Major (subsequently General) von Decker, the least politically minded of the four, presented a useful and systematic summary of the topic which, of necessity, repeated much of the advice proffered by earlier authors; for instance, he advised guerrillas to change their quarters rapidly, after both victory and defeat, never to take their safety for granted, to march at night and to camp in the most remote of villages during a raid. He pointed out the great importance of maintaining good relations with the local population; the partisan should be welcome everywhere, he should be considered a liberator, not a pirate or filibuster. To be thus considered entailed strict discipline, and the giving of payment for supplies received. Decker's ideal "party" was smaller than those advocated by the eighteenth-century theorists; at most it should number a hundred to a hundred and fifty men. Except for high-ranking enemy officers, no prisoners should be taken whose presence would only slow down the movement of the raiders. He counseled extreme prudence when enlisting new soldiers, and stressed the importance of having spies in all classes. The partisan's appearance should inspire confidence, and it was particularly important for him to be on good terms with priests and women ("no one will be able to obtain secrets which neither priests nor women can penetrate"). On some occasions he also emphasized the importance of psychological warfare: for instance, during the Napoleonic wars when the French general Vandamme offered a prize of a thousand thaler for the head of the rebel leader Bork, the latter countered by offering two francs for the head of Vandamme. Partisan warfare, as Decker saw it, was more difficult than la grande guerre: even a mediocre talent could make a useful contribution in regular warfare, whereas partisan warfare called for very special qualities.44
In a subsequent study, Decker commented on the war in Algeria; this was one of the very first attempts to analyze the new military problems beyond the confines of Europe which faced the colonial powers.48 Decker did not rate French chances of success very high, thinking that the French would secure a few towns near the coast at best. A European army with its baggage trains and other encumbrances was unsuited to fight in such unfamiliar conditions. It could not come to grips with the enemy, there were no centers of power to be attacked and the absence of good roads impeded movement. It was quite pointless in these circumstances to aim at inconclusive victories; the side which would last longest would ultimately emerge victorious irrespective of how often it had been defeated.46 Decker correctly analyzed the problems which would one day face the colonial powers but his misgivings were premature as regards the immediate future. The French, under Marshal Bu-geaud, developed highly effective "counter-guerrilla" tactics. Abd el-Kader surrendered only three years after Decker's book appeared, and for a century French North Africa remained relatively quiet.
Karol (Charles) Bogumir Stolzman (1793-1854) was an artillery captain who had taken part in the Polish rising of 1830-1831; later he lived as an emigrant in France and Switzerland, and he represented "Young Poland" in Mazzini's Jeune Europe.* His remarkable treatise was the forerunner of a whole twentieth-century "doit-yourself" literature; it was reprinted in Warsaw in 1959. It gave practical advice on how to produce explosives in a kitchen or garden shed, it provided exact figures on how much powder was needed to produce land mines, and the required size of a mine for blowing up a wall or a bridge.47 Like other authors he referred to the historical predecessors of modern partisan warfare (Skanderbeg, Spain, the Caucasus), stressing the popular character and national inspiration in a modern small war. Surely twenty-two million Poles were as brave as twelve million Spaniards had been. They too would make life intolerable for the occupation forces of their enslaved country. Among the problems which preoccupied him was the question of maintenance of discipline in an irregular unit, and the advisability of awarding decorations for actions of special valor. He suggested that after termination of hostilities a roll of honor should be published, listing those who had distinguished themselves.48 But much of his book was devoted to advice on eminently practical issues: how to cross a river; how to defend a house (or church); how to prepare a code for secret correspondence; how to use scythes in battle if more effective weapons were not available.
Like Stolzman General Wojciech Chrzanowski (1793-1861) had participated in the Polish rising of 1830.* His observations on partisan warfare are of great interest because they contain, in a nutshell, most of the basic ideas of twentieth-century guerrilla warfare. Sometimes there is an almost textual overlapping with Mao's doctrine: namely the importance of guerrilla bases, the idea of protracted warfare and even the gradual transition from guerrilla to mobile warfare.49 Chrzanowski noted that guerrilla warfare could be successful only if the enemy army was not large enough to occupy the whole territory, but this, he added, was seldom likely to happen. To be effective partisan warfare had to be protracted; the longer it continued, the better the chances for victory, for while the guerrillas grew stronger, the enemy units became weaker and more demoralized. Guerrilla war, as envisaged by Chrzanowski, would at first be conducted against individual enemy soldiers, then against small units, and eventually against larger bodies. He stressed, however, the importance of attacking the enemy only from a position of marked superiority. Attacks should be launched if possible from the flanks.
Swiss writers on guerrilla warfare developed the idea of the popular-patriotic partisan war in the same decade. Thus J. M. Rudolph: "Without the support of local inhabitants even the most gifted partisans will be unable to succeed."50 Gingens-La Sarraz emphasized in his study the great importance of the moral factor — the success of an invader, however well he was organized, would be ephemeral against an insurrectional war conducted with energy and intelligence. Counterinsurgency would be of no avail against a total war which denied the enemy supplies and in which no quarter was given.51 A widely quoted Swiss manual on guerrilla warfare by Major von Dach, published almost one hundred years later, rests on the very same basic concept; only the technical details have changed.52 Partisan warfare was studied by military men in most European countries in the nineteenth century, including Spain and even Serbia.53 The nineteenth-century authors quite often plagiarized each other, but what matters in this context is simply the fact that the subject was never entirely neglected.
Stolzman's work was one of the last books on partisan warfare of the pre-railway and pre-telegraph age; two decades later another important book on the topic was published, the contents of which reflected the far-reaching technical changes which had taken place in the intervening years. Its author, Wilhelm Rüstow, a former German officer, was a radical democrat who had taken part in the revolution of 1848. Having settled in Switzerland he was a respected figure in emigré circles, and was to see military service again in Garibaldi's little army. Rüstow (1821-1878) was a well-known and prolific writer on military affairs and his book covered a range of issues from high strategy to minute details on equipment.* He was opposed to high boots, and came out strongly in favor of short loose shirts 01* tunics ("Garibaldi shirts" or Schifferhemden) with dark, not shiny, buttons. He also dealt with the shape of saddles and the size of rifles and carbines, preferring the small-caliber guns. He made the sensible point that the partisan should not have to carry more than twenty-three to twenty-four pounds on his march.54 Rüstow favored the employment of very small tactical units for a variety of reasons — one of which was to mislead the enemy about their real strength. He thought that technical development had made night attacks very risky, but on the whole he believed in ambushes and, generally speaking, in bold, dare-devil action, even in the age of the railway and telegraph line, which, needless to say, figured highly on his list of targets.55
The Prussian wars of 1864 and 1866, and particularly the war with France in 1870, gave fresh impetus to the study of irregular warfare. A. von Boguslawski, a German lieutenant-colonel (and subsequently a general) was perhaps the first to discuss the legal questions involved. He thought it highly unlikely that there would ever be a generally accepted international convention with regard to parti
san warfare. It had been suggested at a conference in Brussels that the civil population would no longer be entitled to continue a war once the country was occupied by enemy forces.56 Bluntschli, the famous Swiss expert on international law, had stated in his Modern Law of War that a popular rising in the rear of the enemy was illegal, and those who took part in it should be treated as rebels according to martial law. Bluntschli added, however, that if the insurrection was on a large scale and if it was at least partially successful this was bound to change the situation and also the status of those who took part in the insurrection. What, Boguslawski asked, constituted the effective occupation of a village? Was it the presence of three soldiers or five hundred? He did not regard an attack by civilians against regular army units as unethical even if the former were not in uniform. But what if a peasant killed a passing officer, threw his rifle into the nearest hedge, and continued to plough his field? A rising in the enemy's rear could be perfectly justified, but could it still be regarded as legitimate warfare if a soldier was killed in his sleep by the owner in whose house he was billeted? Boguslawski argued that there could never be a clear dividing line between the defensible and the indefensible and that, in the last resort, each civilized nation would react to partisan warfare as it saw fit; it certainly would not be bound by international conventions. The author also maintained, somewhat surprisingly for a Prussian officer, that it was very mistaken to believe that a soldier needed no knowledge of politics whatsoever.57
Again, in advance of his time, Boguslawski considered the possibilities of political warfare in combination with military operations. He foresaw that an invading army might want to incite a popular rising; the Piedmontese had done so in Lombardy in 1848, and again in 1859. The question of whether soldiers could be prepared in peace for small warfare intrigued him very much. He thought that such training did not basically differ from all military training apart, perhaps, from teaching the well-known fact that small war depended to a much greater degree on the initiative of the individual officer and soldier. He suggested that it would be helpful if officers, even when on holiday, scanned their surroundings with a professional eye to explore the possibilities for a small war. The idea was not entirely original; Clausewitz's letters from the Silesian spas in summer 1811 to his friend Gneisenau showed that he was heavily preoccupied with such problems and it is unlikely that he was the first strategist whose mind continued to function on professional lines even while on leave.
Boguslawski thought a total war, involving the active participation of women and children such as had occurred in Spain and the Tyrol, unlikely to recur because the mass of the population was not composed of heroes. Nevertheless, as wars had become national ones and were no longer contests between professional soldiers, such an eventuality had to be taken into account, especially when geographical conditions favored it. He analyzed in some detail the attacks of the franc tireurs in the autumn and winter of 1870, a topic which also preoccupied a French officer, Captain Devaureix.
Devaureix's detailed study of partisan warfare was published in 1880; it opened with the melancholy observation that this kind of war, which was so "eminently French" had fallen into disfavor after our "recent disasters."58 But had not the lessons of 1870-1871 amply demonstrated the uses of partisan warfare? The Germans themselves admitted that they had suffered more losses in the second phase of the war than in the first, despite the fact that the French army had been routed. Devaureix claimed that the Germans were not prepared for the privations and fatigues of a lengthy war and he quoted with approval an observation of Marshal Bugeaud that the way to defeat the Germans was to cut their lines of supply, keep them on the march and deprive them of their sleep, Devaureix admitted that the behavior of some of the franc tireurs had been scandalous, and he made it clear that he opposed freewheeling, independent guerrilla activities. Partisans would have to operate under the command of the regular army. Like other authors he saw the main task of partisan warfare as disrupting the enemy's lines of communications and spreading confusion; again like others, he referred to the experiences of Frederick the Great in Bohemia in 1740-1741, and of Napoleon in Russia and Germany after 1812, when these military leaders lost contact with sections of their armies because their couriers were unable to get through to them. The basic effect of partisan warfare was on morale, but had not the great Napoleon said that in war three-quarters of the outcome depended upon morale? He also quoted General Duhesme, author of the leading infantry manual of the Napoleonic age, that partisan warfare had an "immense psychological effect." Much of Devaureix's study is devoted to an excessively detailed historical outline, establishing that real partisan warfare developed only after the end of the seventeenth century, when Turenne's and Montecucoli's last campaigns put warfare on a truly modern and organized basis. Before that time armies had lived off the land, virtually independent of lines of communication and supply. With changes in the art of warfare, armies had become far more vulnerable precisely because their dependence on supplies had become so much greater. While regular warfare became subject to rules which were rigidly observed, partisan warfare had no rules and was by its very essence adventurous and independent. Maurice de Saxe was the first French military leader to realize the importance of a free corps and to establish such a unit (the Légion de Grassin). This, however, was not really a partisan detachment in the modern sense but simply a light cavalry unit operating within the framework of the regular army.
After the end of the Seven Years' War, under the impact of the victories of Frederick II, independent light units were abolished almost everywhere only to re-emerge a hundred years later. Devaureix referred to the popular resistance encountered by the French in the Tyrol (1796) as well as in Verona, Venice and the Naples region and, of course, in Spain. He attributed — wrongly no doubt — the disunity of Napoleon's marshals as the main reason for France's failure. He cited Napoleon to the effect that the guerrillas came into being one year after his departure from Spain because of the pillage and other abuses committed against his strictest orders by several of his generals, above all Soult, who should have been shot.59
The effects of partisan warfare in Russia were again felt mainly on morale: the French had nothing to eat and could not get any sleep. The actual military value of the Russian partisans was very nearly nil. Devaureix quoted the 29th Bulletin of the Grande Armée, which compared the Cossacks to Arabs in the desert, always evading any serious battle: "this contemptible cavalry which makes nothing but noise and is incapable of even breaking through a company of light infantry. . . Contemptible or not, the Cossacks were quite effective and this was all that finally mattered. Referring to the lessons of the American Civil War — "as yet insufficiently studied" — and, of course, the Franco-Prussian War, Devaureix reached the conclusion that partisan warfare still had a future — and an important one at that.
This view was shared by another French student of partisan warfare, Captain Charenton, who, writing in the year 1900, noted that in the next war the franc tireurs would have to fight against two formidable opponents — the telegraph and the railways.60 The former made it difficult for them to hide their presence for any length of time, the latter helped the enemy to concentrate his forces against the partisans. Hence the importance of directing the first blow against these new inventions. Charenton like Devaureix was concerned with the operations of semiregular units which were authorized by the military command and operated under its direction. He quoted as an illustration of a successful franc tireur raid the destruction on 22 January 1871 of the viaduct at Fontenoy over which all trains from Paris to Orléans had to pass. The French had used various ruses: scouts disguised as peasants were sent out to reconnoiter; the raiders wore German Landwehr caps when they attacked the German unit guarding the viaduct; they made a bayonet charge, not firing a single shot. Like other authors Charenton stressed the importance of keeping iron discipline, for otherwise the semiregular units would degenerate into gangs of robbers "as in the American Civil War
." If the free corps were to be constituted of elite troops, however, and they realized that they would always have to be on the offensive, such a corps could well play an important role in any future war. But these unorthodox views were not favored by the general staff of the main European armies, and it was not during the First World War but only in its aftermath that the free corps came into their own again in Central and Eastern Europe.
Britain And The Colonial Experience
Guerrilla warfare as a legitimate subject of study received a new, albeit short lease of life in Britain in the wake of the Boer War. Before that war, as an observer noted, it had not been part of the curriculum of military officers, although the British army had been engaged in the reign "of our late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria'' in no fewer than eighty-two campaigns, most of them small, irregular wars in the bush and desert between "armies" of a few thousand men; wars in which artillery had played no leading role. There was, in January 1900, according to this witness, not a single work on guerrilla warfare available in any London bookshop: "some of our statesmen were amazed that any nation should be so foolish and absurd as to continue any warfare after the regular armies of the country were defeated or after the capital of the country were taken. .. ."61 The author, a barrister of Inner Temple, was certainly correct in noting the general trend in military thought of divorcing doctrine and practice.62 Strictly speaking his above-quoted strictures were exaggerated; there were available Captain Johnson's survey of night attacks (from Gideon's battles to Napoleon's attack on Mantua), and Colonel Malleson's book on Ambushes and Surprises ("being a description of some of the most famous instances of the leading into ambush and the surprises of armies, from the time of Hannibal to the period of the Indian Mutiny").63 In addition there were the writings of officers of the Indian army who had frequently encountered guerrilla warfare and who early on had realized that the objective of a war in Asia was basically different from that which was being taught in the European military academies. Usually there were no enemy capitals to be captured, protection of one's lines of communication was exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, and it was pointless to fire volleys at an enemy who usually did not launch concentrated attacks.64
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