Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (10 page)

By this time, nearing the fall of 1810, the French realized that the capture of Javier Mina had brought them even more troubles with the rise of the new Mina. They decided to take fifteen thousand of Marshal Masséna’s battle-hardened veterans from the fight against Wellington and redeploy them to Navarre. Mina was soon hard-pressed, escaping one trap after another thanks only to the steady stream of intelligence he received from friendly Navarrese, who also fed misinformation to the French—for which the natives were often brutally punished. Indeed, as Reille’s frustration mounted, so did reprisals against the civilian population, including retaliatory executions, mass imprisonments, and the burning of homes whose families could not account for missing sons who, the local census said, ought to be living with their parents. If the war in Spain was a textbook example of irregular warfare, it was also a template for some of the cruelest counterinsurgency practices, many of which we have since seen again and again in a wide range of conflicts over the past two centuries.

Even while on the run, with most of his roughly two thousand fighters dispersed, Mina could still use his intelligence network to call many of them together for occasional counterattacks. In October 1810 he sought to replicate the success of his attack on Puente with a strike against another French garrison, at Tarrazona. But here the terrain was more open, the attack force was detected, and more than a thousand French hussars rode down Mina’s massed force. The result was a slaughter, with Mina catching a bullet in the leg and barely escaping with his life.
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The following month, having recovered from his wound, Mina concentrated his fighters yet again—tying down forces that otherwise would have gone to the fight against Wellington—and was once again caught by the French, this time at Belorado. Mina lost more than five hundred of his men in this lopsided defeat.

As the year 1810 neared its close, the insurgency in Spain thus reached its low point. The bad news extended well beyond Mina’s defeat at Belorado. Several other guerrilla leaders were being hunted down by French forces that had greatly improved their counterinsurgency tactics. In some places the insurgents even found themselves chased by their fellow Spaniards. Regency troops had never recovered from their catastrophic defeats of the preceding year and were able to hold on to the southwestern tip of Spain only with the support of British sea power.

Finally, prospects for coordinating guerrilla operations with Wellington’s main force had also greatly diminished. The Redcoats, even after winning a hard-fought victory at the Battle of Busaco, had retreated from the Spanish-Portuguese border region all the way to the defensive lines of Torres Vedras in the hilly countryside around Lisbon. The best Wellington could now do was to send off some of his scouts to work with the insurgents. These were the kinds of irregulars depicted in C. S. Forester’s classic of the Peninsular War,
RIFLEMAN DODD
, and in some of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe novels. Along the Mediterranean coast, the British frigate captain Thomas Cochrane showed some aptitude for raiding, sometimes in conjunction with rebel forces, but his superiors never fully seized upon the potential of this type of war from the sea.
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Thus the insurgents would have to bind up their wounds and return to the fight largely on their own. It would take Wellington two more years to prepare for and mount a lasting offensive into Spain, one whose success would be greatly aided by the French disaster in Russia in 1812.
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As a leading historian of this era (and a descendant of Wellington) has put it, “Spain was to be saved . . . not by grapeshot . . . but by hardy guerrillas and the flash of the knife.”
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The sharpest of these knives was to be wielded by a resurgent Mina.

*

Even before the coming of the new year, Mina began rebuilding. His
NOM DE GUERRE
remained a magnet, and several hundred new recruits joined the cause. He called in his scattered cavalry units and executed their leader, Juan Hernández, who had allowed and engaged in many acts of banditry. In another brutal yet subtle move, Mina also executed—on trumped-up charges—a charismatic guerrilla leader of the borderlands of Navarre, known as Belza. Soon more than eight hundred new recruits came to him from these borderlands. By December of 1810 Mina was in command of almost three thousand men.

To his bloody clean-up operations Mina also added personal grooming: he ordered short haircuts for all his troops. Long hair, one of the hallmarks of the independent “men of the Idea,” was no longer allowed. It symbolized defiance and hosted lice. Mina made sure that all those with long hair submitted to being shorn. Then Mina himself lost his locks in a public ceremony. If his men had been made to bend to his will, he had now shown that he was one of them, and the force was ready to take the fight to the French once more. In two firefights against French columns, on Christmas Eve and then again two days later, they killed some two hundred imperial soldiers and executed twenty captured Spaniards who were serving with the enemy. Mina was back.

The French responded swiftly, with a winter operation begun in January 1811 that saw some twenty-five thousand troops chasing Mina. In a move reminiscent of Nathanael Greene’s trademark retreats after pitched battles, Mina ordered his forces to scatter and operate independently. And, like the British in the Carolinas, the French in Spain now dispersed their forces once more in a network of small outposts. A bitter “small war” ensued, with heavy casualties on both sides and the peasants becoming more and more the objects of French brutality.

To relieve the suffering of the people, Mina concentrated his forces yet again in the summer of 1811—a mistake that soon cost him dearly as a major part of his guerrilla army was annihilated in a pitched battle near Lerín. With more than four hundred killed and two hundred taken prisoner in this fight, Mina had no choice now but to disperse his remaining forces once more. It seemed there was no end in sight to the resilient French occupation and the hard fight ahead.

At this point, as sometimes happens in war, the enemy’s very successes conspired to turn events. While Reille had been dueling with Mina, Suchet had been overseeing successful pacification operations in Catalonia and Navarre. Indeed, Suchet’s moves had been so successful that surviving insurgent groups left these provinces and headed to Navarre to join Mina, swelling his ranks to their highest levels yet. Thus the guerrillas in Navarre, who had lost more than two-thirds of their three thousand fighters in the failing campaign of 1811, began 1812 with nearly four thousand men reporting in the ranks.
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During this rebuilding, Suchet, unaware of the covert exodus to Navarre, took the next logical strategic step after defeating the guerrillas in his area of operations: he besieged Valencia, the last great holdout city that resisted the occupation on the Costa del Azahar in eastern Spain. Here Suchet met a sizable opposing force under Captain General Joachim Blake, some forty thousand defenders. So he called for reinforcements from Reille’s division in Navarre, a unit that became a key component in his successful offensive. Valencia surrendered in early January 1812. But the garrison occupying Navarre had by now been reduced to fewer than seven thousand troops, and France’s Polish allies—mostly lancers, some of the best horsemen in the world—were recalled home, as preparations for Napoleon’s invasion of Russia began. Always ready for aggressive action, Mina seized the initiative one more time. And this time he did not let go.

In his campaign of 1812, Mina was careful to avoid large pitched battles, so many of which he had lost in earlier years. Instead he mounted a swarming campaign featuring attacks on supply routes and remote small outposts. This shift away from pitched battles and raids on fortified bases, with the focus instead on attacking the lines of supply that sustained the French occupation, was Mina’s key breakthrough—and the surest sign that he had finally mastered the nuances of this irregular war. No more would he run the risk of a decisive defeat in the field. Rather, he now placed the strategic burden entirely on the French, who suffered innumerable attacks on vulnerable supply convoys in the increasing costly effort to sustain their positions. Mina’s innovation, aside from its impact on the war in Spain, would inspire future guerrillas, from Russia’s Denis Davydov to T. E. Lawrence, and on to the Taliban in our time, to imitate his approach.

As his successes mounted, Mina’s numbers increased. And even though Suchet sent a division and more back to Navarre after the fall of Valencia, by this time Mina had grown too strong to be defeated, especially since he refused to mass his forces and fight toe-to-toe.

This didn’t stop Reille from trying, however. He was soon in command of some twenty-five thousand troops, the Army of the Ebro, against dispersed guerrilla forces under Mina amounting, in the summer of 1812, to just under ten thousand fighters. In a brutal struggle through the rest of the year, Mina kept the upper hand by remaining dispersed and continuing to strike “out of the dark.” Soon the large French garrison in Pamplona was effectively under siege, as were a range of outposts that had not yet been overrun. When news came at the close of the year of Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the French began their retreat. Harried by Wellington, who had finally taken the offensive for good, the French would lose a major battle at Vitoria, in part because Mina’s forces were still keeping over twenty-five thousand French troops from joining this big fight. By the close of 1813, Mina had been made a general and the war in Spain was effectively over.

A new fight now began for Mina, against the restored regime in Madrid and old King Carlos’s son, Ferdinand. With fewer troops and reduced funds, Mina soon found himself in conflict with Madrid’s politics. Decrees from Ferdinand calling for him to stand down enraged him, as did a new “constitution” which he famously had tied to a chair and shot.
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Despite such acts of bravado, Mina knew he was operating on borrowed time.

His last trump card was to appeal to his fellow Spaniards along liberal political lines. Spain had been freed by its people from French dictatorship, he declared, and should not allow another autocrat—like Ferdinand—to rule. But the time was not yet ripe for such talk, and Mina was soon forced into exile, ironically, in France. But he would return to Spain with the coming of the reformist Queen Cristina and would play a role in the Carlist War during the 1830s, fighting for a more liberal constitutional monarchy. Thus his reputation was recovered some twenty years after the guerrilla war against the French. He died vindicated on Christmas Eve 1836.

If Mina had to wait decades for political rehabilitation, the ways of war that he had done so much to pioneer had not gone into eclipse at all. Even while Suchet and his colleagues were fighting the insurgents in Spain, Austrians were using similar tactics in the Tyrol against French forces. They would fail there, yet the irregular flame would kindle again in Russia during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812—and would flare up to contribute mightily to his defeat.

HUSSAR POET:
DENIS DAVYDOV

Painting by George Dawe (before 1828)

The intellectual ripples radiating from the guerrilla war in Spain followed a decidedly eastern trajectory, arriving first in Prussia—itself recently beaten by Napoleon at Jena and Auerstädt—as the concept of
KLEINER KRIEG
(small war). At the time, Carl von Clausewitz, who would later gain fame for his brilliant treatise
ON WAR
, was teaching at the Prussian military academy and became intrigued by the subject. During the course of the 1810–1811 school year he gave more than 150 lectures on irregular warfare. With a particularly Prussian twist on the topic, he concentrated not on a rising of armed peasants, as in Spain, but on the potential for breaking regular forces into many small units and using them in unconventional ways. This approach was the most logical one for Clausewitz, given that he was speaking to professional military officers. As Walter Laqueur has observed, “He was, after all, addressing lieutenants and captains of the Prussian army, not Chouans [of the Vendée] or
GUERRILLEROS
.”
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Despite constraints imposed by the academy and concerns of the Prussian government over fostering a capability for arming the masses, Clausewitz’s chief colleagues, Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau, took the small-war concept further. They explored the rise of an armed citizenry, the
LANDSTURM
, drawn from among the general populace. In a curious policy turn, such a militia was actually created in Prussia. But when armed Prussian resistance to Napoleon was rekindled after his campaign in Russia, orders from the high command directed the
LANDSTURM
to eschew guerrilla tactics in favor of fighting alongside the regular army. In this way they would be joining with the other, better trained units formed from the general populace, the
LANDWEHR
, which were partnered in the field with regular infantry formations. As for Clausewitz, his interest in this early form of “people’s war” waned. Only one part of one chapter in
ON WAR
deals with irregular warfare.