by Max Boot
WITH HIS WORLDWIDE fame (more than half a million people thronged the streets of London to greet him in 1864),170 Garibaldi was often in demand in other people’s wars. In 1861 he turned down an offer from Abraham Lincoln to fight in the U.S. Civil War because the Union had not yet committed to abolish slavery—and because he was not offered command of the entire Union army. Garibaldi may have been an idealist, but he also had a healthy ego.171
In November 1870, although by now “old and lame,”172 suffering from rheumatism and old wounds, he was more eager to go to the defense of his erstwhile enemy, France, in its war against Prussia. The regular French armies under Emperor Louis Napoleon were swiftly surrounded and forced to surrender. A republican government then took power and vowed to continue resistance. Now that the “execrable tyrant,” Napoleon, had been overthrown, Garibaldi volunteered “what was left of him,” explaining, “Whenever an oppressed people struggles against its oppressors, whenever an enslaved people combats for its liberty, my place is in their midst.”
In spite of the hostility of conservative Catholics toward this notorious freethinker, the provisional government accepted his services and assigned him to command the irregular Army of the Vosges in eastern France. This was one of many units of francs-tireurs (“free shooters”) that sprang up across occupied France (roughly a third of its total territory) in response to the republican leader Léon Gambetta’s call to “harass the enemy’s detachments without pause or relaxation.” They sniped at “the Boche” and blew up bridges, railroads, and telegraph lines.
Garibaldi’s force, which swelled to over sixteen thousand men, was made up not only of Frenchmen but also of Italians, including his two sons, Poles, Hungarians, and other foreigners dedicated to defending liberty. “In his element once again,” writes the foremost student of the francs-tireurs, “[Garibaldi] fought the way he knew best, striking, feinting, falling back, and striking again—tactics which were the essence of irregular warfare.” His son Ricciotti scored a particularly notable success with his raid on the town of Châtillon-sur-Seine on November 18, 1870, killing or capturing more than three hundred soldiers out of a Prussian garrison of eight hundred. Garibaldi later occupied the city of Dijon and held it for a while against heavy counterattack.
German commanders were exasperated by such setbacks. They ordered their soldiers to shoot captured guerrillas and to impose “harsh reprisals” on towns suspected of aiding them. “They are not soldiers: we are treating them as murderers,” Prussia’s prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, declared. This was in keeping with the traditional approach to guerrillas codified in the influential Lieber Code, authored by the German-American law professor Francis Lieber and promulgated by the Union army in 1863 as General Orders No. 100 to deal with Southern “bushwhackers.” Lieber’s most important contribution was to distinguish between partisans and guerrillas. The former were fighters “wearing the uniform of their army” and “belonging to a corps which acts detached from the main body.” They were entitled if captured “to all the privileges of the prisoner of war.” But “men, or squads of men, who commit hostilities . . . without being part and portion of the organized hostile army . . . shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates.”173
This sounds as if it could have been a prescription for mass executions of captured guerrillas. But it was applied much more inconsistently and humanely by Lincoln’s soldiers in the South and, in spite of Germany’s later reputation for inhumane warfare, by the kaiser’s soldiers in France. Both armies were considerably more restrained than French troops had been in the Vendée, Spain, or Haiti. Captured Garibaldini were especially well treated, because they wore uniforms and generally obeyed the laws of war. The Germans could afford to be magnanimous. The francs-tireurs never seriously threatened to change the outcome of the war, which ended with the fall of Paris in January 1871.
Garibaldi returned home to the jeers of French conservatives. Their vitriol was understandable given that the veteran revolutionary had not worked the miracles that were now expected of him. All of the francs-tireurs had killed fewer than a thousand German troops and tied down a hundred thousand more while prolonging the war for just a few months. They had not saved France from a humiliating defeat that included the loss of two provinces. But then the entire conflict had been so short—just six months—that there was no time for the guerrillas to wear down the invaders, as the Spanish had done seven decades earlier.174
NOTWITHSTANDING THE Anticlimactic end of his career, when he died in 1882, at seventy-four, Garibaldi was celebrated far outside his homeland as “the Hero of Two Worlds.”175 The British historian A. J. P. Taylor would reportedly call him “the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”176 He was the forerunner of all the twentieth-century guerrillas who would become international celebrities. But he was more laudable than most guerrilla chieftains in that he consistently displayed humanity and restraint in his war making and never sought power or riches for himself. In both his sterling conduct and his spectacular results, he set a standard seldom matched before or since.
19.
REVOLUTIONARY CONSEQUENCES
The Liberal Achievement
GARIBALDI’S DEATH, TEN years after Mazzini’s, marks a fitting end to this survey of the era of liberal revolutions inaugurated by the minutemen of Massachusetts more than a hundred years earlier. Most future revolutionaries, whether of the right or the left, would be more extreme in their methods and beliefs. But whatever their orientation, generations of rebels to come would learn from the liberals’ use of propaganda as a powerful weapon of war. It would continue to grow in importance until the present day when Osama bin Laden would declare, not implausibly, that the “media war” constituted 90 percent of his entire battle.177 The percentage was lower in the nineteenth century but much higher than it had been in the countless centuries of largely apolitical guerrilla warfare that preceded it.
Liberal insurgents scored their most impressive victories in the New World, where, with a few small exceptions, by 1825 the writ of European colonialists no longer ran. Louis Napoleon tried to install a puppet regime in Mexico in the 1860s, but his chosen ruler, the Austrian archduke Maximilian, was killed and his government overthrown by liberal forces, including guerrillas led by Benito Juárez. In Europe the most successful uprisings were in Greece and Italy. Constitutional monarchies were also established in Belgium and France in 1830, but these upheavals, like the French Revolution of 1789, were the product of “people power” in the streets rather than of guerrilla warfare. There were many more revolutionary failures, from the Chartists in Britain to the Decembrists in Russia. But even unsuccessful revolts could exert a powerful influence by persuading rulers to grant some of the rebels’ demands in order to assuage their supporters. Thus most of Europe was moving in a more liberal direction in the nineteenth century—even states such as Russia, Germany, and Austria that remained absolute monarchies.
Ironically the consequences of liberal revolts were in some ways the least satisfactory in the places where they had ostensibly succeeded. The French Revolution started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and ended in war and terror. The Greek revolt did not usher in a “Great Age” and “another Athens,” as imagined by philhellenes such as Shelley, but rather rule by an imported Bavarian prince who was overthrown by a coup in 1862.178 Haiti’s liberation was followed by a “general massacre”179 of the remaining whites and an instability that persists to the present day. Spain experienced repression and civil war after the expulsion of the French; it would not see the emergence of democracy until the 1970s. Italy was more peaceful, but Garibaldi, increasingly socialistic and pacifistic in his old age, was deeply discontented by the “misery of [his] country,” which he attributed to “the base and deceitful conduct of government and priests.”180 Even in the United States, a model of effective governance compared with Greece, Haiti, Italy, or Spain, most of the revolutionaries who had fought for freedom from Britain refused to grant freed
om to African-Americans, whose humanity they denied.
José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar, the liberators of Latin America, were even more disenchanted than Garibaldi with the consequences of their struggles. They had hoped to inaugurate an era of “peace, science, art, commerce, and agriculture” overseen by strong central governments operating under liberal constitutions.181 Instead they gave birth to caudillos, corruption, and civil strife—what Bolívar in his last years denounced as “this fearful anarchy.”182 Hard as it usually is to overthrow a regime, harder still is it to establish an enduring and successful successor. Many revolutionaries have discovered, along with San Martín and Bolívar, that ideals are simpler to fight for than to implement.
BOOK III
THE SPREADING OIL SPOT
The Wars of Empire
20.
THE WARS THAT WEREN’T
Why Did So Few Guerrillas Resist the European Advance?
AT THE SAME time that Western states were becoming more liberal at home, they were extending their rule across much of the non-European world in decidedly illiberal fashion: at gunpoint. The process of colonization and resistance would do much to shape the modern world as we know it in the twenty-first century. It would also give rise to the most influential counterinsurgency doctrine of all time, “the spreading oil spot,” which was the forerunner of the “population-centric” doctrine implemented in the twenty-first century by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This meant slowly pushing out army posts and settlements until indigenous resistance was crushed. Long before the term was coined by the French soldier Hubert Lyautey toward the end of the nineteenth century, the strategy that it described was being employed by Europeans with great success.
The inhabitants of Asia, Africa, and the Americas resisted the white man’s advance as best they could. Sometimes they were able to inflict serious setbacks; two famous examples, which will be discussed in this section, were the 1842 British retreat from Kabul and the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. But these were only temporary reverses in the inexorable Westernization of the world. Most of the wars chronicled here were won by the Europeans—whether against the American Indians, Pashtuns, Chechens, Moroccans, or Boers (themselves of European origin). By 1914 Europeans and their offspring controlled 84 percent of the world’s landmass—up from 35 percent in 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and just 15 percent in 1450, at the beginning of the Age of Exploration.1
That non-Europeans did not have more success in preserving their independence was due in large measure to Europe’s growing advantages in military technology and technique. But it also owes something to the fact that most non-Europeans did not adopt the smartest strategies to make use of their limited resources. Few fought as the Haitians did. Instead of attempting to engage in guerrilla warfare—which, even if unsuccessful, might have staved off ultimate defeat for years, if not decades, and inflicted considerable costs on the invaders—most non-Europeans fought precisely as the Europeans wanted them to. That is to say, in conventional, if not particularly effective, fashion.
Westerners thought that most of the areas they conquered were “primitive” and “backward,” but in a sense they were too advanced for their own good. By the turn of the nineteenth century, most of Africa and Asia had fallen under the sway of native regimes with standing armies, and their rulers naturally looked for protection to those forces. Sub-Saharan Africa was the least advanced region from a European vantage point, but even here a recent study has found “the presence of state structures, often elaborate ones, in all military organization[s].”2 Thus in fighting the European onslaught, Africans generally eschewed the sort of tribal tactics—a primitive form of guerrilla warfare—practiced by their ancestors.
To take just one example, the Zulus may have been armed primarily with assegais (stabbing spears) rather than Martini-Henry rifles, but, like the British, their forces were organized into disciplined regiments known as impis, which did not usually fight from cover but rather maneuvered on the battlefield. The Zulus’ goal was to annihilate the enemy—not to engage in hit-and-run raiding. Their favorite tactical formation was known as the “horns of the bull.” The center, or “chest,” of the impi would pin down the enemy while two “horns” on either side raced around to envelop the enemy’s flanks. On January 22, 1879, an impi of 20,000 men wiped out a British column at Isandlwana, killing 1,329 British and African troops. But a frontal assault on the nearby British garrison at Rorke’s Drift was repulsed by just 120 soldiers, and on March 29 the entire Zulu army was defeated at Kambula. In this decisive but little-known battle, the British lost just 18 soldiers to the Zulus’ 2,000. A few months later British troops burned the capital of Zululand and captured its king, Cetshwayo.3
The British did not usually lose as many men as they had at Isandlwana, but otherwise this tale of a minor setback followed by decisive triumphs was replicated in many other corners of the queen’s domains. The Americans, French, Germans, Russians, and other imperialists had similar experiences. The most daunting obstacles to the Westerners’ advance were not native armies but treacherous terrain and deadly diseases. Those difficulties were finally surmounted by advances in medical and transportation technology (quinine, railroads, and steamboats were critical), thereby making possible the “Scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century.
Why did so few indigenous regimes resort to guerrilla tactics? Part of the explanation is that most non-Westerners had little idea of the combat power of Western armies until it was too late. Too many empire builders in the developing world imagined that the tactics that had worked against local tribes would work against the white tribe. They were fatally mistaken, but their incomprehension was understandable given how slowly news traveled before the spread of telegraphs, undersea cables, steamships, and railroads—to say nothing of radio, television, airplanes, and the Internet. In the ancient world, Rome’s enemies had scant opportunity to learn from one another’s experiences. So too in the Victorian world there was little chance that the Zulus could benefit from the experience of the Sioux. By contrast, soldiers from more advanced nations did study each other’s campaigns. A spate of military manuals was published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advising Westerners how to win “small wars.”
When native rulers did try to learn from past mistakes, their impulse was usually to make their armies more conventional, rather than less, by hiring European advisers and buying European arms. With the notable exception of Japan, the reproductions were seldom as good as the originals, and their inferiority was brutally exposed in battle. Most peoples in the developing world would have been better off reverting to older forms of irregular warfare. The Marathas of India, for example, had a long history as superb horse raiders, but in the late eighteenth century they chose to raise European-style regiments that proved no match for disciplined British regulars under such talented generals as Arthur Wellesley and Gerald Lake.4 In a very real sense they beat themselves by imbibing the myth then prevalent in European military circles of the superiority of conventional warfare and the ineffectuality of guerrilla resistance.
Such counterproductive behavior is hard to explain unless one realizes that it would have been hard for traditional rulers to give up their palaces and riches without a fight—or to maintain their grip on recalcitrant subjects while hiding in the bush. There was also an onus in many indigenous armies, just as in their Western counterparts, against fighting in a stealthy or underhanded way. It was considered unmanly. Much better, many figured, to fight courageously and die gloriously. Accepting the ascendance of the Europeans was often not that hard in any case, because the new overlords were liable to practice “indirect rule” that kept local elites in place.
Even if there had been more desire to ignite insurgencies, ideological fuel was generally lacking. Most people have always been attached to their homes, but until modern times their primary allegiance was to the family, clan, or tribe, not to the state. Often the ruler
s of indigenous states were resented as much as Europeans, if not more so, especially by those who belonged to a different tribe or sect. Nationalism was an eighteenth-century European invention that by the nineteenth century had not spread much beyond European settler colonies in the Americas. That helps to explain why most of those colonies achieved independence. The rest of the world lost its independence as much because of a lack of national feeling as because of a lack of modern weapons. The brittle kingdoms of what came to be known as the Third World were wont to collapse after their armies had been defeated on the battlefield. There was seldom prolonged resistance of the kind that occurred in Spain after Napoleon’s initial victories.
A partial exception was to be found in Islamic countries where the people were bound together by ties of religion as well as tribe. Some Muslim states also made the mistake of fighting Europeans head-on. The most notorious example was the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 when thousands of Sudanese “dervishes” charged straight at the British lines in broad daylight only to be mown down by machine-gun, artillery, and rifle fire. But other jihadists were clever enough to avoid the full fury of Western firepower. Chechens, Pashtuns, and Moroccans, among others, would wage protracted insurgencies against European occupiers in the nineteenth century.
Some non-Muslim peoples, notably the Filipinos and Boers, would also inflict serious damage on colonial powers. While painful for the Americans and the British, however, the uprisings in the Philippines and South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century were also relatively brief. Not so the wars of the North American Indians. They would display both the potential and the limitations of guerrilla tactics during a resistance to white rule that lasted almost three centuries.
21.
THE SKULKING WAY OF WAR