SOURCE: “Engels' Military Studies and Their Revolutionary Purposes,” in his Engels, Armies, and Revolution, Archon Books, 1977, pp. 39-63.

[In the following essay, Berger surveys Engels' military writings, arguing that Engels' interest in this area was driven by his desire to help the revolutionary cause. Berger assesses Engels' military writings as “good, but rather conventional.”]

Since Engels' early career reveals no sign of an obsession with war and armies, how are we to explain the diligent study of military science which he began in the 1850s? The answer lies in Engels' willingness to do whatever he could to help the revolutionary cause. Military studies surely required less self-sacrifice than working as a capitalist exploiter in the offices of Ermen and Engels, but they were undertaken in the same spirit of service to the revolution that sent Engels to his hated desk each day for twenty years, in order that Marx might eat and work.

The most immediate and compelling reasons for Engels' military studies were generated by the relations between Marx and Engels and their fellow émigrés. Twenty years afterward, Engels distilled his recollections of 1850s into a law of émigré relations: “after every unsuccessful revolution or counterrevolution,” he wrote,

there develops a feverish activity among the fugitives abroad. The various factions assemble, charge one another with having wrecked the cause, and accuse one another of treason and all other possible deadly sins. Meanwhile they remain in fevered communication with the homeland, organize, conspire, print leaflets and papers, and swear that in twenty-four hours it will break out again, that victory is certain; and in expectation thereof they divide up the offices. Naturally disappointment follows on disappointment, and since they attribute these not to inevitable historical conditions, which they do not wish to understand, but to particular errors of individuals, mutual accusations accumulate, and the whole thing culminates in a general brawl. That is the story of all exile groups from the royalists of 1792 down to the present day; and whoever among the refugees has good sense and judgment withdraws from the useless wrangling as soon as propriety will permit, and finds something better to do.¹

This was a fair description of the activities of the revolutionary refugees of the 1850s, though it was only after considerable expenditure of time and energy that Marx and Engels withdrew from the émigré brawls.

Refugee politics were fairly congenial at first, as Marx and Engels cooperated with other exiles of various political shades in raising money for their neediest comrades. But in September, 1850, the Communist League was destroyed by a split between the factions surrounding Marx on the one hand, and Engels' former commander August Willich on the other. After the split, one of Marx's partisans was wounded in a duel with Willich, and in February, 1851, two supporters of Marx were expelled bodily from a Willich meeting, amid shouts of “Spy! Spy!” and “Haynau! Haynau!”² (Haynau's name was synonymous with brutality as a result of his role in suppressing the revolutions in Italy and Hungary.)

The verbal combat was even fiercer than the physical clashes, and Marx's and Engels' assaults on their rivals show them at their most petty and disagreeable;³ but personal qualities of Marx and Engels, such as a propensity to invective and a will to dominate, were not the cause of the dispute. The Marx and Willich factions disagreed on the nature of revolution and the way to bring it about.

Unlike the Marxist “party of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” the “Willich-Schapper faction” remained an action party, believing that the imposition of the Seventeen Demands would effect the transition to Communism immediately in the next revolution. Though neither faction defined its version of Communism very explicitly, Marx's conception was clearly more sweeping and less subject to prompt realization. The immediate cause of the disagreement, however, centered more on the means of revolution than the ends. Marx believed that the revolution would be brought about by the force of circumstances, Willich by force of arms.⁴

Willich, who lived with his fellow soldiers in an improvised barracks in London, hoped to assemble a company of heroes whose valor and military skill would revive the German revolution.⁵ Marx and Engels considered such an enterprise frivolous and foolish, and they opposed it as injurious to the revolutionary cause. In their view, revolution was not purely or even primarily a military phenomenon; the avoidance of military blunders might be useful to the survival of a revolution once begun, but courage and training alone could not create a revolution.

Thus, although Marx's disgust at the successful money-raising tours of Willich's ally, the poet Gottfried Kinkel, doubtless contained a note of pecuniary envy, he and Engels were offended by the basic premise of Kinkel's “revolutionary loan”—the idea that a revolution could be made by “a small, well-armed band, amply supplied with money.” Such a view demonstrated the military clique's arrogant refusal to let matters develop without their intervention; they had, Marx wrote at one point, “decided to suspend world history till Kossuth's return.” Already in 1850 Marx and Engels announced: “A new revolution is possible only as a consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as inevitable as this.” A revolutionary attempt before the crisis would be foolish, and would succeed only in getting people shot.⁶

In the Marxist view, the timing of the revolution would depend on objective economic conditions, not on the revolutionaries' will power. The contrary view that revolution could be brought about by the resolution and conspiratorial organization of the revolutionaries is usually identified with the name of its most illustrious exponent, Auguste Blanqui; therefore the relations among the revolutionary émigrés in 1850, when Marx and Engels first cooperated with putschist elements in the Communist League and then split away from them, are generally discussed in terms of a brief Blanquist period in the development of Marxism.

Marx, it is said, was misled as to the imminence of a revolutionary resurgence, so until his studies in the British Museum persuaded him to revise his timetable of expectations, he and Engels associated themselves with the Blanquist conspirators.⁷ Thus in the discussion of the disagreements between Marx and Engels and their conspiracy-oriented comrades, Willich and his military revolutionist group appear as a minor subspecies of Blanquist. The general emphasis on Blanqui is understandable, for he was undeniably a more important figure than Willich. But although Marx and Engels repudiated an approach to revolution which Blanqui and Willich shared, they attacked Willich fiercely and frequently, and Blanqui hardly at all.

Despite their tactical differences with him. Marx and Engels repeatedly expressed respect for Blanqui. In 1869 Marx was delighted to learn that Blanqui admired him and liked his Poverty of Philosophy, and he defended Blanqui against Professor Beesly's vague suspicion that the great conspirator was not an “honorable man.” One of the several things wrong with the revolutionary outlook in Paris in 1870, according to Marx, was that “Blanqui appear[ed] entirely forgotten.” And even when Engels dismissed Blanqui as a “revolutionary of a bygone generation” in his reliance on the well-organized minority, he concentrated on attacking Blanqui's disciples as lacking their master's forcefulness, thus implicitly praising Blanqui's revolutionary spirit.⁸

Why this double standard? Why attack Willich and not Blanqui? Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen suggest that Marx and Engels tolerated the Blanquists because in France “conspiracy had become an essential part of the revolutionary movement and had to be reckoned with.”⁹ Perhaps, then, Germany's less hallowed revolutionary traditions permitted more forthright attacks on conspiratorial projects proposed by a German Blanquist like Willich. Perhaps more important, the different revolutionary traditions of France and Germany meant that Marx had little immediate chance of challenging Blanqui's leadership of the French movement, while Willich threatened Marx where his influence was greatest. The fact that Willich was conspicuously present in London while Blanqui was shut up in the prison at Belle Isle must also help to explain Marx's and Engels' concentration on the lesser figure.

Besides, Blanqui seemed a more thoroughgoing revolutionary than Willich, and Marx and Engels preferred Blanqui's vehement putschism to Willich's relatively tepid putschism. When Blanqui damned the revolutionary leaders of 1848 for hesitation and undue moderation, Marx and Engels were wholeheartedly on his side.¹⁰ Blanqui was an ally of sorts against the “democratic lieutenants” who surrounded Willich.

Something in the military emphasis of Willich and his associates was inherently offensive to Marx and Engels. Marx had condemned the civilian “professional revolutionary” of the French conspiratorial type as useless except to the police, but Willich and company were attacked more often, and attacked not just as putschists and fools, but as soldiers. According to Gustav Adolf Techow, Marx declared while drunk that officers were “always the most dangerous in a revolution,” seeking constantly to take over. “One must keep dagger and poison ready for them,” Marx allegedly declared.¹¹

Despite his years in the Prussian Army, Willich was anything but an orthodox martinet; he had distinguished himself in Baden leading a Freikorps, not a regular army unit, and later, after service in the American Civil War, he delivered himself of the remarkable opinion that the Union's war effort had suffered mainly from an excess of military professionalism. He recommended an extreme form of militia system with no peacetime army at all, and amateur officers.¹² Nonetheless, to Marx and Engels he represented an approach to revolution that concentrated on the narrowly tactical aspects of insurrection, overlooking the great economic and social tides that would be necessary to create revolutionary conditions.

Willich's side of the controversy is not fairly represented in the surviving documents, but there is some evidence that the image of him as a contriver of far-fetched revolutionary plots is not entirely inaccurate. Engels' contemptuous reference to a Willich scheme to “revolutionize the world with the Prussian Landwehr” bears a certain resemblance to the project described by someone who was persuaded to talk to the Prussian police, and who had no particular reason to malign Willich. Line and Landwehr companies were to be assembled and revolutionary committees elected in them, whereupon Willich would appear in person, chase Napoleon III from France, and march with the triumphant French revolutionary forces into Germany, proclaiming a republic.¹³

One of Willich's proposals included a generous promise to summon Marx to Cologne within forty-eight hours of the takeover; Marx was to be in charge of finances and social reform, furnished with a bodyguard, and empowered to issue orders enforceable on pain of death. But Willich's generosity was beside the point. Marx and Engels objected to the whole idea of conspiracies, not to being left out of them. In trying to conjure up a revolution through his own efforts, instead of working to predict and prepare for the inevitable crucial moment, “friend Willich” mistook “pure laziness for pure act.”¹⁴ The activist, do-it-yourself approach to revolution left no middle ground between Willich's ambition to be Moses and Joshua in one and “conquer the communist Canaan with 5000 picked men” and total inaction. Impatience made Willich a “pure dreamer”; as Marx summed up the putschist outlook, unless the Willich group could come immediately to power, they might as well go to sleep. Marx, in contrast, insisted that the workers would have to endure “fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil war” before conditions and the workers themselves would be ready.¹⁵

A revolutionary military dictatorship, as proposed by Techow, could not exercise the iron discipline necessary; “only the terror, the civil power” could manage it, in Engels' view; certainly Willich, “the perfect capitaine d'armes and Feldwebel,” was not the man to run the revolution.¹⁶ The purely tactical side of a revolution was a secondary consideration. When in 1853 Kossuth and Mazzini inspired an abortive uprising in Milan, Engels assessed the situation: the city's narrow streets, thick walls, and barred windows were ideal for street fighting, but the attempt was hopeless from the start for political and social reasons. There was no prospect of mutiny in the Austrian garrisons, and the peasants were at best neutral toward the high-born revolutionaries. The only advantage to a revolt launched in such inauspicious circumstances was that its failure created dissension among the revolution-makers, and might put an end to such futile adventures.¹⁷

After the split with Willich, Marx and Engels had consoled themselves with the fact that they were no longer bound up with useless organizations, and could pursue their work without the hindrance of imbecile associates. What need had they of a party—“that is, a bunch of asses who pledge themselves to us because they think we are like them?” Once the conditions were right, they promised, the soldiers would “find themselves.” But the soldiers had found themselves too soon, and as the military leaders of the revolution gathered around Willich, Marx and Engels ceased to revel in their freedom from party entanglement. Willich threatened to capture the leadership of the German revolutionary movement; his victory would mean the triumph of the narrow, impatient military-putschist concept of revolution. Willich was not only wrong, but dangerous; it was necessary to oppose him by all available means.¹⁸

Engels made light of his earlier praise for Willich's conduct in the Palatinate and Baden:

To say that Mr. Willich could lead 700 men more capably than the first student, subaltern, schoolmaster, or shoemaker to come along is indeed “high recognition” of a Prussian lieutenant who has had twenty years' preparation! Dans le royaume des aveugles le borgne est roi!¹⁹

He wrote to Weydemeyer that he had never heard Willich speak an honest word, and joined Marx in gloating over Willich's involvement in a scandal.²⁰ He also supplied Marx with information for use in the anti-Willich pamphlet Der Ritter vom edelmüthigen Bewusstsein (The Knight of the High-Souled Conscience).²¹ Another scurrilous booklet, this one attacking others in addition to Willich, was prepared for the police spy Bangya.²²

But simply maligning Willich and the other supporters of the military-revolutionist view was not enough to eliminate their influence. The officers might plausibly claim that their military training qualified them to direct revolutions; even if one did not agree that revolution was merely a subspecies of war, violence was commonly involved in revolutions, and the officers were trained in the manipulation of violence. Their professional credentials gave their opinions an air of authority, not easily challenged by journalists. It appeared that the intellectual battle between the Marxist and military concepts of revolution would have to be fought, in part, on the officers' own ground, and Engels vowed to equip himself with the necessary theoretical weapons.

We shall show these gentlemen what “das Zivil” means. All this business convinces me that I can do nothing more worthwhile than to advance my military studies, so that at least one “civilian” will be able to compete in matters of theory. At any rate I'll get far enough that such asses will not be able to look down on me.

Marx replied that all the officers were terrified at the prospect of Engels' competition, and that Engels would surely soon justify their apprehensions. In the summer of 1852, Engels predicted that when he had studied militaria for another year the “democratic lieutenants” would be thunderstruck. He would soon be “far enough along to venture before the public with independent military judgment.”²³

To acquire the military expertise that he needed to defend the revolutionary cause against Marxism's rivals, Engels began a reading program guided by Joseph Weydemeyer, an experienced officer untainted by association with Willich. Self-instruction, Engels declared, was nonsense, and could produce no coherent grasp of a subject.²⁴ (In 1842 he had written apologetically to Arnold Ruge that he was “merely autodidact in philosophy”; presumably Weydemeyer's tutelage would make his studies in this new field systematic and respectable.) Engels reminded Weydemeyer that he had never advanced past the rank of Bombardier, and asked for basic, lieutenant's-examination books. He had forgotten much, even in his own service, the artillery, and there was much more that he had never known; he needed maps; he inquired whether Clausewitz was worth the trouble, and whether Jomini was any good.²⁵

At this point Engels had already read Carl von Decker's popular text on secondary operations, which he had used while writing his memoir of the Baden campaign,²⁶ and he had read Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula, which he praised as “by far the best piece of military history I have yet seen.”²⁷ This praise of Napier was the only expression of opinion in Engels' initial, very humble, letter to Weydemeyer. Engels had already sent Marx an assessment of Wellington's generalship, based on Napier,²⁸ but Weydemeyer must have seemed a more exacting audience. Engels maintained the modest tone of a seeker of wisdom.

Again in August, 1851, Engels asked Weydemeyer to recommend the “dullest and most ordinary” elementary works,²⁹ but by January, 1852, he ventured to send Weydemeyer a four-part article on the prospects of a French invasion of England. (Louis Napoleon had recently seized power, and was widely expected to attack his neighbors.) Discounting the significance of his study, Engels presented it “as a military problem, which one attempts to understand and solve just as one does a problem in geometry.” He demonstrated his new skills in estimating the forces that the French would need, and assessing the strength of England's defenses.³⁰ He went into greater detail in a letter, presenting his conclusions—“much too technical for the paper”—to Weydemeyer “as a professional man.”³¹

Engels' mentor must have approved of the article. The paper for which it had been written collapsed, but in November, 1852, Weydemeyer published the surviving installments in another paper, over Engels' protests that the piece had become dated and irrelevant.³²

Engels' military studies continued through 1852. Books arrived from Germany; a man who wanted Engels to get him a position with the family firm bought a Prussian artillery officer's library in Cologne and sent it to Engels in Manchester.³³ A work on fortifications drew praise as “more historical and materialistic” than any military work Engels had seen; and a large theoretical work by Willisen, who had commanded the Schleswig-Holstein forces in 1848, provided the encouragement that a student draws from bad books, to which he can feel superior. “What can one say,” Engels asked,

of a work on military science that begins with the concept of Art in general, says that cooking is likewise an art, expands on the relationship between Art and Science, and finally resolves all the rules, relationships, possibilities, etc., of the Art of War into the single absolute formula that the stronger must inevitably defeat the weaker!

By April, 1853, Engels was sufficiently fortified by his studies to write to Weydemeyer as an equal. He had “significantly improved” his understanding of military affairs over the winter, and he laid down some conclusions: virtually all German military literature written since 1822 was pretentious rubbish; Sir Charles Napier was the greatest living general; Jomini's account of Napoleon's campaigns was on the whole sounder than Clausewitz's. One of the most remarkable aspects of the 1848-49 campaigns, he observed, was the widespread reverence for lines and positions hallowed by Napoleon: “Charles Albert believed no more deeply in the virginity of Mary, than in the magical power of the plateau of Rivoli.” Engels asked no questions, humble or otherwise.³⁴

Engels hoped to supplement his reading program by writing a military history of the Hungarian campaigns of 1848-49. The project would allow him to practice his skills, and might help to finance his military education. The writing would take ten to twelve weeks, even if Engels had the Austrian and Hungarian sources at hand; Engels insisted that he could not dash it off for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's reincarnation as a journal.

There is nothing like military history for blundering, when one speculates without having available all the data on strengths, provisioning, munitions, etc. All that is fine for a newspaper, when all the papers are equally in the dark and it is a matter of drawing the right conclusion from the couple of facts that one has. But to be able to say, post festum, in all the decisive instances, here this should have been done, and this was done right although the outcome seems to argue against it—for this, I think, the material on the Hungarian war is not yet sufficiently available.

Perhaps, though, some publisher could be persuaded to pay for the necessary books and maps, debiting their cost against expected royalties.³⁵ Engels considered the project again in 1852, a year later, when the Hungarian leader Görgey's memoirs appeared. He congratulated himself on having guessed the course of events rather well from the fragmentary sources available for his Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles in 1848-49, but he never got round to the book.³⁶ Probably the troubles in the Crimea provided too much immediate occupation for his talents.

By September, 1853, as Russo-Turkish relations moved toward open war, Engels had spent two years reading military science. The Crimean War gave him his first real chance to practice military journalism, and the way in which Engels and Marx approached the war illuminates the relationship between the partners. Much of Marx's scanty livelihood came from the articles which he wrote, often with Engels' assistance, for the New York Tribune. If military movements occurred in Turkey, said Marx, he would “rely on immediate instructions from the war-ministry in Manchester.”³⁷ Soon Engels received an urgent request for “at least a couple of pages” on the Turks' alleged crossing of the Danube, which Marx could not ignore in his Tribune correspondence, and which he feared to interpret on the basis of mere layman's common sense.

Marx had previously dismissed the Eastern Question as “primarily military and geographical, and thus not in my department,” and though he discovered a positive enthusiasm for international relations, he continued to leave the military side to Engels.³⁸ Military dispatches were a trump card to be played against Marx's rival A.P.C., who also sent European correspondence to the Tribune; Marx demanded military commentary immediately, lest A.P.C. gain on him by plagiarizing an article from the London Times and sending it to New York.³⁹ Marx asked Charles Dana of the Tribune to cease annexing the military pieces as unsigned leading articles, or to leave Marx's byline off all articles, “since I do not wish my name to appear only under indifferent stuff.” Now was the time “to show [Dana] through the militaria that he can't do without me.”⁴⁰

Marx did succeed in extracting a higher rate of pay from Dana, and General J. Watson Webb's New York Courier and Enquirer praised Engels' “well-written article upon the Russian plan of operations,” though Webb doubted “whether either belligerent—Omar Pascha or Gortschakoff will conduct operations on anything like the plan our Phalanstrian neighbor [the Tribune] suggests.” The Tribune bragged that one of Engels' articles had been lifted by the London Daily News, then stolen from the Daily News by a New York German paper. “While we protest at its dishonesty,” said the Tribune, “we record the compliment thus paid to American journalism.” Dana reported the rumor that Winfield Scott was writing the Tribune's war commentaries, and although during the Civil War Engels and Marx denounced Scott as a senile fool, in 1854 the general was only sixty-eight, and Marx considered the attribution a compliment to Engels' skill.⁴¹

Marx encouraged Engels' military studies and praised his accomplishments—“mes remerciements pour le beautiful article,” he wrote on receipt of one of Engels' Tribune pieces—and he generally refrained from trespassing on Engels' specialty. Marx used military imagery in discussing class warfare, the reserve army of the unemployed, and the like, and he sometimes drew upon military analogies for facetious effect (comparing the Russians' problems at Sevastopol with his own financial conflict with his landlord, for instance),⁴² but he had little interest in war. When Engels went off to see the fighting in 1849, Marx did not accompany him.

In a history of the nineteenth century compiled by a truly single-minded military buff, Marx would figure only as Engels' research assistant. He sent Engels a list of military works he had come across in the British Museum, and Engels asked him to check that library's holding of military journals. He provided information on the Spanish artillery and the Neapolitan army for Engels' series, “The Armies of Europe,” in Putnam's Magazine,⁴³ and he furnished Engels with many curiosities that he thought Engels should find interesting: the organization of the Grand Mogul's army, a mythical contraption for projecting fire under the sea (said to have demolished the Turkish fleet at Sinope), Carthaginian mercenaries, Machiavelli's account of condottieri tactics,⁴⁴ and the like. Marx also endeavored to supply Engels with information in the form of refugee Hungarians, such as the Baroness von Beck, who as “Kossuth's spy” was privy to inside information on the Hungarian campaigns of 1848-49, and was “too dumb to conceal the truth.”⁴⁵

In addition to encouraging and assisting Engels' military researches, Marx did some independent reading in the field. He had borrowed Engels' copy of the Decker text on secondary operations in 1851, probably to use while composing anti-Willich pamphlets, and he borrowed it again in 1855.⁴⁶ He may have read Clausewitz on Napoleon's Italian campaigns, unless two articles that the Werke attributes to him were written by Engels; he took careful notes on Spanish guerrilla activity during the Peninsular War, and used his observations in his studies of the revolution in Spain in the 1850s.⁴⁷

He also read the Napier work on the Peninsular War. When Dana sent Marx (who, he assumed, had written the military articles published under his name) a review copy of a book on the Mexican-American War, Marx read it instead of forwarding it to Engels. “Ripley seems to me—thus purely a layman's opinion—to have modeled himself as a military historian plus ou moins on Napier,” Marx concluded. He reiterated his opinions in two more letters, but Engels does not appear to have commented on Marx's comments.⁴⁸

Marx occasionally ventured a suggestion—surely it was clear that the inconclusive slaughter around Sevastopol indicated leadership of less than Napoleonic caliber; or was it perhaps that great fortifications were the antidote to decisive, Napoleonic warfare? (Engels thought not.)⁴⁹ But in general, Marx approached military subjects in a spirit of reluctance and trepidation.⁵⁰ His handling of an analysis of British troop movements in the Crimea that Ferdinand Lassalle produced in 1854 was typical. Engels told Marx what was wrong with Lassalle's effort, and Marx wrote to Lassalle using Engels' letter almost verbatim, only deleting the uncomplimentary references to Lassalle.⁵¹

Marx was not the only admirer of Engels' military writings. Engels' career as a military journalist was distinguished; he was respected in bourgeois and aristocratic military circles. Indeed, in 1854 he considered becoming a full-time military writer. With Marx's encouragement, he applied to the London Daily News, promising to omit politics from his articles. Military science, he said, was like mathematics and geography in its freedom from political coloration. Marx's hopes were high; he parodied Lord John Russell's oratory—“I hope, Sir, you will leave Manchester, Sir, for ever, Sir”;⁵² but the Daily News declined Engels' first article, allegedly after it had already been set in type. Someone must have told the editor that Engels had been only a one-year volunteer (he had described himself as educated in the Prussian artillery) and was a communist. Marx suspected Russian agents.⁵³

Engels' hopes died hard,⁵⁴ but he found no position as a full-time military correspondent to deliver him from his detested desk at the Manchester mill.⁵⁵ His next approach to the military establishment was conducted much more skillfully than his overture to the Daily News. His 1859 strategic pamphlet Po und Rhein was published anonymously, so that it could be acclaimed in circles that might have been put off by Engels' political orientation, and Savoyen, Nizza und der Rhein was signed “by the author of Po und Rhein” in order to establish that writer in a solid position “before he appears to the Lieutenants officially (i.e., on the title-page) as a civilian.”

The strategy worked nicely; when Marx visited Germany in the spring of 1861, he reported that Po und Rhein was much discussed in both Prussian and Austrian military circles, and widely attributed to some Prussian general.⁵⁶Po und Rhein and the 1865 pamphlet Die preussische Militärfrage und die deutsche Arbeiterpartei were favorably reviewed in the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung.⁵⁷

Engels used the pamphlets to establish a connection with the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung. When he submitted an article on the English Volunteer Riflemen, he identified himself as the author of Po und Rhein and Savoyen, Nizza und der Rhein, using the pamphlets to offset the admitted slightness of his formal military training. As he wrote to Marx (whom he informed of the project only after the Militär-Zeitung had printed his article), “I don't dare sail under false colors among these official military people.”

Once the Militär-Zeitung had used the article, Engels translated it into English and placed it in the Volunteer Journal for Lancashire and Cheshire.⁵⁸ Thus he had approached the German journal as a source of information on an English topic, and then, on the strength of his German publication, approached the English journal as a foreign observer with publications in the field—all without misrepresenting his credentials. This first Volunteer Journal piece was widely discussed in London and Manchester papers, to Marx's astonished delight; Engels had sent copies to the papers, describing the article in an anonymous covering letter as “the first professional opinion of a foreign military paper on the voluntary movement.” The Volunteer Journal connection, which Engels considered “worth a lot to me in military affairs,”⁵⁹ produced several more articles in the next two years. Some of them were collected in a pamphlet, Essays Addressed to Volunteers, in 1861, and the United Services Gazette gave the collection a good review.⁶⁰

Engels published many more military commentaries, in such periodicals as the Manchester Guardian, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Tribune, as well as German socialist papers. His Pall Mall Gazette series on the Franco-Prussian War was a major triumph, and “the General,” as Marx's daughter Jenny named him, achieved considerable acceptance in military circles. On the eve of his first visit to England in 1894, Hellmut von Gerlach discussed travel plans with his circle of reactionary notables, and was astonished to hear Major Otto Wachs of the German Great General Staff, “then the strategic authority for the whole right-wing press,” declare that Gerlach must “look up my friend Friedrich Engels.” Wachs considered Engels unexcelled among contemporary military writers in knowledge, objectivity [Sachlichkeit] and clearness of judgment.⁶¹

As a military writer, Engels had made it. But was success as a military publicist what he wanted—or did he entertain more active ambitions, which he did not fulfill?

Engels' initial approach to his military tutor Weydemeyer, in 1851, presented his interest in military science as a theoretical matter. Poor eyesight made him unfit for active service, he said; he wished to go “into detail only insofar as it is necessary in order to understand and correctly assess historical events of a military nature.” He sought polemical weapons for use against the Willich group:

The great importance of the partie militaire in the next outbreak, an old inclination, my Hungarian war-articles in the paper, and finally my glorious adventure in Baden—all these have driven me to it, and I want to bring myself at least to the point where I shall be able to enter into theoretical discussions to some extent, without making a fool of myself.⁶²

But these indications that Engels envisioned himself as a military publicist do not rule out the possibility of more active ambitions. He was surely somewhat diffident in approaching Weydemeyer, and may therefore have concealed the full extent of his intentions.

The Marxists would, after all, have to replace Willich and the rest of the military-putschist faction, as well as discredit them. Those revolutionary officers who had not shown themselves thoroughly incompetent in 1848-49 now appeared politically irresponsible, besides being hopelessly alienated from Marx and Engels by their ferocious disputes. The military side of the next revolution was too important to be left to the generals on hand, but generals would nevertheless be required.

At times Engels seemed to envision himself in very active service. When an outbreak seemed imminent in November, 1857, he wrote to Marx that his studies would immediately take a more practical turn. He would throw himself into the organization and basic tactics of the Prussian, Austrian, and Bavarian armies—and in addition practice “riding, i.e., fox-hunting, which is the real school.”

He reported enthusiastically on his cavalry studies. After seven enjoyable hours in the saddle, he had seen only two in the whole field who rode better than he, “but they had better horses.” Twenty people had fallen, two horses had been ruined and one fox killed; Engels was at the death. Again in February, 1859, he spent seven hours on horseback, jumping five-foot hedges. He was learning to surmount the problems of rough terrain, and would give the Prussian cavalry a real contest.⁶³ Marx did not share Engels' enthusiasm:

I congratulate you on your equestrian performances. But don't break your neck jumping, for soon you will have more important opportunities to risk your neck. You seem to ride this hobby rather hard. In any case, I doubt that the cavalry is the specialty in which you are most necessary to Germany.⁶⁴

“Anyway, sois tranquille,” Engels replied; “my neck will be broken in some other way than falling off a horse.” Hunting was “au fond the material basis of all [his] war-studies,” and “Louse-Bonaparte” had risen to his undeserved eminence mainly because he sat a horse well. (In fact Engels did have a fall, but he did not complain of its results till 1892, almost a quarter of a century later.)⁶⁵ He ceased reporting his equestrian exploits to Marx—who arrived in Manchester for a visit in 1865 to find his host absent on a hunt—but he kept up his riding.

When revolution appeared imminent in 1859, Engels expressed his hopes thus: “Who knows what sort of foxes I'll hunt next season!” As his prospects of active service declined with age, riding remained an aid to physical fitness, and at the age of sixty-four, he discussed his health in terms of readiness for duty on horseback.⁶⁶

Mounted or not, Engels had some sort of practical role in mind for himself in 1853, when he considered it highly important that he work through at least the Hungarian and Italian campaigns of 1848-49 before the next revolutionary outbreak. He asked Weydemeyer for sketches of the Prussian forts, and discussed the relevance of Napoleon's Russian campaign to the problems that any revolution would inevitably face in defeating Russia. Perhaps he hoped to be one of those supreme commanders, directing field commanders by telegraph, that he expected modern warfare to produce;⁶⁷ in any case, whatever ambitions he had toward personal command went unrealized, and his self-denial (he was leading a “very sober life” in 1856, anticipating approaching campaigns) went unrewarded.⁶⁸

Engels passed up an invitation from Paul Lafargue to go to Paris and assist the Commune,⁶⁹ and his closest approach to military policy-making was the suggestions for the defense of Paris that he had already sent to the Government of National Defense. Despite the weighty opinion of Hans Delbrück that Engels had the makings of a great Feldherr,⁷⁰ it may have been just as well for Engels that he did not have the chance to serve as a general of the revolution.

As Engels observed repeatedly, revolutions tend to disorganize armies, and Engels had a low tolerance for disorder. He was almost compulsively neat in his person and his working area, and his polemics against anarchist antiauthoritarian rhetoric ring with the conviction that no one can run a railroad, a cotton mill, or anything of much complexity, without some sort of order.⁷¹ Engels could not control people by sheer force of personality; when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was left under Engels' command for a time, Marx returned to find the staff on the verge of duels. Entrusted with an army that would inevitably have been disorderly and prone to talk back, Engels would probably have suffered the frustrations of the Commune's third military chief, the excellent soldier Rossel.⁷²

Engels' aspiration to participate personally in the revolution's military struggles and his aspiration to perfect himself as a military publicist are not necessarily in conflict. Both efforts grew out of the conflict between the Marxist and military-putschist schools of revolution in the 1850s. That conflict receded into insignificance as the military approach, failing to produce the immediate success that it demanded, declined into “pure laziness.” By 1860 Marx, while assailing a new foe, could say kind things about Willich's character; in 1864 Engels could remark that Willich had made a better showing in the American Civil War than had any of his fellow Forty-Eighters; and in 1875 Marx attributed the Flüchtlingszeit squabbles to the frustrations of exile, which could lead astray even so sound a man as Willich, who had proved himself “more than a phantast” by his exploits in the American Civil War.⁷³

Even the military-revolutionist approach that Willich had personified lost its menacing aspect. Engels praised Garibaldi's successes in 1860 and 1861 with wholehearted enthusiasm; it did not occur to him to worry over Garibaldi's demonstration that in some circumstances a revolutionary legion of five thousand men might invade a country to great effect.⁷⁴ And in 1863, Marx eagerly advocated the formation of a German legion to aid the Polish insurrection.⁷⁵ With the Willich faction only a fading memory, the concept of the revolutionary legion ceased to be anathema.

As the struggle against the Willich group died away, Engels' interest in military science developed a momentum of its own. His military articles helped to buy Marx's bread, rendering the revolutionary cause an indispensable immediate service;⁷⁶ and even when his martial studies vanquished neither putschist delusions nor reactionary armies, they served as a tool for analyzing capitalist society. He continued to read and write on military questions (he discovered Clausewitz's theoretical work only in 1858⁷⁷), and until his death in 1895 he was the principal military advisor of the revolutionary movement. Since he had no opportunity to try the role of revolutionary general, his military writings would have to stand alone as the product of his years of studying military science.

But what was the relevance of Engels' military writings to the problems of revolution? His considerations of the practical military problems of the revolutionary are few in number and never programmatic. He produced a splendid paragraph on the rules of insurrection, but it was more exhortation than instruction:

Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes the value of which may change every day; the forces against you have all the advantage of organisation, discipline, and habitual authority; unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has giving to you; rally those vacillating elements to you which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!

And in the same series of articles, he laid down some revolutionary and military laws. “In war, and particularly in revolutionary war, rapidity of action until some decided advantage is gained is the first rule,” he declared; so he had “no hesitation in saying that upon merely military grounds” the Hungarians ought to have rescued Vienna from the Habsburg forces. His other dicta also stressed resolution and decisiveness: “In revolution, as in war,” he declared, “it is always necessary to show a strong front, and he who attacks is in the advantage; and in revolution, as in war, it is of the highest necessity to stake everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be.” Similarly, “in a revolution he who commands a decisive position and surrenders it, instead of forcing the enemy to try his hand at an assault, invariably deserves to be treated as a traitor.” Even a “well-contested defeat” was as useful as an easy victory, since defeats produced “a wish for revenge, which in revolutionary times is one of the highest incentives to energetic and passionate action.”⁷⁸

Despite their tone of assurance, these confident generalizations were not the ripe fruit of Engels' military learning, but were written in 1851 and 1852, as he began his studies in military science. And they were not a revolutionary textbook; they were parcelled out through a narrative that concentrated on the political and social aspects of the German revolutions of 1848-49.

Later, in a Tribune article of 1860, Engels hinted at a peculiarly revolutionary mode of warfare. He praised Garibaldi's insistence on seeking a victory to encourage his raw troops; a lesser and more conventional leader would have sought minor engagements to school his forces, but Garibaldi correctly saw the morale of his and the enemy's troops as the overriding concern. An audacious offensive was the only proper procedure in insurrectionary war.⁷⁹ But this only repeats some of the injunctions of 1851-52. These scattered quotations, and all the others that can be assembled, do not constitute a recipe for revolutionary success. Engels' instructions are simple and general: revolutions should not be begun unless they have a chance of succeeding; their leaders should proceed with vigor, and be neither traitors nor fools.

Much of the apparent irrelevance of Engels' military writings to the immediate, practical problems of revolutionary procedure can be laid to the market for which he wrote. Much of his writing was intended to earn money in the bourgeois press, or to impress the military establishment, and it would have been imprudent to fill the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette or Manchester Guardian with revolutionary training manuals.

Nevertheless, he could surely have written training manuals while he was not busy with the bourgeois press, and he did not. August Happich contends that Engels must have wished to channel his military expertise into useful handbooks, but refrained lest he be expelled from England. Certainly, Engels and Marx were convinced that their correspondence was being pried into, and that they were surrounded by spies; so fear of expulsion may have deterred them from practical revolutionary activity.⁸⁰

Happich's assertion that Engels wanted to compose practical manuals is based, however, not on any of Engels' statements, but simply on the assumption that any revolutionary must want to do something practical and immediate toward accomplishing his revolutionary aims. It may be that when Marx and Engels ridiculed Franz Sigel for writing a revolutionary soldiers' handbook, they objected to Sigel's absurdly detailed and impractical text, and not to handbooks in general; and it may be that when they mocked the drilling of troops by Kossuth, Kinkel, and Garibaldi, they objected to the prospect that the troops so drilled would be squandered in a futile putsch, and not to the concept of preparatory training. However, despite his assertion that “insurrection is an art,” Engels' general tendency is to derogate the importance of insurrectionary technique.⁸¹

Purely military factors were never really crucial; Milan's virtues as a scene for street fighting were irrelevant in 1853, and in 1857 Engels declared that the excellent guerrilla terrain in Berg and Mark was much less important than the stolidity of the population. He and Marx remarked that in demonstrations that remained short of open armed conflict, the masses seemed to improvise the right tactics, and Marx's suggestion that demonstrations would go better if crowds would make proper use of railings was perhaps the only case where he or Engels offered any concrete tactical advice.⁸²

When Engels did discuss the methods of insurrection, his assessment of the purely military chances of revolution was almost always discouraging. Though in 1847, before he had studied military science or seen a revolution at first hand, he imagined barricades springing up spontaneously and irresistibly all over Paris, his judgments on the effectiveness of barricades in later years ranged from sober to dismal.⁸³

In 1854 Engels reported that barricades had been successful in Spain, and that the successful employment of this revolutionary weapon, which had been considered obsolete after 1848, opened the prospect of a new era of European revolution. The troops of official Europe had been beaten by a popular rising just as they demonstrated their incompetence in the Crimea. But even in this cheery assessment there was a note of caution: barricades had succeeded only against the Spanish army, which was not much of an army. It might be, then, that the insurgents' success was a local phenomenon, rather than a turn in the tactical balance between rebellion and order. Two years later, commenting on the lessons of the Spanish revolution and its defeat, Engels (or Marx) pointed out some novelties in the street fighting in Madrid. Revolutionaries had allegedly assailed attacking columns with the bayonet; barricades had been used sparingly, at major intersections only; and houses had been used as strongholds of resistance. Whatever the workers had learned from Dresden and Paris in 1848, the soldiers had learned more, using artillery to crumble houses and flanking fire to replace headlong assaults. In a conflict between revolutionaries and a regular army, the odds continued to favor the army.⁸⁴

Insofar as Engels' military studies produced practical advice, then, the advice consisted of warnings against foolishness. In this field as in others, the founders of Marxism took a morbid delight in dispelling illusions. Wishful thinking that might mislead the movement was to be discouraged, and any tendency to overrate the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare seemed to Engels a delusion. There is in Engels' work no trace of the modern school of revolutionary thought (Regis Debray, et al.) which makes the heroic guerrilla the originator and carrier of revolution.⁸⁵ For Engels, guerrilla war was simply a species of warfare, and not a particularly effective one.

His readings had taught him that guerrilla activity was no substitute for a regular army. Early in his studies, he had read Carl von Decker's text on secondary operations, which insisted that irregular campaigns must always be ancillary to the operations of a regular force. Napier's Peninsular War book, which Engels so admired, treated the Spanish irregulars as mendacious and unreliable, neglecting “the thousand narrow winding currents of Spanish warfare to follow that mighty English stream of battle, which burst the barriers of the Pyrenees, and left deep traces of its fury in the soil of France.” Engels' own experience in Baden probably supported his skeptical attitude toward the effectiveness of improvised forces, and he never repudiated Decker's belief that irregulars could amount to nothing on their own.⁸⁶

“The support of a regular army,” Engels wrote in 1853, “is now-a-days necessary to the progress of all insurrectionary or irregular warfare against a powerful regular army.” In 1852 he suggested that, contrary to precedent, guerrilla tactics might be used to good effect in densely settled country, but despite the prevalence of poachers as a pool of guerrilla talent, he did not suppose that partisan warfare alone would suffice to defeat a French invasion of England.⁸⁷

Though Engels was intensely interested in the appearance or non-appearance of partisan war in the American Civil War, he considered it mainly as a gauge of the morale and determination of the belligerent parties. He complained that the civilian population took less part in the war than the Russians in 1812 or the French in 1814. But a “white trash” partisan campaign would only have the effect of making plantation owners appeal to the Union forces to keep order. Anticipating that Beauregard's army at Corinth would dissolve into guerrilla bands, he resolved to examine the odds of an irregular campaign; but he found them unpromising for the guerrillas, since his comments in late 1864 and 1865 foresaw only a militarily insignificant fading echo of the regular war.⁸⁸ Engels' considerations of Southern partisan war against the Union underline his view that there was nothing inherently revolutionary about irregular activity. Reactionaries could use it as well, or as poorly, as revolutionaries.

The dispersal of the Sepoy rebels' field forces in 1858 indicated that the war was “gradually passing into that stage of desultory warfare, to which, more than once, we have pointed as its next impending and most dangerous phase of development”; but though this change in the character of the war threatened the British, Engels concluded that “by this change, the war loses much of its interest.” The impression that Engels considered guerrilla warfare an inferior form of military activity is further supported by his comments on Garibaldi's capture of Palermo, which proved that Garibaldi was more than just a clever partisan leader—he had real strategic gifts and was capable of directing serious military operations. Garibaldi had raised himself to a higher plane.⁸⁹

Engels' concentration on the conventional warfare of his day was entirely consistent with his devotion to the revolutionary cause. Since he could see no effective military shortcut to revolution, he restricted his practical advice to warnings against rashness and concentrated on analysis of the military activities of bourgeois society. Not only was this attitude consistent with Marx's predilection for studying phenomena that existed, instead of those that one might wish to exist (writing much more about capitalism than about socialism, for instance⁹⁰), but it was the most useful way in which Engels' military studies could serve the revolution.

Military cleverness could not make a revolution; that had been the error of Willich and the military-putschist group. (Engels did develop what is discussed as the Theory of the Vanishing Army, Chapter Nine, but that was a means of predicting the revolution, not producing it.) Military skill would be useful not in making the revolution, but in defending it from hostile neighbors once it was made, and the defense would have to be carried on by conventional means.

Engels' 1851 essay on the defense of a revolutionized France predicted that eventually the proletarian revolution would change the very nature of war in unpredictable ways, since the greater productivity of the new society would provide commanders with unprecedented masses of unprecedented mobility. Nevertheless, on the morrow of the revolution, the revolutionaries would have to fight “with the methods and means of modern warfare in general.” When Engels believed a crisis was imminent in 1857, and turned his studies to more “practical” channels, he concentrated on the organization and tactics of the existing European armies, which the revolution would have to face.⁹¹

Engels' ideas on these existing methods and means of contemporary war were in no way remarkable. He had no dogmatic preference for line or column formation, and although he criticized undue reliance on skirmishing tactics, he recognized that the introduction of the breech-loading rifle had increased the rate of infantry fire and necessitated an open order of attack. Operations on converging lines of operation, such as Moltke's novel maneuvers in 1866, violated the traditional Jomini-influenced reliance on interior lines and made Engels nervous.⁹² Engels was a good, but rather conventional, military writer.

What does make his military thought remarkable is its integration into the vision of revolution that he and Marx developed. Engels' military studies were not a hobby or a diversion from his revolutionary mission;⁹³ they were central to the development of Marxist revolutionary thought. Engels and Marx were engaged in a continuing effort to understand the operation of bourgeois society and the forces that would, in due course, prepare that society's collapse. Engels' analyses of wars and their likely results shaped the Marxist outlook on the vital question of when European capitalism would break down; his views on the nature of armies showed how revolution could and could not be carried out, and furnished classical Marxism with its formulas for revolutionary tactics. …

Notes

1. “Programm der blanquistischen Kommuneflüchtlinge,” Volksstaat, June 26, 1874, MEW, 18, 528.

2. Fund appeals, etc., 7, 545-60; Marx, Herr Vogt, MEW, 14, 394, 440, 443-45; Marx to Engels, Feb. 24, 1851, 27, 198-99.

3. As Leopold Schwartzschild points out. Karl Marx: The Red Prussian (New York: Scribner's, 1947), 217-30, 243-47.

4. For the Demands, see MEW, 5, 3-5; good commentaries on the state of the League and its factions are Shlomo Na'aman, “Zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten in Deutschland in der zweiten Phase seines Bestehens,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 5 (1965), 5-82, esp. 72-73, and Werner Blumenberg, “Zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten. Die Aussagen des Peter Gerhardt Röser,” IRSH, 9 (1964), 99, 115-16.

5. G. A. Techow to A. Schimmelpfening, Aug.-Sept. 1850, in Carl Vogt, Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung (Geneva: the author, 1859), 158; Na'aman, 58.

6. 6 Marx, Herr Vogt, MEW, 14, 668; to Engels, May 6, 1851, 28, 68; to Engels, Dec. 9, 1851, 27, 383; “Revue,” NRZ-Revue, May-Oct. 1850, MEW, 7, 440; to Weydemeyer, Dec. 19, 1849, 27, 516; Engels to Marx, May 7, 1852, 28, 68. Engels' business contacts also expected a crash: “Peter Ermen shits his pants whenever he thinks about it, and he's an excellent barometer.” Engels to Marx, July 30, 1851, 27, 290.

7. Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, Man and Fighter (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1936), 206-18. For the Central Committee's June 1850 statement avowing connections with Blanquist groups, see MEW, 7, 306-12. For the fullest treatment of the Blanquist problem in Marxism, see Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, 1: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 132-258.

8. Marx to Engels, Mar. 1, 1869, 32, 264; to Paul and Laura Lafargue, Feb. 15, 1869, 32, 592; to Jenny Marx, Aug. 15, 1870, 33, 137; Engels, “Programm der blanquistischen Kommuneflüchtlinge,” Volksstaat, June 26, 1874, MEW, 18, 529-30. On Blanqui's popularity on the Marx household, see Werner Blumenberg, “Ein unbekanntes Kapitel aus Marx' Leben,” IRSH, 1 (1956), 95.

9. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, 214.

10. Blanqui sent a toast to a revolutionary banquet which featured an address by Louis Blanc, whom Blanqui considered a traitor. Blanqui's toast was not read, but Marx and Engels published it as a pamphlet. MEW, 7, 568-70. Blanqui's assertion that he who has iron has bread bore a remarkable resemblance to the force theory that Engels later assailed in the Anti-Dühring. On this incident see W.I. Fishman, The Insurrectionists (London: Methuen, 1970), 71.

11. Review of works by A. Chenu and L. de la Hodde, NRZ-Revue, April 1850, MEW, 7, 267-68, 271-80; Vogt, 153-54.

12. The Army, Standing Army or National Army? An Essay (Cincinnati: A. Frey, 1866) esp. 3, 12-13, 21-23.

13. Engels to Ernst Dronke, July 9, 1851, 27, 561; to Marx, Sept. 23, 1851, 27, 343; Blumenberg, “Röser,” 109-110. For other similar schemes, not invented by Willich, see Wolfgang Schieder, “Der Bund der Kommunisten im Sommer 1850. Drei Dokumente aus dem Marx-Engels Nachlass,” IRSH, 13 (1968), 43-45, 49-50.

14. Engels to Marx, Mar. 19, 1851, 27, 223; Marx to Engels, Oct. 28, 1852, 28, 170; Engels to Marx, Nov. 23, 1853, quoted in Marx, Der Ritter vom edelmüthigen Bewusstsein, MEW, 9, 498. Cf. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, MEW, 8, 413.

15. Engels to Marx, Sept. 23, 1851, 27, 343; Marx to Engels, July 13, 1851, 27, 279; Marx, Enthüllungen, MEW, 8, 412; Central Committee minutes, Sept. 15, 1860, MEW, 8, 598.

16. Techow's views were summarized by Marx, to Engels, Sept. 23, 1851, 27, 347-49. Cf. D. Riazonov, introduction to Engels, “Die Möglichkeiten und Voraussetzungen eines Krieges der heiligen Allianz gegen Frankreich im Jahre 1852,” Neue Zeit, 33 (1914-15), 266. Engels to Marx, Sept. 26, 1851, 27, 353; to Marx, Mar. 19, 1851, 27, 222. Engels expressed some disillusionment with the Terror (to Marx, Sept. 4, 1870, 33, 53) but later accorded it some value (to Kautsky, Feb. 20, 1889, 37, 155).

17. To Marx, Feb. 11, 1853, 28, 212-13; Marx to Engels, Feb. 23, 1853, 28, 214-16. Cf. Marx, Tribune, Mar. 8, 1853, MEW, 8, 527, Engels to Marx, Mar. 9, 1853, 28, 217.

18. Engels to Marx, Feb. 13, 1851, 28, 190; July 20, 1851, 28, 288-89; Marx to Hermann Becker, Feb. 28, 1851, 28, 546-47; to Weydemeyer, Jan. 23, 1852, 28, 478.

19. To Marx, Nov. 23, 1853, reprinted by Marx in the Ritter, MEW, 9, 500. Engels' “Reichsverfassungskampagne” had painted Willich as almost the only competent officer on the revolutionary side (MS, 1, 97), and it was remarked that Engels saw Willich and himself as the only useful people in the campaign. Schieder, 52.

20. To Weydemeyer, Aug. 7, 1851, 27, 569; on the scandal, wherein Willich was alleged to have been thrown out of Baroness von Brünigk's house after trying to rape his hostess, Marx to Engels, May 22, 1852, 28, 78; Engels to Marx, May 24, 1852, 28, 79; Marx to Engels, July 3, 1852, 28, 81-82; Marx to Adolf Cluss, Oct. 8, 1852, 28, 552-53. Engels said that the affair was surprising, since Willich usually evidenced “more enthusiasm for young blond cobblers'-apprentices than for fair ladies.” To Weydemeyer, June 11, 1852, 28, 532.

21. So translated by Edward Fitzgerald, in Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962), 223. The title was intended to convey a sense of self-righteousness. Marx asked Engels for material in letters of Apr. 30 and May 6, 1852, 28, 62 and 69.

22. Engels thought that the £25 offered by Bangya “valent bien un peu de scandale” (May 1, 1852, 28, 64-65), but Bangya never paid. Engels, more worldly than Marx, was first to suspect Bangya. For the booklet, Die Grossen Männer des Exils, see MEW, 8, 233-335. On Bangya, see R. Rosdolsky, “Karl Marx und der Polizeispitzel Bangya,” IRSH, 2 (1937), 229-45.

23. To Marx, May 23, 1851, 27, 266; Marx to Engels, Apr. 30, 1852, 28, 61; Engels to Marx, July 15, 1852, 28, 91. Happich, p. 43, considers that this last statement proves that Engels' studies were directed “toward the decisive revolutionary moment,” not “merely intended as the basis for journalistic endeavors.” It seems not to prove quite that. “Lieutenant” was used as a term of mild derision, owing to the combination of authority and inexperience sometimes present in new officers. See Engels to Marx, Sept. 23, 1852, 28, 138; Engels, “The Armies of Europe,” Putnam's 6 (1855), 309.

24. To Weydemeyer, June 19, 1851, 27, 553. Engels had asked Marx for Weydemeyer's address on Apr. 3, 1851, 27, 234; Weydemeyer was defending the Marxist position in the United States. On his career, which included service in the Civil War and the posthumous honor of a Liberty Ship named for him, see Karl Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, Pioneer of American Socialism (New York: International Publishers, 1947).

25. To Ruge, July 26, 1842, 27, 408; to Weydemeyer, June 19, 1851, 27, 553-55.

26. La petite guerre, ou traité des opérations secondaires de la guerre (Brussels: Société de librairie belge, 1838). This work went through three editions between 1822 and 1828. Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807-1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 176. Engels had used this French edition in Switzerland while writing the Reichsverfassungskampagne. To Weydemeyer, Aug. 7, 1851, 27, 568.

27. Sir William P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, from A.D. 1807 to A.D. 1814 (6 vols., London: Warne, 1850); Engels to Weydemeyer, June 19, 1851, 27, 555. Engels had already praised the Napier work to Marx, and had complained of the difficulty of getting the volumes from his local libraries in proper order. Feb. 26, 1851, 27, 203-04, Mar. 17, 1851, 27, 217. He so admired Napier that when he offered to send some military articles to the London Daily News as a sample of his work, he asked that they be judged by Napier rather than any “lesser martinet.” To H. J. Lincoln, Mar. 30, 1854, 28, 600.

28. Apr. 11, 1851, 27, 235-36. Wellington, said Engels, had no spark of genius, but excelled at picking defensive positions and withdrawing from them: “tel soldat, tel politique”—the perfect representative of Toryism.

29. Aug. 27, 1851, 27, 568-69. Weydemeyer was to write to Engels' business address, so that the firm of Ermen and Engels might bear the postage costs of Engels' military education. Cf. similar postal advice, to Weydemeyer, Apr. 16, 1852, 28, 513; to Wilhelm Steffen (who was supposed to send maps), Apr. 15, 1856, 29, 531.

30. “England,” MEW, 8, 208-18; to Weydemeyer, Feb. 27, 1852, 28, 500-01. Mayer, 2, 35, points out the showing off in the article.

31. Jan. 23, 1852, 28, 482-83.

32. To Weydemeyer, Apr. 16, 1852, 28, 514.

33. Engels to Marx, July 15, 1852, 28, 91; to Weydemeyer, Apr. 12, 1853, 28, 576.

34. To Marx, May 7, 1852, 28, 71; to Weydemeyer, April 12, 1853, 28, 576-81. Later Engels could disagree openly with Weydemeyer on a military question. Grant's approach to Richmond from the sea side of the city was not dangerous, as Weydemeyer feared, but proper procedure when one controlled the sea. Engels cited Wellington's campaigns in Spain to prove his case. Mar. 10, 1865, 31, 458-59.

35. To Marx, Apr. 3, 1851, 27, 231-32. Cf. Marx to Engels, Apr. 2, 1851, 27, 228.

36. To Marx, May 7, 1852, 28, 72; July 6, 1852, 28, 86; Aug. 16, 1852, 28, 111; June 10, 1854, 28, 365-66; Marx to Engels, Dec. 14, 1854, 28, 315. Engels' library contained a copy of another Hungarian campaign memoir, by Friedrich Heller von Hellwald, carefully annotated and compared with Görgey. Bruno Kaiser, Ex libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Schicksal und Verzeichnis einer Bibliothek (Berlin: Dietz, 1967), 92.

37. Sept. 30, 1853, 28, 299. Engels lived in Manchester, Marx in London. Therefore their correspondence.

38. Marx to Engels, Nov. 2, 1853, 28, 306; Mar. 10, 1853, 28, 222. Marx declared that he and Engels had “neglected this subject [international relations] far too long.” Nov. 2, 1853, 28, 307. Marx's curious enthusiasm for the Turcophile “monomaniac” David Urquhart (e.g., Marx to Engels, Feb. 9, 1854, 28, 324-25) cannot be discussed here. More of Marx's requests for comments on military affairs: Nov. 23, 1853, 28, 310; Jan. 18, 1854, 28, 319; Jan. 24, 1854, 28, 321; Apr. 19, 1854, 28, 340; June 21, 1854, 28, 370; July 22, 1854, 28, 377-79; July 17, 1855, 28, 453; etc.

39. Engels to Marx, Mar. 11, 1853, 28, 226. (A.P.C. was Aurelius Pulszky, a former aide to Kossuth. Engels hoped to demolish him with a display of Allwissenheit in Turkish matters, but A.P.C. was durable.) Marx to Engels, Mar. 11, 1854, 28, 329.

40. To Engels, Mar. 29, 1854, 28, 334.

41. Marx to Engels, Dec. 11, 1853, 28, 463; Courier, Oct. 18, 1853; Tribune, Dec. 20, 1853; Marx to Engels, Jan. 5, 1854, 28, 317.

42. To Engels, Dec. 2, 1853, 28, 311; to Engels, Sept. 11, 1855, 28, 460. Cf. Marx to Engels, Mar. 31, 1851, 27, 226.

43. Marx to Engels, Aug. 19, 1852, 28, 112-13; Engels to Marx, Aug. 24, 1852, 28, 117; Marx to Engels, June 29, 1855, 28, 450; July 23, 1855, 28, 451. Marx's bibliographic assistance to Engels' military efforts are summarized in A. J. Babin, “Die schöpferische Zusammenarbeit von Marx und Engels auf militärgeschichtlichem Gebiet,” ZfMG, 9 (1970), 420-29.

44. June 2, 1852, 28, 252-53; Mar. 29, 1854, 28, 334; Sept. 7, 1857, 29, 192-93.

45. To Engels, Apr. 2, 1851, 27, 229. There was a falling out with the Baroness, for Engels soon referred to her as a whore (to Marx, Sept. 1, 1851, 27, 334), and Marx published a notice disavowing all connection with her. Kölnische Zeitung, Oct. 9, 1851, MEW, 8, 108. For other Hungarians offered Engels, see Marx to Engels, Apr. 5, 1852, 28, 49; May 6, 1852, 28, 68-69; July 13, 1852, 28, 88; Marx to Szemere, Apr. 4, 1860, 30, 520; Marx to Engels, Apr. 5, 1852, 28, 49; May 13, 1852, 28, 73.

46. Engels to Weydemeyer, Aug. 7, 1851, 27, 568; Marx to Engels, May 16, 1855, 28, 446.

47. “Quid pro Quo,” Volk, July 30, 1859, MEW, 13, 450; “Truth Testified,” Tribune, Aug. 4, 1859, MEW, 8, 440; Maximilien Rubel, “Les cahiers d'étude de Karl Marx, II. 1853-1856,” IRSH, 5 (1960), 56.

48. To Engels, Nov. 30, 1854, 28, 413-14; Dec. 2, 1854, 28, 416-17; Dec. 15, 1854, 28, 420-21.

49. To Engels, Jan. 18, 1854, 28, 319-20; Jan. 25, 1854, 28, 321-22. For Engels' view on the fortifications question, “The Movements of the Armies in Turkey,” Tribune, Nov. 8, 1853, MEW, 9, 438-39; “The Crimean Prospects,” Tribune, Oct. 1, 1855, MEW, 11, 533; “The Siege of Sevastopol,” Tribune, Nov. 15, 1854, MEW, 10, 543, repeated in “Rückblicke,” Neue Oder-Zeitung, Jan. 4, 1855, MEW, 10, 591.

50. Inter alia: Marx to Engels, Mar. 25, 1856, 29, 32; Apr. 10, 1856, 29, 38; July 14, 1857, 29, 155; Aug. 15, 1857, 29, 160-61; Sept. 17. 1857, 29, 176 (here Marx seems to have done some rather technical reading, but he defers to Engels nevertheless); Sept. 23, 1857, 29, 188; Nov. 13, 1857, 29, 207; Jan. 1, 1858, 29, 246; Feb. 12, 1858, 29, 285; Aug. 8, 1858, 29, 349; Aug. 13, 1858, 29, 352. Marx said that lack of time to master unfamiliar material, rather than any constitutional incapacity, kept him from doing military articles, but they were out of his province anyway. To Engels, Jan. 5, 1858, 29, 247; Aug. 18, 1858, 29, 354.

51. Engels to Marx, Mar. 23, 1854, 28, 331-32; Marx to Lassalle, Apr. 6, 1854, 28, 604-06.

52. Marx to Engels, Dec. 14, 1853, 28, 316; Engels to H. J. Lincoln, Mar. 30, 1854, 28, 600-03; Engels to Marx, Apr. 3, 1854, 28, 337; Marx to Engels, Apr. 4, 1854, 28, 338.

53. To Marx, Apr. 20, 1854, 28, 342; Marx to Engels, Apr. 22, 1854, 28, 347.

54. To Marx, Apr. 21, 1854, 28, 344-45; Apr. 20, 1854, 28, 343; June 10, 1854, 28, 366.

55. Carlton (161-62) laments the failure to get the job, under the impression that it would have got Engels away from the malevolent influence of Marx. She confuses the positions of war correspondent (“a civilian who goes to the front”) and military correspondent (“a soldier who stays at home”). Definitions from The Liddell Hart Memoirs (New York: Putnam, 1965), 1, 80. Engels wanted to move to London, not to Sevastopol. When he and Marx proposed to supply the Tribune with on-the-spot reports, the war correspondent recommended was Otto von Mirbach, Engels' old commander in the Elberfeld revolution. Engels to Marx, Dec. 12, 1855, 28, 464. Engels later preferred to report the Franco-Prussian War from England instead of the battlefield, since England provided more chance for objectivity and more security from the Prussian police. Marx to Engels, July 20, 1870, 33, 6; Engels to Marx, July 22, 1870, 33, 9.

56. Engels to Lassalle, Mar. 15, 1860, 30, 517 (further correspondence on the anonymity of the pamphlets: Marx to Engels, Feb. 25, 1859, 29, 401; Marx to Lassalle, Feb. 25, 1859, 29, 580-81: Engels to Lassalle, March 14, 1859, 29, 582; Marx to Engels, shortly after Jan. 11, 1860, 30, 6; Engels to Marx, Jan. 30, 1860, 30, 14; Engels to Marx, Feb. 4, 1860, 30, 25). Marx's source of military gossip was Countess Hatzfeldt, Lassalle's friend; through her he met General von Pfuel, whom he and Engels had assailed fiercely in 1848-49, and discussed Engels' pamphlet with the General. To Engels, May 7, 1861, 30, 162.

57. Ernst Drahn, Friedrich Engels als Kriegswissenschaftler (Gautzsch bei Leipzig: Felix Dietrich, 1915), 20. Wolfe's complaint (Marxism, 31-32) that the two strategic pamphlets lack any socialist characteristics misses the point; they were aimed at an audience not noted for socialist sympathies.

58. The Volunteer Movement was a semiofficial force assembled to repel a possible French invasion, during the war scare that followed the coup of Napoleon III. Engels to editor, AMZ, Sept. 8, 1860, 30, 559-60; to Marx, Sept. 15, 1860, 30, 93. The article appeared in AMZ, Sept. 8, 1860, and is in MEW, 15, 137-43; English version in Volunteer Journal, 1 (Sept. 14, 1860) and is in EMC, 1-8.

59. Marx to Engels, Oct. 2, 1860, 30, 102; Marx to Lassalle, Oct. 2, 1860, 30, 568; Engels to Marx, Oct. 5, 1860, 30, 104; Sept. 15, 1860, 30, 93.

60. The pamphlet's component articles are in EMC, somewhat rearranged. For the United Services Gazette review, see EMC, xvi. The pamphlet was said to be “modestly and carefully written,” though Engels was “to a considerable extent bitten with that new-fangled admiration for French soldiering which we, after long and intimate knowledge, hold to be an utter delusion.” The history of the rifle was particularly praised; later Gordon Craig used it as a handy and accurate summary of the subject. The Battle of Königgrätz: Prussia's Victory over Austria, 1866 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964), 20.

61. Gerlach, who had never before seen a socialist, was received with great cordiality and attended one of the drinking parties that Engels held to celebrate election victories by the German Social Democrats. Von Rechts nach Links (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1937), 138. Engels' correspondence with Wachs had begun in 1893, when he noticed Wachs' name in the Military Commission and asked August Bebel to find out whether it was the same Wachs whom Engels had met 25 years before in Manchester. Wachs, a cousin of Engels' friend Eduard Gumpert, had then just joined the Prussian Army, and was depressed to find there the same barrack spirit that he had thought to leave behind in Electoral Hesse. Engels advised him to stick it out. Engels to Bebel, Feb. 9, 1893, 39, 27-28.

62. June 19, 1851, 27, 553.

63. Nov. 15, 1857, 29, 212; Dec. 31, 1857, 29, 245; Feb. 11, 1858, 29, 278.

64. Feb. 14, 1858, 29, 280. Paul Lafargue reports Marx's fear that Engels would kill himself while hunting. “Persönliche Erinnerungen an Friedrich Engels,” Neue Zeit, 23 (1905), 556. Marx himself could barely ride (Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs [Chicago: Kerr, 1901], 129); his “horse exercise” probably involved a wooden contraption. Engels to Jenny Marx, May 11, 1858, 29, 558; Marx to Engels, Sept. 21, 1858, 29, 355. No doubt Marx also resented Engels' supporting a horse (a Christmas present from his father, 1856) while the Marxes were particularly hungry. Engels to Marx, Jan. 22, 1857, 29, 100; Aug. 1, 1862, 30, 261.

65. Feb. 18, 1858, 29, 282-83; Engels to Victor Adler, Sept. 25, 1892, 38, 473. Cf. Mayer, 2, 173.

66. Marx to his daughter Jenny, Jan. 11, 1865, 31, 442; Engels to Marx, Apr. 11, 1859, 29, 417; to Kugelmann, Nov. 8 and 20, 1867, 31, 569 (Engels insisted that Kugelmann, a gynecologist, owed some horsemanship to his profession, which concerned “riding and being ridden”); to J. P. Becker, Oct. 15, 1884, 36, 218; Apr. 2, 1885, 36, 290; June 15, 1885, 36, 328.

67. To Weydemeyer, Apr. 12, 1853, 28, 581-82, 577; “Betrachtungen und Aussichten eines Krieges der Heiligen Allianz gegen ein revolutionäres Frankreich im Jahre 1852,” MS, 1, 220. This essay was first published in Neue Zeit, 33 (1914/15) and is in MEW, 7, 468-93, under a somewhat different title. It is cited below as “Holy Alliance vs. France,” from the MS.

68. To Marx, Feb. 7, 1856, 29, 10.

69. Lafargue to Marx, Apr. 28, 1871, quoted in Celina Bobinska, Marx und Engels über polnische Probleme (Berlin: Dietz, 1958), 278.

70. On Engels' plan, below, pp. 123-24. Delbrück's opinion was expressed to Gustav Mayer, who reports it in his Erinnerungen: vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Munich: Verlag der Zwölf, 1949), 357. On Delbrück, see Franz Mehring, “Eine Geschichte der Kriegskunst,” Neue Zeit, Erg. 4 (Oct. 16, 1908), 1-2; Gordon A. Craig, “Delbruck: The Military Historian,” Makers of Modern Strategy, 280-83. Delbrück's praise of Engels' military qualities is thus more of an expert judgment than Liebknecht's (“Friedrich Engels,” 423).

71. Lafargue, “Persönliche Erinnerungen,” 560-61; Engels to Lafargue, Dec. 30, 1871, 33, 365-66; to Carlo Terzaghi, Jan. 6, Jan. 14-15, 1872, 33, 372-75; to Theodor Cuno, Jan. 24, 1872, 33, 389; “Aus der Internationale,” Volksstaat, July 2, 1873, MEW, 18, 475; article on authority, Almonacco Republicano per l'anno 1874, MEW, 18, 306-07. See also Hans-Jürgen Usczek, “Friedrich Engels zum Volkskrieg in Frankreich,” ZfMG, 9(1970), 517-20.

72. Lafargue, “Persönliche Erinnerungen,” 557; Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), 241-63.

73. Herr Vogt, MEW, 14, 441; Engels to Weydemeyer, Nov. 24, 1864, 31, 425; Marx, introduction to a new edition of the Enthullungen uber den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, MEW, 18, 569.

74. Tribune, June 22 and Sept. 24, MEW, 15, 60-64, 155-58. Marx did point out that a revolution of sorts was already under way when Garibaldi landed, but he did not attempt to make such developments a precondition for revolutionary invasion. Tribune, June 4, Aug. 8, 1860, MEW, 15, 55, 92. Cf. Marx to Hermann Ebner, Dec. 2, 1851, 27, 597.

75. To Engels, Sept. 12, 1863, 30, 372. Marx thought that such a legion would either encourage a German rising, or embarrass the German democrats. According to the prospective leader, Colonel Lapinski, Marx himself suggested the idea. Adam Ciolkosz, “Karl Marx and the Polish Insurrection of 1863,” Polish Review, 10 (1965), 22-23. Engels apparently made no comment on the project.

76. He later described his articles, mostly on military topics, for Dana's New American Cyclopedia as “strictly business.” To Hermann Schlüter, Jan. 29, 1891, 38, 16.

77. To Marx, Jan. 7, 1858, 29, 252. He had previously encountered the historical works of Clausewitz, whom he called “as much a standard author in his line, all over the world, as Jomini” in 1855. Putnam's, 6 (Sept. 1855), 309.

78. Germany: Revolution and Counterrevolution (originally articles in Tribune, 1851-52), German Revolutions, 227-28, 198, 206-207.

79. “Garibaldi in Sicily,” June 14, 1860, MEW, 15, 62.

80. Happich, 38, 47; the Marx-Engels correspondence contains too many references to suspicion of the mails to enumerate. Wolfe (114) is oddly indignant that Engels and Marx should so suspect the British Government; as Marx pointed out, violation of the privacy of the mails had been admitted in Parliament. To Engels, Mar. 2, 1852, 28, 34. Marx said at one point that an Alien Bill would be a good thing, as it would keep the émigrés stirred up, but actual expulsion would have been a great inconvenience. To Engels, Mar. 1, 1851, 27, 213.

81. Grosse Männer, MEW, 8, 315-16; Engels to Marx, Aug. 16, 1852, 28, 111; Sept. 24, 1852, 28, 146. Engels' general assertion that insurrection is an art with (mostly unspecified) rules of its own inspires this tribute from Stepanova (113): “This Marxist teaching on armed insurrection was developed on the basis of the subsequent class struggles of the proletariat and especially of the Moscow rising in December 1905. In the decisive days of October, 1917, the Bolshevik Party gave a classic example of how to prepare and carry out a successful armed revolution.”

82. Engels to Marx, Feb. 11, 1853, 28, 212-13; Oct. 9, 1857, 29, 195; “Konflikte zwischen Polizei und Volk,” Neue Oder-Zeitung, July 9, 1855, MEW, 11, 345; Marx to Engels, July 27, 1866, 31, 243.

83. “The Reform Movement in France,” Northern Star, Nov. 20, 1847, MEGA, 1, 6, 356; to Kautsky, Nov. 3, 1893, 39, 161; preface (1895) to Marx's Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich, MS, 2, 689-90.

84. Engels and Marx, “That Bore of a War,” Tribune, Aug. 17, MEW, 10, 380-81; Marx, “Revolution in Spain,” Tribune, Aug. 18, 1856, MEW, 12, 45. The Werke attributes this article to Marx, who indeed wrote most of the Spanish pieces, but it seems unlikely that he would have commented upon the tactical aspects of the revolution without consulting Engels.

85. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? (New York: Grove Press, 1967) is the most forceful advocate of this theory. On the guerrillist school of thought in general, see Theodor Arnold, Der revolutionäre Krieg (Pfaffenhofen/Ilm: Ilmgau Verlag, 1967).

86. Decker, 30; Napier, 1, iv, also 120-21, 42-43. Napier disapproved of armed peasants and considered regular army support essential to any successful insurrection.

87. “The Holy War,” Tribune, Nov. 15, 1853, MEW, 9, 156; “England,” article sent to Weydemeyer in 1851, MEW, 8, 213-14.

88. Engels and Marx, “Die Lage auf den amerikanischen Kriegsschauplätze,” Presse, May 30, 1862, MEW, 15, 507 (this article follows closely Engels' letter to Marx, May 23, 1862, 30, 240-41); Engels to Marx, July 30, 1862, 30, 255; May 23, 1862, 30, 240; May 29, 1862, 30, 244; to Hermann Engels, Nov. 2, 1864, 31, 421; to Weydemer, Nov. 24, 1864, 31, 424; to Marx, Sept. 4, 1864, 30, 430; to Rudolf Engels, Jan. 10, 1865, 31, 440; to Marx, Feb. 7, 1865, 31, 62.

89. “The Indian Army,” Tribune, July 21, 1858, FIWI, 175-76; “Garibaldi in Sicily,” Tribune, June 22, 1860, MEW, 15, 62-64. Cf. “Garibaldi in Calabria,” Tribune, Sept. 24, 1860, MEW, 15, 155.

90. Reinhard Höhn, Sozialismus und Heer, 1, 65, suggests that this concentration on real rather than on desirable conditions was somehow derived from Scharnhorst.

91. “Holy Alliance vs. France,” MS, 1, 218-21; to Marx, Nov. 15, 1857, 29, 212.

92. “Kinglake über die Schlacht an der Alma,” ms. probably begun for the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung in 1864, MEW, 15, 589-91; to Marx, Oct. 6, 1857, 29, 195 (Engels translated for the Volunteer Journal, Feb. 9-Mar. 2, 1861, a lecture in which Marshal Bugeaud disapproved of skirmishing, MEW, 15, 248-50); “Taktik der Infanterie aus den materiellen Ursachen abgeleitet, 1700-1870,” note intended for the Anti-Dühring, MS, 2, 623-24; “Notes on the War, No. IV,” Manchester Guardian, July 3, 1866, EMC, 133-34.

93. Lafargue, “Persönliche Erinnerungen,” 560, reports that Marx accused Engels of studying things just for the fun of it, but these objections probably were aimed at Engels' philological studies; Marx always encouraged the military researches. Heinz Helmert uses Engels' militaria as a model for the Marxist military historian, and reasonably; but Engels did not occupy himself with military science in order to inspire future scholars. “Friedrich Engels und die Aufgaben der marxistischen Militärgeschichtsschreibung,” ZfMG, 5 (1966), 72-84.

A Note on Documentation

The multiplicity of collections and editions available to the student of Marxism creates certain problems for both reader and writer. If a note documents some statement of Engels or Marx by referring the reader to some page of some collection, the reader is lost unless he happens to have that particular collection at hand; in addition, the status of preferred editions changes constantly.

While the research for this book was being done, the handiest and most nearly complete edition was the MEW (Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Werke [Berlin: Dietz, 1960-74], 41 vols. plus supplementary volumes). Therefore most of my primary citations refer to the MEW; but it is being superseded both by an all-original-language Gesamtausgabe and an all-English Collected Works. Future scholars will not have to seek out articles that Engels wrote in English in their original newspapers and magazines if they wish to avoid retranslating from the MEW's German.

Since anyone now writing on classical Marxism will soon find his documentation obsolete, I have used the most convenient editions, and have tried consistently to specify both where I found the cited statement, and what letter, book, or article contained it originally. Thus the notes may be pursued by the reader in whatever collection he has on hand.

Since all of Engels' and Marx's letters are cited from the MEW, I have attempted to lighten the typographical burden of the notes by omitting repetition of MEW when citing letters of Engels or Marx; letters are identified by date, recipient, and the volume and page numbers from the MEW.

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

AMZ: Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung

EMC: Engels as Military Critic

FIWI: The First Indian War of Independence

IWK: Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung

MEGA, 1: Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. Series 1 (works) (Moscow: Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 1927-1935), 7 vols.

MEW: Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Werke

MS: Engels' Ausgewählte militärische Schriften

NRZ: Neue Rheinische Zeitung

NRZ-Revue: Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue

PMG: Pall Mall Gazette

ZfMG: Zeitschrift für Militärgeschichte