War And Peace

Let us imagine two men fighting a duel with swords and following all the rules laid down for the art of swordsmanship. The fencing goes on for quite some time. Suddenly one of the combatants realizes he has been wounded, and the wound is serious, life-threatening, so he throws his sword away, grabs the first club that comes to hand and weighs in with it. Then let us imagine that this duellist, having been bright enough to find the best and easiest method of getting his way but also being a champion of old-fashioned chivalry, decides to cover up what really happened and now insists he won by fighting fair. Imagine the confusion and obscurity that would arise in his description of the duel!

The duellist who fought by the rules was the French army; his opponent, who threw his sword away and grabbed a club, was the Russian army, and those who attempt to explain everything by the rule-book are the historians who have written about this event.

The burning of Smolensk was followed by a war that flouted all the old traditions of warfare. The burning of towns and villages, the retreat after every battle, the blow administered at Borodino followed by yet another retreat, the abandoning and burning of Moscow, the hunting down of looters, the interception of transport – all of this went against the rule-book.

Napoleon could sense this, and from the moment he took up the proper stance for a fencer, in Moscow, only to see a club raised against him instead of his opponent’s sword he never stopped complaining to Kutuzov and Tsar Alexander that this war wasn’t following the rule-book. (As if rules existed for the killing of people!)

Despite French complaints that they weren’t keeping to the rules, despite misgivings among some highly placed Russians over the rather shady practice of fighting with a club instead of following the rule-book and standing there in carte or tierce, or making a skilful thrust in prime, and so on, the people’s war club was raised with all its menace, majesty and might, and indiscriminately, with no thought for the niceties of proper procedure, it rose and fell with brainless simplicity but remarkable effectiveness, hammering the French until the entire invading force was finished off.

Happy the people who, unlike the French in 1813, refuse to salute the magnanimous conqueror by following the rules laid down for this form of art and offering him the sword hilt-first with elegance and courtesy. Happy the people who, when put to the test, ask no questions about other people’s behaviour under similar circumstances, but pick up the first club that comes to hand in one simple, easy movement and hammer away with it until the humiliation and vengeance deep in their hearts give way to contempt and compassion.

CHAPTER 2

One of the most obvious and successful infringements of the so-called ‘rules of war’ is the action of scattered groups of individuals ranged against men working together in a dense mass. This type of action is always seen in war where nationality is at stake. In this kind of fighting, instead of ganging together to attack another crowd, men split up into small groups, attack in ones and twos and run away immediately they are attacked by superior forces, only to mount another attack when chance permits. This is how the guerrillas operated in Spain, the hills-men in the Caucasus and the Russians in 1812.

This has come to be known as ‘guerrilla warfare’ on the assumption that to name it is to define it. But in fact, this kind of warfare, far from obeying any laws or rules, is a flagrant contradiction of a well-known law of tactics which tends to be thought of as infallible. This law states that the attacking party shall concentrate its forces in order to be stronger than the enemy when battle begins.

Guerrilla warfare (invariably successful, as history shows) is a flagrant infringement of this rule.

The infringement arises from an assumption, made by military science, that military effectiveness is commensurate with numerical strength. Military science maintains that the greater the numbers, the greater the strength. As the saying goes, God is on the side of the big battalions.

In saying this, military science is behaving like a specialist in mechanics who bases his definition of momentum on mass alone and claims that momenta are equal or unequal only in so far as their masses are equal or unequal.

But momentum (the measurement of motion) is the product of mass and velocity.

In warfare the strength of an army is the product of its mass multiplied by something else, an x factor.