Page:On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation).djvu/16

Introduction mountains were patriots loyal to the ruler whose crown had been taken from him by the Emperor of the French. They were not revolutionists. Most did not desire a change in the form of their government. Their single objective was to help Wellington force the French armies to leave Spain.

A few years later, thousands of Russian Cossacks and peasants harried Napoleon’s Grande Armée as Kutuzov pushed it, stumbling, starving and freezing, down the ice-covered road to Smolensk. This dying army felt again and again the cudgel of the people's war, which, as Tolstoi later wrote, "was raised in all its menacing and majestic power; and troubling itself about no question of anyone's tastes or rules, about no fine distinctions, with stupid simplicity, with perfect consistency, it rose and fell and belabored the French until the whole, invading army had been driven out."

A little more than a century and a quarter later, Hitler's armies fell back along the Smolensk road. They too would feel the fury of an aroused people. But in neither case were those who wielded the cudgel revolutionists. They were patriotic Russians.

Only when Lenin came on the scene did guerrilla warfare receive the potent political injection that was to alter its character radically. But it remained for Mao Tse-tung to produce the first systematic study of the subject, almost twenty-five years ago. His study, now endowed with the authority that deservedly accrues to the works of the man who led the most radical revolution in history, will continue to have a decisive effect in societies ready for change.