War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [672]
From the time of the burning of Smolensk, a war began that did not fit any of the former traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the retreats after battles, the blow struck at Borodino and then another retreat, the abandoning and burning of Moscow, the hunt for marauders, the cutting off of transport, the partisan war—these were all deviations from the rules.
Napoleon sensed that, and from the moment when he stopped in Moscow, in the correct position of a fencer, and instead of his adversary’s sword, saw a club raised over him, he never ceased complaining to Kutuzov and the emperor Alexander that the war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people). Despite the complaints of the French about the non-fulfillment of the rules, despite the fact that highly placed Russians thought it shameful for some reason to fight with a club and wanted to follow the rules and assume a position en quatre or en tierce, make a skillful thrust en prime, and so on—the club of a national war was raised with all its terrible and majestic power, and, not asking about anyone’s tastes or rules, with stupid simplicity, but with expediency, not sorting anything out, rose and fell, and hammered on the French until the whole invasion was destroyed.
And blessed is that nation which, not like the French in the year 1813, who saluted by all the rules of the art and, turning the sword hilt first, graciously and courteously handed it to the magnanimous victor, but which, in the moment of trial, not asking how others have acted according to the rules on such occasions, simply and easily raises the first club that comes along and hammers with it until the feeling of outrage and revenge in its soul gives place to contempt and pity.
II
One of the most palpable and advantageous deviations from the so-called rules of war is the action of scattered people against people pressed together in a mass. This kind of action always emerges in a war that acquires a national character. These actions consist in the fact that, instead of a crowd opposing a crowd, people scatter, attack singly, and flee as soon as large forces attack them, then attack again as soon as the opportunity arises. This was done by the guerrillas in Spain;1 it was done by the mountaineers in the Caucasus; it was done by the Russians in the year 1812.
Warfare of this kind has been named partisan warfare, and those who named it supposed that by doing so they were explaining its meaning. Yet this kind of warfare not only does not fit into any rules, but is directly opposed to a tactical rule that is well-known and acknowledged as infallible. This rule says that an attacker should concentrate his troops in order to be stronger at the moment of battle.
Partisan warfare (always successful, as history demonstrates) is directly opposed to this rule.
This contradiction proceeds from the fact that military science assumes the strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. Military science says that the bigger the army, the stronger it is. Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison.*713
In saying that, military science is like a mechanics which, considering forces only in relation to their masses, would say that forces are equal or not equal to each other because their masses are or are not equal.
Force (the quantity of motion) is the product of mass times velocity.
In military action, the force of an army is also a product of mass times something, some unknown x.
Military science, seeing from a countless number of examples in history that the mass of an army does not coincide with its force, that small detachments defeat large ones, vaguely recognizes the existence of this unknown multiplier and tries to find it either in geometric disposition, or in armaments, or—most commonly—in the genius of the commander. But the substitution of all these values for the multiplier