ordered to persist in their efforts throughout the summer as well, the great heat notwithstanding, and after their blows were directed no longer against a forever elusive enemy, but against their villages, crops and food supplies. Deprived at last of their sustenance, the Seminoles had no alternative but to surrender.
With the opening of the West to white settlement and the spread of a railway network, the Indians were still further depleted and their remnants herded into reservations. Dissension had always been rife in their ranks; there was not, after all, one cohesive Indian nation, only a disparate collection of many tribes, frequently on the warpath against each other. Their arms were inferior in quality and they had no powerful outside ally. Their foe gradually became as adept as they were themselves at woodcraft and scouting.
In three of the four major wars of the nineteenth century, guerrilla warfare played a certain, albeit minor, role — the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Boer War. Differing as greatly in almost every respect as these wars did, the guerrilla activities in each warrant individual examination. Considerable claims have been made about the impact of the Confederate guerrillas; according to Virgil Carrington Jones, the war would have ended in 1864, eight to nine months earlier than it did, but for the operations of the raiders who prevented Sheridan from clearing up the Shenandoah valley so that Grant could pursue his campaign.53 But even if this claim is accepted, the guerrilla activities merely prolonged the agony of the South. Leading Confederate generals had misgivings about the irregulars from start to finish. "I regard the whole [partisan] system as an unmixed evil," was General Lee's own unvarnished way of putting it. Perhaps it was simply the resentment of the regular soldier against an unconventional manner of warfare, and snobbism vis-à-vis its practitioners who were not always gentlemen. Not that it was snobs alone who objected to William Quantrill, the gang leader who captured Independence, Missouri, and plundered Lawrence (1862-1863). He was a vicious murderer, and his men consisted chiefly of cutthroats like Jesse James and his brothers.54 They developed a strange ritual (a black flag and a black oath), but their prime object, as far as can be ascertained, was to pillage and to destroy, with no great pains taken to distinguish between friend or foe.
True, it would be unjust to regard Quantrill and his men as the typical Confederate guerrilla; Mosby, Morgan, Johnson, Ashby, Stuart Sheridan and their raiders were men of quite different caliber. To single out only the two most famous and effective among them, Morgan was a businessman in Lexington, Kentucky, thirty-six when the war broke out — a daring cavalryman and lover of thoroughbred horses who had seen action as a captain in the Mexican campaigns. Mosby was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, who while a student at the University of Virginia had killed a fellow student in an unprovoked duel, and had read law while in prison.55 Morgan's raiders came from the best families of the South — deep-rooted gentry as for instance the Bullitts, Colemans, Breckinridges — and were themselves lawyers, physicians, merchants, journalists for the most part, drawn at the time to what one Richmond newspaper called "the most attractive of the services for all young men of a daring and adventurous nature. In equipping his troops, Morgan discarded the saber in favor of pistols and carbines; everyone dressed according to his taste — broad-brimmed hats, the pants stuck into high boots, a pair of pistols buckled around the waist. Mosby later denied that his men habitually wore blue overcoats to mislead the enemy; they did so only when they could get no others.56 The question was of more than academic importance, for the Northerners were not at all sure whether captured partisans should be shot or treated as prisoners of war — and those in civilian clothes, it was argued, had forfeited all rights. Mortan was the first to stage long-distance raids into the enemy rear in the cold winter of 1861-1862 after the South had sustained some unexpected defeats. When about to enter battle, the raiders dismounted and fought as if they were an infantry unit.
Of Morgan's four major raids which took him to Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee, the first and third were the most successful. In the first raid he covered a distance of a thousand miles in twenty-four days and for the loss of a hundred of the eight hundred men with him, did much damage to the Union forces and captured (and paroled) twelve hundred prisoners. In the third raid, this time with four thousand men, he took over eighteen hundred prisoners for the loss of only two men, and destroyed two million dollars' worth of property.57 The fourth (Ohio) raid in July 1863 was the most spectacular but also the most pointless. With some twenty-five hundred men he ventured far afield from his base; on one occasion in Indiana he covered ninety miles in thirty-five hours.58 But eventually his force was surrounded and destroyed and Morgan had to surrender. A new raid into Tennessee ended in total disaster; at Greeneville he was tracked down by Union troops and killed.
The composition of his band had changed greatly toward the end. The Southern aristocracy was replaced by Southern riffraff; bank robberies as well as petty thieving became quite common. Morgan was a courageous, impulsive, and impatient commander, conspicuously lacking some of the essential qualities of a guerrilla leader. His great achievement was to tie up to thirty thousand Union soldiers with a force which never extended beyond a few thousand men, but usually was far smaller. He excelled in public relations; newspapermen were always welcome at his camp and he had a good press, except, of course, in the North. But his victories, however dashing, never influenced the issue of a campaign, let alone the war.59
Mosby's rangers, who numbered only two hundred, began their actions on a small scale, cutting telegraph wires; later on they hung around enemy camps, shot at sentinels and pickets, intercepted couriers and supply wagons and forced the Union army to move only in large bodies. On one occasion Mosby captured a Union general in his bed (General Stoughton, not one of the outstanding leaders of the North); on another he seized a payroll of $173,000. His activities were given wide publicity and many Southern soldiers of the line asked for a transfer to this unit or to another raider command.
Among the generals and colonels in charge of these units, Nathan Bedford Forrest was considered by many to be the greatest. According to some, he was the most accomplished fighter to emerge in the war, and this despite his having had no previous military training.60 A wealthy businessman from Tennessee, he had raised a battalion at his own expense in 1861. In a major raid with a thousand men in July 1862, he overpowered an enemy brigade, destroyed railway bridges and captured a load of supplies. His second raid in December 1862, into Kentucky with twenty-five hundred men, was less successful, but in the Atlanta campaign, during the second half of 1864, he played a considerable role, diverting major enemy units for a dismayingly long time with a force of between two to five thousand men. Sherman was brought to the point of saying that "the devil Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it costs ten thousand lives and bankrupts the treasury."61 His operations resembled those of Denis Davydov in the War of 1812; deep-penetration raids into the enemy's rear rather than guerrilla warfare.
By mid-September 1862, partisan rangers had been organized into six regiments and nine battalions in half a dozen Southern states, and units of company size existed in Florida and Mississippi. The North, too, had a few rangers, if their activity was mainly confined to the Leesburg area. But the strong opposition partisans and their operations had aroused from the beginning tended to increase rather than diminish in both North and South and cannot readily be explained away, exist though it may well have done at times, as simple professional jealousy. General Heth, commanding the West Virginia military district, wrote that the partisans were just organized bands of robbers, that they were more ready to plunder friends than enemies (because it was less dangerous), that their leaders were unable to enforce discipline and that their interpretation of fighting was roaming over the country, taking what they wanted — and doing nothing.62 Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war, wrote President Davis in 1863 that they (the partisans) had not infrequently caused more odium and done more damage with friends than enemies.
The treatment of guerrillas by the North varied from state to state. Assistant Secretary of War P. H. Watson wrote that they were the "common enemies of mankind" and should be shot without challenge. Generals McClellan and Halleck issued orders instituting the death penalty for insurgent rebels apprehended in the act of destroying bridges, railway and telegraph lines. When Northern forces threatened to execute two Confederate officers, Lee warned McClellan in a letter that he would retaliate and the Union Command did not carry out its threat (on a previous occasion, after the execution of six of Mosby's men by Custer, Mosby had retaliated by killing six of Custer's soldiers). Grant thought that guerrillas without uniform should not be treated as prisoners of war. Washington consulted Francis Lieber, professor of law at Columbia, about the status of the guerrilla in international law. His treatise, learned and fair as it was, did little to elucidate the issue. Partisans (he wrote) were entitled to the privileges of the law of war provided they opposed the invader openly and in respectable numbers and operated in the yet uninvaded portions of the hostile country; on the other hand, no army and society could allow unpunished assassination, robbery and devastation.63 But this left many questions open. What was "open resistance"? What were "respectable numbers"? And what if the front line was not clearly delineated?
As resistance against guerrillaism grew, the Confederacy in early 1864 repealed the act which had authorized the formation of partisan units. Some nevertheless continued to operate, and a few continued to fight on even after the South had surrendered. The Union generals responded to the raids during the last year of the war with the systematic destruction of farms, crops and livestock and the carrying off of all men under the age of fifty; in this way, Grant had told Sheridan, "you will get many of Mosby's men.'
The subsequent fate of some of the leading partisan commanders is not without interest. Mosby tried his luck in politics, made his peace with the North, and was helped by President Grant, much to the disgust of his fellow Southerners. He became consul general in Hong Kong and eventually acted as an attorney for railroad companies. Duke became a congressman and published a number of books about his experiences in the war. Forrest, who had been a millionaire before the war and lost his property, became a planter and apparently also the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. "Flying Joe Wheeler'" also became a congressman, and a general in the U.S. Army who was to see action in the Philippines against another partisan, Aguinaldo, three decades later. General Adam R. Johnson outlived them all; blinded in battle, he settled in a new town which he had founded on the shores of the Colorado River in Texas; he died in 1922.
The question of the effectiveness of partisans and rangers in this war has remained, as noted initially, a matter of dispute to this day. That the guerrillas were a "hornet's nest" and that they caused damage to the North is beyond doubt. But Union retaliation could be telling; if the rangers attacked their supply lines, they would live off the land, much to the detriment of the South. The rangers were at their most potent when operating among a friendly population, their deep-penetration raids frequently taking them into hostile territory where they could not count on the valuable goodwill of the civilians. Some of the large-scale raids involving thousands of men were quite successful, but they were also far more risky and liable to end in disaster. The smaller units, such as Mosby's, were more elusive and therefore, for that very reason perhaps, on balance more effective.
The war between France and Prussia began in mid-July 1870; two months later the French armies were beaten, the emperor had abdicated, Paris was under siege and Moltke, the German commander in chief, was reasonably certain that he would be back on his farm in Silesia in October in time for the hunting season. But outside Paris a government of national defense had taken over with the ringing slogan, guerre à l'outrance, and a huge new army was mobilized by Gambetta and his military deputy, Freycinet. The underlying concept was that this new army should act as a vast guerrilla force, harassing the enemy rather than engaging in frontal attack. Memories of the Vendee and of Spain were conjured up; some of the partisan units were commanded by officers who were descendants of leading Vendee rebels such as La Rochejacquelin. The guerrilla concept did not lack plausibility; the Germans had an efficiently organized fighting machine, but they might well find themselves hard pressed to adjust to an unfamiliar type of war. It was thought, furthermore, that guerrilla warfare would give the French soldier a chance to exhibit his real prowess. In the first phase of the war the soldiers had fought well, whereas the higher command had failed. Guerrilla warfare, however, demanded no staff experience and planning; it could be carried on by zealous citizens even if they had no profound knowledge of strategic theory or its practice.
The new government nevertheless decided on 29 September 1870 to put the franc tireur units under the general command of the army. In all, some fifty-seven thousand officers and men enlisted in the free corps (corps francs); some small units of perhaps two to three thousand men had been in existence even before then.64 But the original enthusiasm for a vast chouannerie did not last, for several reasons. Above all, Gambetta realized that it would take time to organize a people's war, longer time than was available to lessen the pressure on the besieged capital. Hence, priority had of necessity to be given to the establishing of a new regular army which could be readied more quickly to help relieve Paris. Secondly, there was passive resistance on the part both of army officers and the civil administration. There were reports that the franc tireurs were misbehaving, scandalizing the population by their brigandage, and that they were none too eager to engage the enemy.65 New measures were proclaimed to intensify control over the free corps; each such unit was to be directly responsible to the local military command, every officer had to report twice weekly on the activities of his unit. On 14 January 1871 it was announced that no new free corps would be established.
The opposition to franc tireur operations stemmed partly from the innate conservatism of unimaginative army officers who feared that with the spread of partisan units the line between soldier and civilian would be blurred.66 But their aversion was not entirely unjustified, for the franc tireurs indeed lacked discipline, they were incapable of carrying out sustained military operations, joining or absenting themselves from their units as it suited them. Lastly, patriotic enthusiasm was strongest in the towns and weakest in the countryside. The peasants did not receive the Germans with open arms, and more often than not they refused to collaborate, but neither was there any great willingness on their part to leave home and farm to join the franc tireurs. There was a general feeling of apathy, and since the Chouans lacked enthusiasm, there could be no chouannerie.
The jranc tireurs were badly equipped, their leadership was indifferent and they missed countless opportunities. Even their two most spectacular operations were of no military significance. By the time they mined the viaduct of Fontenoy (22 January 1871), the railway line was no longer of vital importance for the Ger-mans.67 And the capture of the village of Le Bourget, north of Paris (the site long since of a famous airport), by Parisian franc tireurs on 27 October 1870 provided a psychological boost but little more; the Germans took it back four days later.
And yet, uncoordinated and badly executed as partisan warfare was, it produced some startling results. As the war progressed — and as it emerged once it was over — the Germans had to deploy some hundred and twenty thousand men, a quarter of their total force, to protect their lines of communication, mainly the railways. The people's war between the Seine and Loire caught the Germans altogether unprepared, both politically and militarily. Politically, because Bismarck feared that the longer the war lasted, the more likely the diplomatic intervention of the other European powers, which would deprive the Germans of at least some of the fruits of victory. On that count alone, Bismarck had every incentive to bring the war to a speedy end. Militarily, the Prussians were superbly prepared to fight against a regular army, but an elusive enemy was not that easy to destroy. France is a big country, the German armies combined numbered fewer than half a million soldiers and the farther they advanced, the more thinned out they became, for garrisons had to be left behind in every town and strongpoint that was occupied; not too small garrisons either since an attack or an insurrection could never be ruled out. Altogether the Germans lost more than a thousand men in franc tireur warfare, a not insubstantial figure in terms of casualties in general. Of more import was the pervasive atmosphere of insecurity generated by franc tireur operations, and German commentators freely admitted after the war that the irregulars had caused them serious problems.68 A people's war conjured up the specter of a revolution. The Germans would have greatly preferred to make peace with the emperor; instead, they had to deal with a republican government, and there was the danger of further radicalization.
The war was conducted cruelly on both sides; the franc tireurs committed acts of individual terror, the Germans retaliated by executing hostages and burning villages. French publicists, including Victor Hugo, called blatantly for total war, the extermination of every last German; Frau Bismarck was not alone in suggesting to her husband that all Frenchmen should be shot and stabbed to death down to the smallest infant. But Bismarck and the old emperor, despite occasional expressions of violent anger, were sober and farsighted enough to reject such advice. They rightly feared the incalculable consequences for the future relations between France and Germany if these atrocities should spread and become common practice.
The franc tireur war consisted of innumerable small actions such as destroying railway lines and bridges; the French irregulars also tried to blow up tunnels but lacked the know-how and sufficient quantities of explosives. On several occasions they succeeded in freeing transports of French prisoners of war. Thus, on the road from Soissons to Chateau Thierry, between three to four hundred prisoners escaped during a franc tireur attack.69 Telegraph lines were cut and supply columns attacked. The scope of franc tireurs activities would have been wider but for the lack of cavalry which restricted their movements on the whole to forests and other inaccessible regions. They engaged in night attacks on small German garrisons, as at Chatillon in November 1870.70 In this instance the Germans lost 192 officers and men. Many of these were taken prisoner and the French threatened that they would be executed unless the Germans treated captured irregulars as prisoners of war. Auxon, near Troyes, had to be evacuated temporarily under franc tireur pressure, and a first German attempt to enter the city of St. Quentin and to arrest the local prefect was beaten back. The Bavarians and the troops of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg ran into difficulties near Orléans, on the road to Chartres and in the Dijon area, and almost invariably in hilly or wooded country.
The franc tireur units, hastily established, were a mixed bag and it is almost impossible to generalize about their composition, political orientation and military efficiency. Some bands had only a handful of members, others several hundred. Most were set up on a local basis, with the men fighting in the vicinity of their homes, but there were also partisan units from Bretagne, from Nice and from North Africa, not to mention Garibaldi's irregulars. They wore every kind of fantasy uniform, and some wore no uniform at all. Some were radical left wing in inspiration, a number had a conservative and monarchist bias. Some were relatively well organized and disciplined and operated to all intents and purposes as small military units would have done. Others, wandering aimlessly from village to village, showed greater proclivity for marauding than fighting the German enemy.71
After all the initial enthusiasm for a people's war, French resistance collapsed during the early months of 1871. France was not the Vendée or Spain; the great majority of Frenchmen, much as they hated the Germans, lacked the fanaticism and the stamina for the guerre à l'outrance which had been so loudly proclaimed at the start. The psychological shock of the defeat had been immense; for two centuries, if not longer, Frenchmen had believed their country to be militarily superior to all other European powers, and the surrender of their armies had destroyed their self-confidence — it was not just a crisis but a national disaster, the collapse of a whole world. To prolong resistance now, was the despondent attitude, would be but to devastate their towns and villages further, to no conceivably different end. It is idle to speculate what might have happened if resistance had continued for six more months or even a year. Moltke and the war party were only too eager to carry on the campaign, but domestic pressure on them to end it was growing. It was not only Bismarck's apprehensions about diplomatic intervention, but the war was becoming increasingly expensive, and daily more unpopular at home. Even the front-line troops were weary and the war minister, Roon, wrote that it might take years to occupy the whole of France. But the years were not called upon: French resistance faded and died away first. Guerrilla warfare, as the average Frenchman saw it, would never bring about the liberation of his country, whereas peace would perhaps open new perspectives and possibilities for a national recovery. Which all points up the more strongly that the operations of the franc tireurs neither could nor did change anything insofar as the military results of the war or — even less — the conditions of the peace treaty were concerned. German demands certainly did not become more moderate as the people's war continued. It was political considerations at the last, however, quite unconnected with events on the battlefield, that fairly narrowly circumscribed the terms that Germany could finally impose on her defeated neighbor.
In May 1900 there was every reason to assume that the end of the Boer War was in sight. Cronje had surrendered, the siege of Mafe-king had been raised, Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, had been taken and in early June the British troops entered Pretoria. Field Marshal Roberts, commanding the British forces, predicted the impending collapse of Boer resistance; the Burghers had become, in the words of one of their commanders, a "disorderly crowd of terrified men fleeing before the enemy. He let his men go home, for "I cannot catch a hare with unwilling dogs."72 When President Kruger announced that the war would begin only now, the British generals were inclined to dismiss this as idle talk on the part of an old man, a civilian who lacked understanding of military realities.
At the start of the war, in October 1899, the Boers had at first beaten the British. But as massive reinforcements streamed into South Africa, the tide began to turn despite poor generalship on the British side. The Boers were excellent horsemen and crack shots. They knew the terrain and used it very well in their operations. Above all, they were fighting for their homes and national independence. According to Boer common law, every Burgher between sixteen and sixty had to be prepared to fight for his country at any moment; he had to have a riding horse, saddle, bridle, a rifle, thirty cartridges and food for eight days. They went to war in their working clothes. But they lacked military experience and discipline and were unaccustomed to receive and carry out orders. It was truly a citizens' army; on more than one occasion their elected generals were outvoted by the corporals and the privates. Their forces were subdivided into commandos of between three hundred and three thousand men. Joubert and Cronje, who led them in the early phase of the war, were old and overcautious men; having scored a victory, they failed to press it home and make it complete. They lacked any overall strategic concept; they were capable of carrying out daring raids and surprise attacks, but there was little coordination between the commandos, and no general plan. This is not to say that they could have won the war with better leadership and a well-trained regular army; the contest was too unequal. Thus they would score some remarkable victories, such as Magersfontein, Colenso and Spionkop, but in the end the British would get fresh reinforcements, whereas all the Boers got were messages of sympathy from various parts of the world.
The British were at first exceedingly bad at reconnoitenng and in general at adjusting themselves to local conditions. But as the war continued, they improved; they had guns in plenty, while the Boers had only a few and did not make good use of their artillery. It was during the second phase of the war, which lasted from, roughly, March 1901 to May 1902, that guerrilla tactics were more and more often adopted.73 In the beginning it had been the "last of the Gentleman's Wars"; the Boers usually released their prisoners after a day or a week, if only because they had no facilities for keeping them, and the British, too, acted with restraint. But in the guerrilla phase of the war the British began to burn farms on a massive scale; the women and children who had lived on these farms were evacuated to refugee camps, known also as concentration camps. Similar practices had been employed by General Weyler in Cuba. These camps had nothing but the name in common with the concentration camps of the Nazi era, but by the standards of a more civilized period these measures were considered barbarous in the extreme; there was an outcry in Britain, the Boer resistance became even stiffer. Patriotic feeling, however, was running high in Britain, and for all the sense of outrage at this inhumanity toward civilians, not everyone by any means was happy with the relatively lenient treatment meted out to members of the Boer commandos who were exiled to St. Helena or Bermuda. Maguire, the guerrilla theoretician, wrote that if it became generally known that guerillas or irregulars would be treated like the guerrillas or irregulars in South Africa were treated, "there will be plenty of guerrillas and irregulars in every future war. It will be the most prosperous career possible."
The second guerrilla phase of the Boer War was highlighted by the commando raids of de Wet, Smuts, de la Rey, Botha and Viljoen. At the beginning of the war, the British garrison consisted of a mere 12,000 men, by the end of December 1901 there were 388,000, and when the war ended 448,000. About 46,000 of them were killed or wounded during the war, or died of disease. There had been some 60,000 soldiers in the Boer army at the beginning of the war, but their number shrank to fewer than 20,000 in the guerrilla stage.
Despite the numerical superiority, the British commanders faced the
silent disability of a regular army in contest with a horde of guerrillas manoeuvring about their own country. Seldom in the course of the whole campaign in South Africa was it possible for the British Commander-in-Chief or any of his lieutenants, to select their own sites for battle or ground for manoeuvre. Well-nigh invariably these spots were dictated by the enemy, insignificant numbers of whom led great armies whither they would.74
Boer tactics were not, of course, decisive, but it was "exceedingly humiliating to be thus bandied about at the will of handfuls of evasive freebooters."75 Even by early 1902 full control had not been reestablished in the Orange River Colony:
There was not a convoy whose safe arrival could be counted on, not a garrison that did not stand continually to arms, not a column which even whilst it marched against the enemy had not to move with the strictest precautions of the defensive.76
Hardly a day elapsed, according to another well-known chronicler of the Boer War, that the railway line was not cut at some point.77
With the beginning of the guerrilla phase a rough division of labor was decided upon by the Boer leaders; de Wet and Hertzog transferred their activities to the Free State, Botha to eastern Transvaal and on to Natal, de la Rey and Smuts to western Transvaal. Operations in the Free State became very difficult indeed, because the territory had been laid waste by the British. Smuts's raid into Cape Colony, in the course of which he covered two thousand miles, was one of the most successful operations of the whole war. He set out with three hundred and sixty men; evenutally his force swelled to almost four thousand. He did not succeed in stirring up a general rising in Cape Colony as he had hoped, but he kept tens of thousands of British soldiers busy for a long time.78
The Boer columns caused greater damage to the British in this period of the war than ever before. Their incessant maneuvers and frequent attacks exhausted the British forces; their horses died by the thousands. There were daring attacks on such strategic targets as the Bloemfontein waterworks. De Wet wrote that it was painful for him to see any railway line and not be able to damage it. At first the commandos used a primitive land mine. The barrel and lock of a gun connected to a dynamite cartridge were placed under a sleeper; when a passing engine pressed the rail to this machine, it exploded.79 Later on the system was perfected; the gravel was hollowed out, the machine was placed under a sleeper and covered up again. The British trebled their guards but there were still explosions, and no trains could run at night.
To isolate the commandos and to prevent a breakthrough, the British built a network of blockhouses at a distance of between eighty and eight hundred yards, which were connected by barbed wire entanglements, trenches and stone walls. To man them and to maintain other garrisons, some hundred thousand troops were needed. De Wet was scornful about these "white elephants" and claimed that he always fought his way through, that not a single soldier was captured as a result of the "policy of the blockhead."80 He found it more difficult to cope with British night attacks and, like other commando leaders, was paralyzed and eventually defeated by the British scorched-earth policy. Kitchener's flying columns sweeping the area beyond the blockhouses were not effective; if the Boers lost heart, it was not as the result of these drives but because of the strategy of steady attrition. It was a race against time for both sides; opposition to the war in Britain was rising and Kitchener was by no means optimistic. "The dark days are on us again," he wrote in March 1902. Four months earlier Smuts's column had entered the western regions; at first they were "hunted like outlaws," but, "today," Smuts wrote, "we practically held the whole area from the Olifants to the Orange river 400 miles away, save for small garrison towns here and there."81 But there were some hundred thousand Boer women and children in the concentration camps, and the number of Boer prisoners of war (thirty-two thousand) who had been exiled was by early 1902 considerably in excess of the number of those still in the field (eighteen thousand). Thus, after heated internal discussions at Vereeniging, with Steyn and de Wet demanding a fight to the bitter end, the Boer leaders capitulated. What clinched the matter was apparently an aside by Kitchener in conversation with Smuts — that in all probability two years hence a Liberal government would come to power granting a constitution to South Africa which would meet the Boers' demands for national autonomy.82 The peace terms were not too harsh; within the next five years Britain was to pay the Boers some ten million pounds in compensation for the property that had been destroyed, and in 1910 the Act of Union came into force, the first major step on the road to an independent South Africa.
The Boer War had certain unique features distinguishing it from all other wars of the period. Was it a guerrilla war? De Wet did not think so. "I was always at a loss to understand by what right the British designated us guerrillas," he wrote. In his view, the only case in which the term could be used was when one civilized nation had so completely vanquished another that not only the capital was taken but the whole country from border to border occupied, and this clearly was not so in South Africa.83 But de Wet labored under the misapprehension that brigandage and guerrilla warfare were more or less synonyms; a deeply religious man, like most Boer leaders, it was for him a "war of religion." "My people will perhaps say 'our generals see only the religious side of the question.' They will be right."84 They had begun the war "strong in the belief in God," because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the possibility of defeat had not entered their minds.
It was a "gentleman's war" to the extent that nongentlemen — that is, black people — were not mobilized by either side. The Boers underrated the enemy in the light of their past experience with the British (their victory at Majuba Hill in 1882), and the victories in the early months of the war seemed to justify their optimism. But they underestimated the resources of the British and, once the war became less gentlemanly (the scorched-earth tactics and the concentration camps), the Boers found themselves not only without food and in rags, but having great trouble getting weapons and ammunition. Reitz relates that he had exactly four bullets left when he joined Smuts's raid into Cape Colony, and others were no better off. Had there been two or three million Boers, they could have held out almost indefinitely against the British, but even their fighting spirit and commando tactics were not adequate enough substitute for their paucity of numbers.
The war had long been at an end when the leaders of the Boer commandos were to find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades — like the Spanish guerrilleros in the Carlist wars, and like many other guerrillas before and since once their wars were over. When World War I broke out, de Wet and de la Rey felt the time had come to shake off the British yoke. Hertzog was wavering, but Smuts and Botha suppressed the rising by force of arms. While de la Rey was killed in the fighting, Smuts lived to become a British field marshal and member of the British war cabinet. He commanded the British troops in German East Africa in World War I, while Botha fought the Germans in South West Africa. Reitz commanded the Royal Scots Fusiliers, one of the oldest British regiments, on the Western Front and eventually became a South African cabinet minister. The Boer War generation dominated the South African political scene for many decades; when the Nationalists at long last broke Unionist rule in the elections of 1948, the former were still led by General Hertzog, the latter by Smuts. And when the South African Republic was proclaimed and in May 1961 left the Commonwealth, there were still some of those alive who had fought for independence sixty years earlier.
After his return from a visit to the distant provinces of northern China, Eric Teichman, a British diplomat, wrote in 1917 that the north of Shensi Province was at the time of his visit in the hands of organized troops of brigands of a semipolitical character, "robbers one day, rebels the next, and perhaps successful revolutionaries the next." It was in this very area that the Chinese Communists established their main base after the Long March. But the phenomenon was by no means specifically Chinese — in Latin America throughout the eighteenth century, and elsewhere up to and including the present time there have been similar phenomena.85 There is in fact frequently no clear dividing line between guerrilla warfare, terror and brigandage. No one, to be sure, thought of nineteenth-century Russian and French anarchists as guerrillas; their attacks were directed against leading figures of the political establishment, and sometimes indiscriminately against the public at large. But in later years the border line between guerrilla warfare and assassination became hazy; the activities of the Irish rebels and the Macedonian IMRO serve as an illustration. The demarcation between guerrilla and banditry had all along been less than clear. For ages past, the world over, bandits operating from hideouts in inaccessible regions such as mountains or forests used the technique of the hit-and-run raid and the ambush, they had to be good shots and good horsemen to succeed in their chosen profession. There were, of course, important differences, not least on the tactical level; the marauders usually operated in very small groups and, even where brigandry was endemic, cooperation was rare between one band and the other. (Outside Europe, however, bandits sometimes operated in units of many hundreds.) Above all, they lacked a political incentive, robbery being in the main and chief objective; the richer the victims, the better. Nonetheless, as with every rule, the exceptions did sometimes exist and a political element would enter into brigandage — as, looking back, with the Haiduks in the Balkans, while the activity of dacoits in Burma can also not be ignored in this context. After the defeat of King Thibaw in the third Burma war (1885), armed gangs of patriotic robbers continued to harass the British for several years. But they also fought their own countrymen, and, of course, each other.
Certain early anarchist and socialist ideologists such as Bakunin and Weitling set great store by the bandit, the "genuine and sole revolutionary — a revolutionary without fine phrases, without learned rhetoric, irreconcilable, indefatigable and indomitable, a popular and social revolutionary" (Bakunin). Such expectations seemed perhaps only logical, up to a point; the bandits were a subversive force, undermining existing society — like the early Fascists, they were the outcasts of all classes. But, unlike the Fascists, they were highly individualistic people, they had no intention whatsoever of establishing a mass movement and of overthrowing the entrenched order. They were not even interested in expanding their ranks beyond a certain limit. Bakunin's fantasy had a revival in the theories (and practices) of some twentieth-century revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas, as we shall see in turn.
Banditry has been inherent in all known societies since the beginning of time, but robbers have differed from each other not less than sociologists and philosophers. There was, at one extreme, the sadistic outlaw who found fulfillment in murder for murder's sake, and on the other the noble bandit (or bandolero) who robbed the rich and distributed some or even most of his loot among the poor. In times of general political and social disturbance robbers would become guerrillas, some because they found it convenient to pursue their old exploits under a new respectable cloak, others because they were patriotically inclined and capable of disinterested action. Furthermore, most guerrilla movements included members of semirespectable professions such as smuggling and poaching; in peacetime these activities were strictly illegal, but smugglers and poachers were hardly regarded by society as major criminals and in time of war moral standards were invariably lowered. Smugglers and poachers knew the countryside better than anyone else, they had a lifetime of experience of being on the run and were often of considerable help to guerrilla strategists.
There were other affinities between guerrilla and bandit, inasmuch as the former, "living off the land," had to appropriate horses, food and other supplies from the local population, usually without paying for them. He did this in the name of a cause, whereas the robbers did it for less elevated reasons, but for those deprived of their belongings, the effect was all one. In addition to the official requisitions ordered by the guerrilla chiefs, there was invariably a good deal of private enterprise marauding. It would be hard to point to a single guerrilla campaign in which looting did not occur, if only because strict discipline was difficult or impossible to enforce among dispersed irregulars. It was rare in some guerrilla movements led by men of integrity such as Garibaldi or the Boer generals, but more often than not the guerrillas took a share of the spoils as their due, simply because this was the only kind of payment they had any hope of getting. This was all but standard operating practice in nineteenth-century Latin America, but it also happened in the Vendee, in the Spanish rising against Napoleon, in the American Civil War, among Abd el-Kader's followers and in countless other instances. The more farsighted guerrilla leaders did what they could to prevent systematic and too-frequent looting because they knew that, in the long run, they depended on the goodwill and the collaboration of the local inhabitants — mention has been made of the extermination of robber bands by Mina in the Spanish wars —but even they had their hands full trying to impose a guerrilla order. Mention has also been made of the almost imperceptible transition from brigandage (or bandolerismo) to partisan warfare in Cuba in the 1870s and the same applies, in some degree, to Mexico — Pancho Villa was perhaps the most famous case of a bandit turned guerrilla, but there were many others.86 And this leaving out, nearer to our own times, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Cuban war in the 1950s. In some countries bandolerismo was a concomitant of the social struggle — this certainly goes for Mexico and for Andalusia at the end of the eighteenth century — elsewhere, as in Greece, the armatoli were on the contrary a conservative force forming part of the established social system.
Paneho Villa turned bandit, so he claimed, only because he wanted to defend the honor of his mother.87 Su San, the female gang leader who earned a unique place in the history of the Taiping revolution, had become an outlaw (and the head of a major bandit gang) after the death of her husband. She organized a posse to hunt down his murderer, killed him with her own hands and in time became the chief of a band which had the reputation of robbing the rich to help the poor. Eventually she joined the Taiping army with two thousand men, winning immortality in the poems of contemporary Chinese literati.88
During its guerrilla phase, Communism in China drew not a few of its recruits from the ranks of robber bands. Writing about the composition of the Red Army, Mao declared it was not true to say (as the Hunan Provincial Committee had done) that all the soldiers were éléments déclassés, meaning deserters, robbers, beggars and prostitutes, but he admitted that the majority consisted of such men and women.89 In principle it was quite true that they should be replaced by peasants and workers but in practice it was impossible to find replacements. Hence the necessity to intensify political training "so as to effect a qualitative change in these elements."90 The éléments déclassés (yumin) were especially good fighters, they were courageous, and under the right leadership they could become a revolutionary force. It was surely no mere accident that the Communist guerrillas appeared precisely in those parts of China such as the Hua Yin region in which banditry on a mass scale had been endemic for a long time. In the early phase the Communist guerrillas had much in common with other armed bands such as the t'u-fei (bandits), and Mao for one displayed great interest in the t'u-fei tradition.91 In later years the Chinese Red Armies only tolerated them in regions in which Communist rule had not yet been firmly established.
The ecology of guerrilla war and banditry is identical to all intents and purposes. This applies to all the more recent major guerrilla wars — China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, and so on. Naturally both guerrillas and bandits looked for hideouts in difficult terrain. But there was also usually a regional tradition of "young people taking to the hills.
If some bandits would turn to the left, others would join rightwing forces; the story of the resistance against Napoleon in southern Italy is enlightening in this respect. As in Spain, the French army of occupation could maintain itself only in the large towns; the countryside was in the hands of men who hated the foreign invaders, had lost their jobs or did not want to be conscripted. They preferred to pursue guerrilla warfare: "too weak for such an operation, they were still strong enough to turn brigands,"92 But they did not think of themselves as robbers, almost to a man these brigands died courageously when apprehended by the French. "I ladri siete voi" (You are the robbers), a Calabrian peasant proudly declared when facing the tribunal at Monteleone. "I carried my rifle and knife for King Ferdinand whom my God restore,"93 Militarily these brigands' gangs were by no means insignificant; the occupation army could transverse the country only in large units, small detachments were almost certainly bound to be destroyed. Murat's lines of communication were constantly disrupted, several battalions always had to be ready to fight the bandits. In the end, ten thousand soldiers were spread over two provinces. General Championnet once admitted that Fra Diavolo's band gave him more difficulty than any division of the royalist army.94 The French position improved after they had enlisted the help of Andrea Orlando, himself an ex-bandit who knew most of the hideouts of his former comrades, and made him head of a counterguerrilla detachment. The bandit guerrillas committed innumerable atrocities, to which the French responded with "extraordinary measures"; since they found it impossible to chase the brigands, they turned against the villages, compelling them (in the words of a French officer) "to extirpate the brigands of themselves under penalty of being regarded as their complices and abetters." (Lettres sur les Calabres, par un officier français, Paris, n.d.)
Fra Diavolo, the most notorious of these robbers, was in fact born Michele Pezza, his better-known sobriquet indicating the cunning of a priest and the malice of the devil. It is reported that French officers who fell into his hands were burned at the stake while the villagers danced around this auto-da-fé. Like other prominent robbers such as Gasparone, he became the protagonist of an opera (by Auber, with the libretto by Scribe).95 He had been made a colonel by King Ferdinand and after his death — he was hanged by the French in November 1806 — his family received a royal pension Mammone, Fra Diavolo's almost equally famous colleague, had the reputation, perhaps apocryphical, of a cannibal: "The inhabitants [of his native village] assert that he hung about the butchers' stalls for an opportunity to put his mouth to the gashed throats of bullocks and swine."96
In this guerrilla war in the southern Italian provinces, the patriotic forces consisted of an alliance between the Bourbonists, the nobility, the clergy and the brigands, while the liberals, the republicans and the French were the enemy. The reactionary forces were headed by Cardinal Ruffo, who coined the slogan "Fernando e la Santa Fede"; the brigands, among them many released convicts, were fighting in the name of the holy faith. Ruffo promised the citizens faithful to the king exemption from taxes for six years and celestial delights for all eternity:
The rabble took up its line of march as a disorderly religious procession. They tore down the trees of liberty, set up crosses in their place, entered villages and visited churches with the most sacred forms and ceremonies of the Roman Church, the Cardinal in his purple blessing the people and their arms.97
When the Bourbon forces entered Naples, the republican sympathizers were lynched and their property looted. It was later bruited about that the British had first suggested that the government of Sicily should be relieved of the great burden of maintaining so many convicts and transport them to Calabria, making them useful to the public cause. Ruffo, according to this version, made the best of a difficult situation by reeducating the cutthroats with the help of his chaplains who were acting as political commissars: "He turned this unpromising human clay into brigadier generals and saints."98 Ruffo's efforts, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, were not altogether successful.
Why certain bandits defended the existing order while others fought for the revolution depended partly on the general character of the gang, partly on the political and social background, but also on the character of the gang leader. In many cases this was a matter of sheer accident. Su San, herself turned bandit and then a leader of the Taiping through unordained circumstances, is reported by some to have later married Lo Ta-kang, another prominent ex-bandit. Together with seven other leaders of river pirates, Lo had shown up in Chin-t'ien, the main base of the Taiping, in 1851 or 1852. He became one of the most distinguished generals of the movement, and after his death in battle he had bestowed on him by the Heavenly King the noble title of Fen wang (Endeavour King).99 The other chiefs of the water pirates deserted the Taiping and went over to the emperor's army. There is no known way of sociological or psychological analysis to explain why Lo became a pillar of the Taiping whereas the other pirates rejoined the antirevolutionary forces, why Mina fought with the Cristinos and Merino with the Carlists, Fra Diavolo with the Bourbons and Andrea Orlando with the Napoleonic forces. In a war against a foreign invader the choice for patriotically inclined bandits was more obvious than in a civil war.
The days of guerrilla wars seemed to be over as the nineteenth century drew to its close. One of the few who dissented was that remarkable Russo-Polish-Jewish businessman and strategist Jean de Bloch, author of The War of the Future, who claimed that the modern rifle favoring individual action and sharpshooting and requiring the abandonment of close formations, was primarily a guerrilla weapon and tended to put the civilian on a level with the regular soldier. A guerrilla war, he declared on more than one occasion, would inevitably follow regular resistance in the future.100 A German officer, writing in Deutsche Revue, sharply disagreed; it was not true that, as Bloch had argued, a guerrilla war in Europe would make a decisive result impossible. The action of the franc tireurs in 1870 had been quite ineffectual. Futhermore, a highly civilized nation could not carry on a guerrilla war, it would not have the patient capacity to endure the burdens, privations and sacrifices of such a war and the longing for peace would become over-whelming.101 Bloch retorted that the case of the franc tireurs proved nothing, and that anyway a protracted war with large standing armies such as foreseen by the leading strategic thinkers of the day could only lead to social cataclysms and violent revolutions. Both Bloch and his Prussian critic were to be proved right by the events of the next two decades. With a few exceptions, the nations of Europe were indeed too civilized for guerrilla warfare, but the social cataclysms and the revolutions came with a vengeance.