Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  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.

  Empires Versus Guerrilla

  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 o
f 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 foll
owers 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: