Friedrich Engels 
The fighting in France 

The Pall Mail Gazette. 
Nr. 1793, 11. November 1870 

The fighting in France. 

During the first six weeks of the war, while German victories followed 
each other rapidly, while the expanding force of the invaders was as yet 
but incompletely spent, and while there were still French armies in the 
field to oppose them, the contest, generally speaking, remained one of 
armies. The population of the invaded districts took but little part in the 
fighting. True, there were a dozen or so of Alsatian peasants court- 
martialed and shot for participating in battles or for maiming the wound- 
ed; but a tragedy like that of Bazeilles was quite the exception. This is 

10 proved by nothing better than by the immense impression it made, and 

by the eager controversy carried on in the press as to the degree in which 
the treatment of that village was justifiable or otherwise. If it were advis- 
able to reopen that controversy, we could prove, from the testimony of 
unimpeachable eye-witnesses, that inhabitants of Bazeilles did fall upon 

15 the Bavarian wounded, ill-treated them, and threw them into the flames 

of houses fired by shells; and that in consequence of this, General Von 
der Tann gave the stupid and barbarous order to destroy the whole place 
—stupid and barbarous chiefly because it meant setting fire to houses in 
which his own wounded were lying by the hundred. But any- how, Ba- 
zeilles was destroyed in the heat of battle, and in a contest the most 
exasperating—that of house and street fighting, where reports must be 
acted upon and decisions taken at once, and where people have no time 
to sift evidence and to hear counsel on both sides. 

During the last six weeks the character of the war has undergone a 
remarkable change. The regular armies of France have disappeared; the 
contest is carried on by levies whose very rawness renders them more or 
less irregular. Wherever they attempt to come out in masses in the open, 
they are easily defeated; wherever they fight under shelter of barricaded 

Friedrich Engels 

and loopholed villages and towns, they find they can offer a serious 
resistance. They are encouraged in this kind of fighting, in night surpris- 
es, and other coups of petty warfare, by proclamations and orders of the 
Government, who also command the people of the district in which they 
operate to support them in every way. This resistance would be easily put 
down if the enemy disposed of forces sufficient for the occupation of the 
whole country. But this he did not up to the surrender of Metz. The force 
of the invaders was spent before Amiens, Rouen, Le Mans, Blois, Tours, 
and Bourges could be reached on the one hand, and Besancon and Lyons 
on the other. And that this force became spent so soon is in no small 
degree owing to this greater condensation of the resisting medium. The 
eternal "four Uhlans" cannot now ride into a village or a town far out- 
side their own lines and command absolute submission to their orders 
without risk of being caught or killed. Requisition columns have to be 
accompanied by an imposing force, and single companies or squadrons 
have to guard themselves well from night surprises when quartered in a 
village, and from ambushes when on the march. There is a belt of dis- 
puted ground all around the German positions, and it is just there that 
popular resistance is most severely felt. And to put down this popular 
resistance the Germans are having recourse to a code of warfare as anti- 
quated as it is barbarous. They are acting upon the rule that every town 
or village where one or more of the inhabitants take part in the defence, 
fire upon their troops, or generally assist the French, is to be burned 
down; that every man taken in arms who is not, according to their no- 
tion, a regular soldier, is to be shot at once; and that where there is 
reason to believe that any considerable portion of the population of a 
town have been guilty of some such offence, all able-bodied men are to 
be massacred at once. This system has now been ruthlessly carried out 
for nearly six weeks, and is still in full force. You cannot open a German 
newspaper without stumbling over half a dozen reports of such military 
executions, which there pass quite as a matter of course, as simple pro- 
ceedings of military justice carried out with wholesome severity by "hon- 
est soldiers" against "cowardly assassins and brigands." There is no dis- 
order of any kind, no promiscuous plunder, no violation of women, no 
irregularity. Nothing of the kind. It is all done systematically and by 
order; the doomed village is surrounded, the inhabitants turned out, the 
provisions secured, and the houses set fire to, while the real or suspected 
culprits are brought before a court-martial, when a short shrift and halfa 
dozen bullets await them with unerring certainty. In Ablis, a village of 

900 inhabitants, on the road to Chartres, a squadron of the 16 (Sles- 40 

wick-Holstein) Hussars were surprised at night by French irregulars, and 

The fighting in France 

lost one half of their men; to punish this piece of insolence, the whole 
brigade of cavalry marched to Ablis and burned down the whole place; 
and two different reports, both from actors in the drama, assert that all 
able-bodied men were taken out from the inhabitants and shot down, or 
hacked to pieces without exception. This is but one out of very many 
cases. A Bavarian officer in the neighbourhood of Orleans writes that his 
detachment had burned down five villages in twelve days; and it is no 
exaggeration to say that wherever the German flying columns are passing 
in the centre of France, their road but too often remains traced by fire 
and by blood. 

Now it will scarcely suffice in 1870 to say that this is legitimate war- 
fare, and that the interference of civilians or of anybody not properly 
recognized as a soldier is tantamount to brigandage, and may be put 
down by fire and sword. All this might apply in the time of Louis XIV. 
and Frederick IL, when there were no other contests but those of armies. 
But from the American war of independence down to the American war 
of secession, in Europe as well as in America, the participation of the 
populations in war has become not the exception but the rule. Wherever 
a people allowed itself to be subdued merely because its armies had be- 
come incapable of resistance it has been held up to universal contempt as 
a nation of cowards; and wherever a people did energetically carry out 
this irregular resistance, the invaders very soon found it impossible to 
carry out the old-fashioned code of blood and fire. The English in Ameri- 
ca, the French under Napoleon in Spain, the Austrians, 1848, in Italy 
and Hungary, were very soon compelled to treat popular resistance as 
perfectly legitimate, from fear of reprisals on their own prisoners. Not 
even the Prussians in Baden, 1849, or the Pope after Mentana, had the 
courage to shoot down indiscriminately their prisoners of war, irregulars 
and "rebels" though they were. There exist only two modern examples of 
the ruthless application of this antiquated code of "stamping out": the 
suppression of the Sepoy mutiny by the English in India, and the pro- 
ceedings of Bazaine and his French in Mexico. 

Of all armies in the world, the very last that ought to renew such 
practices is the Prussian. In 1806 Prussia collapsed merely because there 
was not anywhere in the country a trace of that spirit of national resist- 
ance. After 1807, the reorganizers of the administration and of the army 
did everything in their power to revive it. At that time Spain showed the 
glorious example how a nation can resist an invading army. The whole of 
the military leaders of Prussia pointed out this example to their country- 
men as the one to be followed. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz were 
all of one mind in this respect; Gneisenau even went to Spain himself to 

Friedrich Engels 

fight against Napoleon. The whole of the new military system then in- 
augurated in Prussia was an attempt to organize popular resistance to the 
enemy, at least as far as this was possible in an absolute monarchy. Not 
only was every able-bodied man to pass through the army and to serve in 
the landwehr up to his fortieth year; the lads between seventeen and 5 
twenty and the men between forty and sixty were to form part of the 
landsturm or levee en masse, which was to rise in the rear and on the 
flanks of the enemy, harass his movements, intercept his supplies and 
couriers, use whatever arms it could find, employ indiscriminately what- 
ever means were at hand to annoy the invader —"the more effective these 10 
means the better" —and, above all, "to wear no uniform of any kind, so 
that the landsturmers might at any time resume their character of civil- 
ians and remain unknown to the enemy." The whole of this "Landsturm 
Ordnung," as the law of 1813 regarding it is called, is drawn up—and its 
author is no other than Scharnhorst, the organizer of the Prussian army 15 
—in this spirit of uncompromising national resistance, to which all 
means are justifiable and the most effective are the best. But then all this 
was to be done by the Prussians against the French, and ifthe French act 

in the same way towards the Prussians that is quite a different thing. 
What was patriotism in the one case becomes brigandage and cowardly 20 
assassination in the other. 

The fact is, the present Prussian Government are ashamed of that old, 
half-revolutionary Landsturm Ordnung, and try to make it forgotten by 
their proceedings in France. But every act of wanton cruelty they get 
committed in France will more and more call it to memory; and the 25 
justifications made for such an ignoble mode of warfare will but tend to 
prove that if the Prussian army has immensely improved since Jena, the 
Prussian Government are rapidly ripening that same state of things 
which rendered Jena possible.