The Rise and Fall of Armies
The Rise and Fall of Armies(1)
[The Pall Mall Gazette, No. 1740, September 10, 1870]
When Louis Napoleon founded the Empire "which was peace," (2)
on the votes of the peasants and on the bayonets of their sons, the soldiers of the army, that army did not occupy a particularly prominent rank in Europe, except, perhaps, by tradition. There had been peace since 1815 — peace interrupted, for some armies, by the events of 1848 and 1849. The Austrians had gone through a successful campaign in Italy and a disastrous one in Hungary; neither Russia in Hungary nor Prussia in South Germany had gathered any laurels worth speaking of58; Russia had her permanent war in the Caucasus and France in Algeria.[59] But none of the great armies had met another on the field of battle since 1815. Louis Philippe had left the French army in a condition of anything but efficiency; the Algerian troops, and especially the pet corps founded more or less for African warfare — Chasseurs-à-Pied,(3) Zouaves, Turcos, Chasseurs d'Afrique(4)—were indeed the objects of much attention; but the mass of the infantry, the cavalry, and the matériel in France were much neglected. The Republic did not improve the state of the army. But the Empire came which was peace, and—"si vis pacem, para bellum"(5)—to it the army at once became the chief object of attention. At that time France possessed a great many comparatively young officers who had served, in high positions, in Africa at the time when there was still some serious fighting there. She possessed, in the Algerian special corps, troops who undoubtedly were superior to any others in Europe. She had, in the numerous substitutes,[60] a greater number of professional soldiers who had seen service, real veterans, than any other continental Power. The one thing necessary was to elevate as much as possible the mass of the troops to the level of the special corps. This was done to a great extent. The "pas gymnastique" (the "double" of the English), hitherto practised by the special corps only, was extended to the whole infantry, and thus a rapidity of manoeuvring was obtained previously unknown to armies. The cavalry was mounted, as far as possible, with better horses; the matériel of the whole army was looked to and completed; and, finally, the Crimean war was commenced. The organization of the French army showed to great advantage beside that of the English; the numerical proportions of the Allied armies naturally gave the principal part of the glory — whatever there was of it — to the French; the character of the war, circling entirely round one grand siege, brought out to the best advantage the peculiarly mathematical genius of the French as applied by their engineers; and altogether the Crimean war again elevated the French army to the rank of the first army in Europe.
Then came the period of the rifle and the rifled gun. The incomparable superiority of the fire of the rifled over the smooth-bore musket led to the abolition, or in some cases to the general rifling, of the latter.(6) Prussia had her old muskets converted into rifles in less than one year; England gradually gave the Enfield, Austria an excellent small-bore rifle (Lorentz), to the whole infantry. France alone retained the old smooth-bore musket, the rifle being confined, as before, to the special corps alone. But while the mass of her artillery retained the short twelve-pounder, a pet invention of the Emperor, but of inferior efficiency to the old artillery on account of the reduced charge — a number of rifled four-pounder batteries — were equipped and held in readiness for a war. Their construction was faulty, being the first rifled guns made since the fifteenth century; but their efficiency was much superior to that of any smooth-bore field gun in existence.
Under these circumstances the Italian war broke out.[61] The Austrian army had rather easy-going ways; extraordinary efforts had seldom been its forte; in fact, it was respectable, and nothing more. Its commanders counted some of the best and a great many of the worst generals of the age. Court influence brought the mass of the latter into high command. The blunders of the Austrian generals, the greater ambition of the French soldiers, gave the French army a rather hard-fought victory. Magenta brought no trophies at all; Solferino only a few; and politics dropped the curtain before the real difficulty of the war, the contest for the Quadrilateral, could come off.
After this campaign the French was the model army of Eirrope. If after the Crimean war the French Chasseur-à-Pied had already become the beau idéal of a foot soldier, this admiration was now extended to the whole of the French army. Its institutions were studied; its camps became instructing schools for officers of all nations. The invincibility of the French became almost a European article of faith. In the meantime France rifled all her old muskets, and armed all her artillery with rifled cannon.
But the same campaign which elevated the French army to the first rank in Europe gave rise to efforts which ended in procuring for it, first a rival, then a conqueror. The Prussian army from 1815 to 1850 had undergone the same process of rusting as all other European hosts. But for Prussia this rust of peace became a greater clog in her fighting machinery than anywhere else. The Prussian system at that time united a line and a landwehr regiment in every brigade, so that one half of the field troops had to be formed anew on mobilization. The material for the line and landwehr had become utterly deficient; there was a great deal of petty pilfering among the responsible men. Altogether, when the conflict of 1850 with Austria compelled a mobilization, the whole thing broke down miserably, and Prussia had to pass through the Caudine Forks.[62] The matériel was immediately replaced at great cost, and the whole organization revised, but in its details only. When the Italian war of 1859 compelled another mobilization, the matériel was in better order, but not even then complete; and the spirit of the landwehr, excellent for a national war, showed itself completely unmanageable during a military demonstration which might lead to a war with either one or the other of the belligerents. The reorganization of the army was resolved upon.
This reorganization, carried out behind the back of the Parliament, kept the whole of the thirty-two landwehr regiments of infantry under arms, gradually filling up the ranks by an increased levy of recruits, and finally forming them into line regiments, increasing their number from forty to seventy-two. The artillery was increased in the same proportion, the cavalry in a much smaller one. This increase of the army was about proportional to that of the population of Prussia from 1815 to 1860, from 10 l/[2] to 18 l/[2] millions. In spite of the opposition of the Second Chamber,[63] it remained practically in force. The army was, besides, made more efficient in every respect. It had been the first to supply the whole of the infantry with rifles. Now the needle-gun breech-loader, which had hitherto been supplied to a fraction of the infantry only, was given to all, and a reserve stock prepared. The experiments with rifled artillery, carried on for some years, were brought to a close, and the adopted models gradually replaced the smooth-bores. The excessive parade drill, inherited from stiff old Frederick William III, made room more and more for a better system of training, in which outpost duty and skirmishing were chiefly practised, and the models in both branches were to a great extent the Algerian French. For the detached battalions the company column was adopted as the chief fighting formation. Target-shooting was paid great attention to, and capital results were obtained. The cavalry was likewise much improved. The breed of horses, especially in East Prussia, the great horse-breeding country, had been attended to for years, much Arab blood having been introduced, and the fruits now began to become available. The East Prussian horse, inferior in size and speed to the English trooper, is a far superior war horse, and will stand five times as much campaigning. The professional education of the officers, which had been much neglected for a long time, was again screwed up to the prescribed very high level, and altogether the Prussian army was undergoing a complete change. The Danish war[64] was sufficient to show to any one who would see that this was the case; but people would not see. Then came the thunderclap of 1866, and people could not help seeing. Next, there was an extension of the Prussian system to the North German army, and in its fundamental essentials to the South German armies too; and how easily it can be introduced the result has shown. And then came 1870.
But in 1870 the French army was no longer that of 1859. The peculation, jobbery, and general misuse of public duty for private interest which formed the essential base of the system of the Second Empire, had seized the army. If Haussmann and his crew made millions out of the immense Paris job,[65] if the whole Department of Public Works, if every Government contract, every civil office, was shamelessly and openly turned into a means of robbing the public, was the army alone to remain virtuous — the army to which Louis Napoleon owed everything — the army, commanded by men who were quite as fond of wealth as the more fortunate civilian hangers-on of the Court? And when it came to be known that the Government was in the habit of receiving the money for substitutes without providing these substitutes— a thing necessarily known to every regimental officer; when those other peculations in stores &c, commenced which were to supply the funds secretly paid over to the Emperor by the Ministry of War; when the highest places had to be held by men who were in the secret and could not be dismissed whatever they did or neglected — then the demoralization spread to the regimen-tal officers. We are far from saying that peculation at the public expense became common among them; but contempt for their superiors, neglect of duty, and decay of discipline were the necessary consequences. If the chiefs had commanded respect, would the officers have dared, as was the rule, to drive in coaches on the march? The whole thing had become rotten; the atmosphere of corruption in which the Second Empire lived had at last taken effect upon the main prop of that Empire, the army; in the hour of trial, there was nothing but the glorious traditions of the service and the innate bravery of the soldiers to oppose the enemy, and these are not alone sufficient to keep an army in the foremost rank.
Endnotes
[59] The reference is to the war of the mountain-dwellers of the Northern Caucasus against Tsarist Russia which began at the end of the 1820s. It was caused by the Tsarist colonisation policy and the oppressive rule of local feudal lords who were supported by the Tsarist government. The war was very arduous and continued for decades. The last stronghold of the mountain-dwellers fell in 1859. The Algerian people put up a stubborn resistance to the French colonialists; it took more than two decades before the country was conquered, pp. 95, 193
[60] The system of substitutes was, for a long time, widely employed in the French army; it was a privilege of the propertied classes, allowing them to buy themselves substitutes for military service. The system was prohibited during the French Revolution (1789-93), but was restored by Napoleon I. Certain changes were introduced into it in April 1855. According to the new legislation, the substitutes, if they were not close relatives of the men called up for military service, were appointed officially and the money for them donated to a special army fund. The 1868 legislation legitimatised the system of substitutes, used by approximately 20 thousand people every year. The system was abolished in 1872.
[61] Engels refers to the Austro-Italo-French war between the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) and France, on the one hand, and Austria, on the other (April 29 to July 8, 1859). It was launched by Napoleon III, who, under the banner of the "liberation of Italy", strove for aggrandizement and sought to strengthen the Bonapartist regime in France with the help of a successful military campaign. The Piedmontese ruling circles hoped that French support would enable them to unite Italy, without the participation of the masses, under the aegis of the Savoy dynasty ruling in Piedmont. The Austrian army was defeated at Magenta and Solferino (see Notes 18 and 23). However, Napoleon III, frightened by the scale of the national liberation movement in Italy and not willing to promote its unification, abruptly ceased hostilities. On July 11, the French and the Austrian emperor concluded a separate preliminary peace in Villafranca. As a result of the war, France gained Savoy and Nice, Lombardy joined the Kingdom of Sardinia, and Austria was allowed to retain Venice (up to 1866).
[62] The 1850 mobilisation of the Prussian army was a result of the intensification of the struggle between Austria and Prussia for domination in Germany. Prussia, however, was compelled to abandon the idea of military operations and capitulate (the Agreement of Olmütz or Olomouc of November 2, 1850) owing to the serious shortcomings in its military system, exposed during the mobilisation, and also its obsolete armaments, as well as vigorous opposition by Russia, which supported Austria in the conflict. Engels ironically compares the failure of Prussian diplomacy with the defeat of the Roman legions at the Caudine Forks, near the ancient Roman town of Caudium, in 321 B.C., during the second Samnite war. The Samnites compelled the Romans to go under the yoke, which was the greatest disgrace for a defeated army. Hence the expression "to pass through the Caudine yoke", meaning to undergo extreme humiliation.
[63] In February 1860 the majority of the Second Chamber (the chamber of representatives) in the Prussian Landtag refused to approve the army reorganisation project submitted by War Minister von Roon. The government, however, soon succeeded in obtaining the Chamber's approval for large alloc-ations to "maintain the army ready for action" and used them for the planned reorganisation of the army. When, in March 1862, the Chamber's liberal majority did not sanction military expenditures, the government dissolved the Landtag and called new elections. At the end of September 1862, Bismarck was appointed Prime Minister; the new government dissolved the Landtag in October and initiated a military reform without parliamentary approval of the necessary outlays.
[64] 04 The Danish war waged by Prussia and Austria against Denmark in 1864 brought Germany's unification under the Prussian auspices nearer. Bismarck's Junker government aimed to annex Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, which belonged to Denmark but were inhabited mostly by Germans; to strengthen Prussian influence in Germany and to suppress the opposition of the liberal bourgeoisie. Austria, which likewise intended to seize the duchies, also took part in the war. The war ended with a defeat for Denmark. The duchies were proclaimed a condominium and were to be administrated jointly by Prussia (Schleswig and Lauenburg) and Austria (Holstein). After the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 (see Note 5) the three duchies were annexed to Prussia,
[65] Large-scale re-planning and reconstruction of Paris, headed by Haussmann, prefect of the Seine department, took place in the 1850s-1860s. Apart from improving housing for the wealthy, the purpose of the works was to widen old streets and build new straight ones to make it easier for the troops to manoeuvre and the artillery to fire in the event of popular uprisings. Large sums from the allocations were misappropriated by Haussmann and his subordinates.
[2] In May 1870, Napoleon Ill's government held a plebiscite in an attempt to strengthen the tottering regime of the Second Empire. The issues put to the vote were formulated in such a way that disapproval of the policy pursued by the Second Empire could not be expressed without opposing democratic reforms at the same time. Despite this demagogic manoeuvre, the plebiscite showed the growing opposition: 1.5 million voted against the government, 1.9 million abstained. During the preparations for the plebiscite, the government organised a broad campaign of repressions against the working class movement, scaring the middle-class sections with the threat of a revolution. On April 24, 1870, the Paris Federation of the International and the Federal Chamber of Workers' Trades Associations in Paris issued a manifesto exposing the Bonapartist plebiscite manoeuvre and called on the workers to abstain from voting. On the eve of the plebiscite many members of the Paris Federation were arrested on a charge faked by the police of plotting to assassinate Napoleon III (see present edition, Vol. 43, Engels' letter to Marx of May 8, 1870). The government used this charge for organising a broad campaign of persecution and harassment of the International's members in various French towns. In this connection, the General Council,at its meeting on May 3, 1870, adopted the Address "Concerning the Persecution of the Members of the French Sections", written by Marx (see present edition, Vol. 21), which exposed the Bonapartist police's libellous charges. At the third trial of the Paris Federation members, held from June 22 to July 5, 1870, the false character of these charges was fully disclosed. Nevertheless, a number of members of the International in France were sentenced to imprisonment merely for affiliation to the International Working Men's Association. Persecution of the International in France caused mass protests by the working class. pp. 3, 273