Should a revolution succeed, the revolutionary army automatically joins the rest of the newly changed nation's armed forces. It is possible to induce a revolution by adjusting taxes, razing entertainment and government buildings, constructing schools, or deliberately losing battles. Moving all military units out of the home region before the revolution occurs will then ensure that there is only minimal resistance in the form of local militia to the revolutionary army.
Total War Wiki Explore. Historical Games. Medieval Medieval II Kingdoms. Date Posted: 2 Apr, am. Posts: 3. Discussions Rules and Guidelines. Note: This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising, and problematic harassment, fighting, or rude posts. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. He did so in part through co-opting nobles and other large landowners and in part through terror. His mobile columns shot captured guerrillas and priests found with weapons out of hand.
They virtually wiped the town of Saliente off the map. Suchet took hostages and tried to recruit local auxiliaries. He had not eliminated resistance, only stunned it. It did not help that the French commanders squabbled mightily with each other and that, increasingly, they had to rely on inexperienced conscripts newly arrived from France.
Above all, they simply did not have the manpower to make their tactics work — particularly as the guerrillas were killing or capturing an average of 25 French soldiers a day. The reports filed by General Reille from the northern city of Pamplona testify with particular eloquence to the Sisyphean nature of guerrilla war for the French.
From mid to mid, Reille vainly struggled against the increasingly professional force of Francisco Espoz y Mina. He bitterly chided his superiors for withdrawing troops rather than sending more.
He boasted to them of the priests his men shot and the hostages they took. But it made no impression on Paris, and in April , Napoleon himself chided Reille for showing little energy and leaving everything unpunished. This bolt from Olympus left the general almost speechless with shock, and he reacted by turning increasingly vicious in his tactics, until his own reports come to seem like the draft of a bill of indictment against him for war crimes.
On July 8, , he had 40 alleged guerrillas, held prisoner in the citadel of Pamplona, summarily shot and warned that the same thing would happen to another unless the guerrillas abandoned their campaign.
Here was absolute enmity on the French side as well. And it takes little effort to imagine the sort of war that followed from the respective positions of the guerrillas and the French. Even high-ranking French officers frankly acknowledged in their memoirs the general mercilessness of the conflict.
They were constantly facing the need to punish the innocent with the guilty, of revenging themselves on the weak instead of the powerful. Blaze himself recorded gruesome stories of soldiers flayed alive by the guerrillas or placed between wooden boards and sawn in two.
Belgian soldiers wrote home of seeing victims of the guerrillas with their eyes plucked out, their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. French troops recounted seeing comrades literally nailed to barn doors and left to die. Whole towns could pay a terrible price for insurgency. Early in , Marshal Claude Victor, operating in central Spain near Talavera, sent a detachment of 25 German soldiers through nearby villages to ask for supplies.
Four of them stopped in the village of Arenas, where the inhabitants pretended to greet them with hospitality but then fell on them and killed them. According to the account left by their officer Karl Franz von Holzing, the Spanish women, before murdering the soldiers, crushed their bones and testicles and cut off their penises.
Holzing himself then led an expedition against Arenas. When the villagers tried to flee, his men shot at them from a distance as if on a hunting expedition, laughing whenever their victims fell into the grass. The French then set the village on fire. In the town of Porto da Mos, men, women, and children were burned to death in the parish church. A German in the British service later recalled:. Every morning at dawn, when we started out, the burning villages, hamlets and woods, which illuminated the sky, told of the progress of the French.
Murdered peasants lay in all directions. At one place, which contained some fine buildings, I halted at a door to beg water of a man who was sitting on the threshold of the house staring fixedly before him. He proved to be dead, and had only been placed there, as if he were still alive, for a joke…. The corpse of another Portuguese peasant had been placed in a ludicrous position in a hole in a garden wall, through which the infantry had broken.
It had probably been put there in order to make fun of us when we came along…. The villages through which we marched were nothing but heaps of debris. The most powerful evocations of the horrors of this war never even saw the light of day until During the fighting, Francisco de Goya, very much an enlightened Spaniard with little sympathy for the Church, had flirted with the new regime. But the unceasing cascade of atrocities revolted him. They drove him to produce a series of blisteringly powerful etchings titled The Disasters of War, which depicted atrocities committed by all sides.
Their unflinching, deliberately obscene detail exposed the horrors of war in a manner rarely before seen in European art. In fact, they speak better to later sensibilities, which perhaps explains why Goya never published them in his lifetime.
The guerrillas, however, did not defeat Napoleon in Spain. They did, however, manage to tie down hundreds of thousands of French soldiers desperately needed in other theaters of operations particularly Russia , while bleeding them badly and destroying their morale.
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