Damian Winczewski

Introduction

Friedrich Engels’s military writings are a relatively poorly known part of his output, even though Marxist theoreticians frequently make references to them highlighting the links between technological progress and the intensity of military conflicts identified by him. The existing literature is pretty old and focuses on Engels as a revolutionary strategist and ideologue, although there are also works written by authors who consider his military interests as being of importance for the development of the Marxist doctrine in the field of operational art and tactics. I think that Engels’s works deserve our attention; they allow us to rediscover him as an insightful thinker in the context of transferring methodological rules of historical materialism into military studies. This enables Marxists to reject on scientific grounds the bourgeois and utopian view that spontaneous and disorganized armed uprisings – following the views expressed by August Blanqui or August Willich -- are efficient means for conducting social revolutions. Moreover, the current state of knowledge on the contribution of Engels in this field requires updating and systematization.  This will enable discussion of several significant issues. For example, where did Engels’s interest in the topic come from? How do his considerations connect with historical materialism? To what extent is his reasoning shared by the classical 19th-century strategy writers Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini? And finally, how accurate were his analyses of contemporary conflicts and his predictions concerning global militarism?

Following a brief biographical sketch of Engels’s military interests and influence, I will describe his main theses about the nature of war. We shall then examine his reflections on battlefield realities in the mid-19th century, his alleged connections to Clausewitz and Jomini, his analyses of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, and his letters and forewords written just before his death, which contain predictions about future world war and socialist revolution.

Source of Engels’s military interests: From Neue Rheinische Zeitung to The Baden Revolution

Engels served in the Prussian army as a member of the Household Artillery in Berlin in 1841–42. However, according to Berger:

Engels does not appear to have been obsessed with military affairs in his youth. References to military parades and the like in his early letters are generally mocking, and his year in the Prussian artillery seems to have been devoted to an assiduous avoidance of duty. He participated in military combat in the rank of a bombardier (corporal). Engels probably developed his fascination with warfare while analyzing the campaigns of 1848 and 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

During that time, he nonetheless presented his critical analyses of the most important battles and skirmishes of the “Springtime of Nations.” The high quality of his writings is suggested by an anecdote from Wilhelm Liebknecht. According to him, Engels’s anonymously written articles about military combat in Hungary were attributed to a high-ranking Hungarian officer. Of the battles fought during that period, Engels was particularly interested in the urban warfare of the armed revolutionary proletariat. He wrote several interesting articles about the June Days uprising in Paris (June 23-26,1848). He could see in the street fighting the first symptoms of a total war. It was fierce and ruthless – the workers were declared enemies of society and the bourgeois army showed no mercy, killing all the wounded and captured. According to Engels, the class context was evident in these events since the bourgeois class was particularly willing to use the lumpenproletariat in their struggle against the workers. The lumpenproletariat are presented as unscrupulous people who gladly served anyone who had power, which is why Engels described this group as the Praetorians. Organized as a so-called ‘mobile guard,’ the Praetorians were relatively well paid and contributed to several defeats for the workers. These events led Engels to advance the thesis that revolutionary wars were characterized by more brutality than classical wars fought between monarchs some decades earlier.

Engels saw the lack of well-organized leadership and good coordination as the cause of many problems for the uprising. However, he praised the insurgents for forming dynamic flying columns that moved adroitly around the city. He appreciated the formation of fortified bases but also observed that the absence of good organization left one of the key areas unprotected. He felt that the introduction of military organizational methods saved the uprising from total failure, noting that the insurgent army remained disciplined despite their opponents’ surge; the insurgents were even able to mount a counter-offensive. Unfortunately, they were outnumbered by the government army, which also had more weapons (mainly artillery). Engels’s final conclusions were quite optimistic, though. He believed that after the slaughter of the insurgents, the people had become even more revolutionary, and therefore the organizing of uprisings, even if they had poor chances for victory, was desirable from the revolutionary perspective: “A well contested defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary significance as an easily-won victory.” For him, simply surrendering and giving up revolutionary ideas without fighting would be a treacherous act. Eventually, however, Engels’s predictions did not come to pass. The revolution collapsed, the working class suffered huge losses, and Paris had to wait for more than twenty years for another uprising

After the closing of Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849 due to Prussian censorship, Engels enlisted in the army fighting in the uprisings in Baden and the Palatinate. In the spring, when preparing the rebellious town of Elberfeld in Westphalia for a siege, he demonstrated his knowledge of military engineering including logistics (also known as “sapper’s techniques”). Later, having joined the revolutionary army, he participated in several skirmishes and then withdrew to Switzerland together with his comrades. He presented his impressions in a short letter to Jenny Marx:

Willich being the only officer who was any good, I joined him and became his adjutant. I was in four engagements, two of them fairly important, particularly the one in Rastatt, and discovered that the much-vaunted bravery under fire is quite the most ordinary quality one can possess. The whistle of bullets is really quite a trivial matter and though, throughout the campaign, a great deal of cowardice was in evidence, I did not see as many as a dozen men whose conduct was cowardly in battle. But all more ‘brave stupidity.’ . . . it was as well that one member of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was present, since the entire pack of democratic blackguards were in Baden and the Palatinate, and are now bragging about heroic deeds they never performed. . . . but of all the democratic gentry, the only ones to fight were myself and Kinkel. . . . Having covered withdrawal of the Baden army, our corps entered Switzerland . . .. Our column, which fought well, bores me and there isn't anything to do here. In battle, Willich is brave, cool-headed and adroit, and able to appreciate a situation quickly and accurately, but when not in battle he is a plus ou moins tedious ideologist and a true socialist. Most of the people in the corps whom one can talk to have been sent elsewhere.

Although Engels’s participation in the uprising was merely a brief adventure for him, his serious attitude to the uprising itself as well as to the military organization of the insurgent army is evident. He is very strict in his assessment of the military competences of the insurgents. The fact that he treats only Willich – a former Prussian officer who started supporting the revolution - as a legitimate commander is suggestive of Engels’s stringent standards. The letter is generally rather pessimistic. Engels joined the uprising only because he felt forced to do so. He had an opportunity to distinguish himself among the other “democratic” insurgents who joined the army only in order to boast about their “heroic” deeds in social circles. Engels not only refrained from boasting about his courage, but also deprecated its role in the war stating that in the heat of battle it appears somewhat automatically. It is also often unnecessary and may lead to foolhardy behaviour. He harbored no illusions about the poor organization of the insurgents and he thought that their uprising might become a caricature of revolution.

In November 1849, Engels settled in England and took over the management of his father’s enterprise. He then began serious theoretical studies on the issues of war and militarism. They had a specific and practical context because he wanted to oppose his former commander, Willich, who started to organize other veterans around him. Willich hoped to use the military force to carry out a revolution based on the Blanquist model. As Berger noted, the “Willich group included nearly all the officers among the émigrés, so Engels – believing that revolution was too important to be left to these particular would-be generals - undertook to challenge their monopoly on military expertise.” Engels’s studies supplement Marx’s philosophical, political and economic critique of Utopian anti-capitalist tendencies, broadening it to include military issues. 

Nature of War: Historical Dialectics of Objective Material Factors and Human Praxis

After 1849, Engels frequently commented on contemporary wars and their historical significance, making notes in the margins of his writings and letters but never tackling the problem of war in a systematic manner. Nevertheless, his main theses can be briefly reconstructed.

According to Walter Gallie, for Engels, war is a historically significant, yet contingent element of the materialist transformation of society. Engels focused on the fact that the political order of the best known historical epochs, in particular the earliest ones, was based on military order: on military formations and their needs, their structure of command, and finally, “on the fruits of military campaigns’ successes.” In The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels pointed out that wars originally played a significant role in the organization of social and economic life as invasions and plundering had been a much simpler way to acquire wealth than the development of one’s own production forces. In Anti-Dühring, Engels observed that war had a significant influence on the development of the Greek tribes for whom the best way to increase the volume of available labour force was an invasion and conquering the people inhabiting the neighbouring territories. Thus, Engels presented war as one of the dynamic factors explaining the character of social processes.

Gallie’s narrative suggests that war is a social phenomenon strongly connected to the economy. However, war is not reduced to economy in Engels. This was noted by Martin Kitchen when he summarized Engels’s 1892 letter to Danielson:

It was precisely in times of war that the relationship between individual human action and material preconditions could be demonstrated most clearly and the dialectical relationship between objective forces and human praxis laid bare. In war, human beings made history in circumstances that were not of their own choice. In a similar manner, the relationship between economic development and warfare was reciprocal. The exigencies of modern warfare necessitate the further development of modern industry.

This perspective is visible already Engels’s early works that show that the evolution of militarism is not a linear reflection of the development of productive forces. His considerations on the nature of war are based on historical materialism’s treatment of war as a variable phenomenon, one depending on the dynamics of the class relationships in a given society. Traces of this way of thinking are to be found in his book, The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Here Engels warned against the identification of the contemporary plebeians with the proletariat and associating with the methods of military combat used in the 16th century. Moreover, he indicated that class relationships play a significant role in the realization of military goals. In his analysis of the military and political failure of the November Uprising in Poland (1830-31), for example, he saw the anachronistic serf relationships in the country as obstructing popular support for the independence actions of the noblemen. 

The complexity of Engels’s approach is most clearly evident in his 1851 article, “Conditions and Prospects of War of Holy Alliance against France,” which presents his analysis of the birth of modern militarism in revolutionary France. It should be underlined that in the days of the ancien regime, wars were typically conducted by small armies comprised of professional soldiers paid from the royal treasury, whose loyalty and morale depended on the solvency of the monarch. Thus, campaigns were typically rather short, and military operations expressed the private interests of the contending aristocrats. The campaigns remained something foreign or external for the common people. However, Engels noted that the French citizen armies derived their power from the political revolution and its ideology. He also emphasized that modern militarism was conditioned by the mutual relations between (a) the social structure (a class alliance of the bourgeoisie that provided money for military operations and the liberated peasantry that provided recruits), (b) appropriate infrastructure including the development of transportation and supply networks (railways, telegraph, mobilization system, etc.), and ( c) the organization of the army itself based on mass conscription. Thus, the bourgeois revolutions enabled the transformation of European armies into “well-organised machines for carrying out Napoleonic manoeuvres,” – characterized by quick offensive operations, the concentration of force, and striving for winning the decisive battle.

Engels supplemented these considerations with a broader social dimension in Anti-Dühring written during the Long Depression (1873-1879), the first serious financial crisis of capitalism. He noted that capitalism highlights the mutual relations between the political and economic dimensions of militarism: the rivalry between capitalist powers leads to increased investment in their military potentials; in turn, this drains these states and colonies of these resources.

According to Engels, the effectiveness of political violence depends on the material means at the disposal of the social classes, i.e., on society's economic condition. Dühring’s notion of political relations as the only basis for violence is an illusion. Both politics and violence are determined by the material conditions. To put violence into practice, suitable instruments are needed and, in the last instance, these instruments develop along with the entire economy. Cold steel is replaced by small arms and artillery. With the evolution of social formations, violence becomes more and more institutionalized. As the author stresses, the main instruments of violence in capitalism are the organized army and naval fleet whose development depends on progress in the sphere of productive forces. To conclude, “'in short, always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and the instruments of economic power which help ‘force’ to victory, without which force ceases to be force.” Both violence and war are essential elements of the dialectic of social processes. Condemning them sententiously in isolation from the founding material relations is naive, all the more so because abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism will probably also result from violence. 

It is important to note that for Engels, military power was not simply the sum of the development of social relations, infrastructure, and material resources invested, but also involves adequate theoretical preparation in the field of strategy. It must also be stressed he studied a considerable number of works on military history and often sent his questions about it to Joseph Weydemeyer, a former Prussian officer who changed sides and joined the revolutionary movement during the Springtime of Nations. According to the Israeli military historian Azar Gat, Engels’s reading list included the old works of the 17th-century strategist, Raimondo Montecuccoli; the co-author of the Communist Manifesto also spoke favourably of William Napier’s work on the history of conflict on the Iberian Peninsula (1807 – 1814). Engels asked Weydemeyer about his opinions on Clausewitz’s and Wilhelm von Willisen’s works. He also asked him about the works of the greatest rival of the Prussian strategist classic - the Napoleonic general Antoine-Henri Jomini. Engels special interest in Jomini becomes evident right after the 1848 Revolutions; he observed that many people were fascinated with Jomini. He and his disciple, Wilhelm Rustow, according to Gat, were the most frequently quoted persons in Engels’s military correspondence. Later, he probably read the works of (or the literature on) the best strategists of the Napoleonic age: August von Gneisenau, Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Arthur Wellington. 

These studies probably contributed to Engels’s deep understanding of the role of tradition, ideology and morale in military operations. As Kitchen rightly observed, for Engels: “such subjective and superstructural factors were firmly anchored in [the] objective historical experience of the individual nations.” This played a significant role in Engels’s reflections because “by stressing the historical and national differences between various armies he did not fall into the error of reducing his theory of war to a series of abstract ‘objective’ principles.” This is evidenced in Engels’s 1850s writings and in his remarks concerning the links between the art of war and the military culture of a particular nations. What he meant was that specific military cultures resulted from several factors: the tradition of particular types of armies; the attitude to war shaped by it; education; continuity of generations of leaders; innovations or technological neglect; and so on. It also seems that he was particularly concerned about the great powers’ armies, as he was often very critical of them. For instance, writing on the Crimean War, he had the following opinion about the British command:

The Englishman is of so pugnacious a nature that the greatest and most common fault of the British officer, in a battle, is to forget his duty as an officer and to fight as a private soldier.  Indeed, when he does this he is sure of the applause of his countrymen, although in any other army he would risk being cashiered for loss of presence of mind.

Engels was critical of British command skills and explained high desertion and poor recruitment rates terms of “the brutal and often mindless discipline and the indiscriminate use of the cat o' nine tails [a type of whip].” However, Engels also claimed that during the Crimean War discipline did not matter for the Turkish soldier because he “is so accustomed to see his own officers run away that when once his spirit is up, he cares nothing at all for officers or command, but fights where he happens to stand.” Engels also thought that the Turks continued the Islamic military tradition whose spirit “bore the banner of Islam from Mecca to Spain and was only checked at Poitiers. Its offensive strength is gone, but a trace of its defensive power has remained,” therefore he believed that the perceived stubborn resistance is essentially Turkish. He analysed the Russian army equally thoroughly. He claimed that the Russian infantry was accustomed to fight in close-order columns and therefore would not succeed in “a little war” where small tactical units fight. He considered the reform of the Cossacks consisting in the establishment of a regular army to be unsuccessful. He thought that the soldiers accustomed to plundering were somewhere between the regular and irregular army, and therefore they did not have proper combat value. He also strongly criticized the French army because he believed that particular generals’ and dynastic ambitions prevailed over military considerations. Although he was very critical of different nations’ commanders, he had some admiration for the bravery of ordinary British and Russian soldiers. However, as we will see in the next part, Engels’s subjective convictions sometimes led him to mistakes in his analysis of military campaigns.

Between Clausewitz and Jomini: Engels against idealism in military studies

Engels’s words concerning the strict relation between violence and politics (as also on the importance of military tradition and morale) are considered to be a proof of Clausewitz’s direct influence upon him. Engels frequently described war campaigns that might have been won or in which serious mistakes could have been avoided, had there not been political disturbances. For instance, he wrote that the Neapolitans could have defeated Garibaldi, had it not been for the fight between two political groups - the liberal and the conservative camarillas, and in his article “Criticism of the French Conduct of the War” (co-authored with Marx), he observed that military mistakes made by the French had their origin in Louis Bonaparte’s dynastic ambitions and stubbornness. 

However, Gat’s analysis indicates that the theses on war in Anti-Dühring did not have anything in common directly with the conclusions of Clausewitz, because Engels presented all the most important ideas already in 1851, whereas he probably read the work of the Prussian general several years later. Already in his letters of the 1850s Engels criticized the contemporary Prussian military literature. He also wrote then that he could not temporarily force himself to read Clausewitz. Engels complained about Clausewitz's “strange style of philosophizing” yet still praised the general. According to Gat, Engels’s military writings were of a strictly professional nature, and therefore Clausewitz’s work, difficult to understand, was of little use for him. 

Gat believes in Engels’s greater admiration of Jomini’s authority in military strategy. Jomini fought until 1813 in the Napoleonic army, then changed sides and joined the Russians. In most literature on the subject, his theory is considered to be in complete opposition to the works of the Prussian. According to the military historian, Christopher Bassford, 

Jomini's view of history and of war was static and simplistic. He saw war as a 'great drama', a stage for heroes and military geniuses whose talents were beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. He saw the revolutionary warfare in which he himself had participated as merely the technical near-perfection of a fundamentally unchanging phenomenon, to be modified only by superficial matters like the list of dramatis personae, technology, and transient political motivations. He drew his theoretical and practical prescriptions from his experiences in the Napoleonic wars. The purpose of his theory was to teach practical lessons to 'officers of a superior grade'. Accordingly, Jomini's aim was utilitarian and his tone didactic. His writing thus appealed more readily to military educators. His later work, Summary of the Art of War (Precis de l'Art de la Guerre, 1838), became, in various translations, popularizations, and commentaries, the premier military-educational text of the mid-nineteenth century.

However, Bassford also emphasizes in his article that many differences between Jomini and Clausewitz are not very important. Still, the Prussian general’s work was much more abstract and at that time it was Jomini’s work that enjoyed more popularity among military men.  This could explain why Engels as someone who has experience in military service was a supporter of Jomini’s theory.

It seems that Jomini’s influence on Engels was not entirely fortunate. According to Gat, it accounts for Engels's misguided analysis of the Prussian - Austrian War (1866), in which, in common with most contemporary commentators, he anticipated the Austrians’ victory. He believed that the Prussians made serious mistakes, including first of all breaking the “Napoleon – Jomini principle” according to which one should never divide one's troops if they cannot support each other. This is proved by the following quotation:

Suppose a young Prussian ensign or cornet, under examination for a lieutenancy, to be asked what would be the safest plan for a Prussian army to invade Bohemia? Suppose our young officer were to answer,— 'Your best way will be to divide your troops into two about equal bodies, to send one round by the east of the Riesengebirge, the other to the west, and effect their junction in Gitschin'. What would the examining officer say to this? He would inform the young gentleman that this plan sinned against the two very first laws of strategy: —F i r s t l y, never to divide your troops so that they cannot support each other, but to keep them well together; and, secondly, in case of an advance on different roads, to effect the junction of the different columns at a point which is not within reach of the enemy; that, therefore, the plan proposed was the very worst of all; that it could only be taken into consideration at all in case Bohemia was quite unoccupied by hostile troops; and that, consequently, an officer proposing such a plan of campaign was not fit to hold even a lieutenant's commission.

According to Gat, several days later he had to eat his words when it turned out that the Prussians won a decisive victory. I think, however, that Engels did not eat his words. He was still convinced about the mistake of the victorious army: 'The campaign which the Prussians opened with a signal strategic blunder has been since carried on by them with such a terrible tactical energy that it was brought to a victorious close in exactly eight days'. Generally, though, he explained his erroneous prediction with the fact that the Austrians eventually had even worse leadership than the Prussians, and he correctly noticed that the main asset of the Prussian army was their use of quick-firing needle guns. On the other hand, he evidently underestimated the victorious army, as right before the beginning of the war he claimed their chances were more or less equal, with the Austrians slightly outnumbering the Prussians, but he added that the Prussian army was demoralized and inexperienced in battle, while the Austrian army was more valiant and had better leaders - which, as it turned out, he had to take back soon. 

I think, however, contrary to Gat, that the above example does not prove any special attachment of Engels to Jomini. It seems rather that Engels sometimes overrates the significance of subjective, human factors like command skills, as opposed to technological factors, resulting in erroneous military forecasts. He predicted a rapid ending of the Crimean War, even though a little earlier he stated that it might last endlessly, and might even transform into a pan-European war. He was also mistaken in his predictions concerning the British army campaign against the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1858. He underestimated the British who quickly formed an alliance with landowners and started pacifying villages on a large scale, which enabled them to defeat the guerrilla fighters. He then made only some statements that the population of India would always hate the British invaders and he never admitted that he was wrong with his predictions. Thus, also Kitchen was mistaken claiming that Engels viewed subjective, national characteristics of armies as “secondary to the major technological and economic factor.” 

As for Clausewitz?  Engels as a historical materialist rejected abstract idealization of war. In his letter to Marx of 7 May 1851 he criticized the book of the Prussian general, Karl Wilhelm von Willisen, commenting ironically:

Willisen's book should really be called the philosophy of great wars. This in itself would indicate that it contains more philosophising than military science, that the most self-evident things are construed a priori with the most profound and exhaustive thoroughness and that, sandwiched between these, are the most methodical discourses on simplicity and multiplicity and such-like opposites. What can one say about military science which begins with the concept of art in general, then goes on to demonstrate that the art of cookery is also an art, expatiates on the relationship of art to science and finally subsumes all the rules, relationships, potentialities, etc., etc., of the art of war under the one, absolute axiom: the stronger always overcomes the weaker. Every now and again there are some nice aperçus and some useful reductions to basic principles; it would indeed be bad if there were not. As to its practical application, I haven't yet got to that, but it doesn't say much for Willisen that every one of Napoleon's greatest victories was achieved in defiance of Willisen's elementary rules, a result that your orthodox Hegelian can, of course, readily explain away without the least violence being done to those rules.

Engels was not particularly concerned with doctrinal principles of military strategy manuals. What mattered to him was the relevance of a given theory  to contemporary strategy and tactics. Together with Marx, he frequently criticized historicistic doctrines developed on the basis of German idealism. Therefore, he was not necessarily willing to present a profound analysis of Clausewitz’s works, which according to many authors, in a philosophical dimension, seem to be a cluster of different Enlightenment theories. The Prussian general’s philosophical views can most plausibly be placed somewhere between Kantianism and Hegelianism.

 This does not mean that Engels rejected Clausewitz’s ideas. He frequently used his concepts concerning strictly the practical aspects of warfare. Moreover, Gat’s statement according to which Clausewitz had no significant influence on Marx and Engels seems exaggerated, at least with respect to the latter. As Youri Cormier has recently pointed out, references to Clausewitz are not limited to several notes in the correspondence between Marx and Engels in 1858. Engels referred to Clausewitz commenting on the American Civil War and writing about the Napoleonic wars in 1871. It might be added that Clausewitz is also mentioned in Engels’s preface to a little-known booklet published in 1888 by Sigmund Borkheim, In Memory of German Blood-And-Thunder Patriots. 1806 – 1807. On the first page of the preface Engels wrote, “Clausewitz had brought forth a star of first magnitude.” As Cormier accurately concluded – if Clausewitz had not been important for Engels, he would not have quoted him twenty years after reading On War.  Engels’s theory of war seems to be convergent with Clausewitz’s main thesis that war is an extension of politics, although he (Engels) paid more attention to the socio-economic base of wars. But Engels’s reflections were of course based on significantly different methodological and theoretical foundations.

Late analysis of modern militarism and predictions of future conflicts

It has to be admitted that despite his slightly overrated and subjective analysis of the power and skills of particular national armies, in his other works Engels did make profound, accurate predictions concerning the long-lasting social and political consequences of the economic and technological development of the art of war.

Already in his early writings, analysing colonial conflicts, he highlighted the threats ensuing from them for the life and cultural identity of the local peoples. His predictions concerning the growing role of artillery were also accurate, and he also paid attention to the increasing significance of transport and logistics as well as the speed of operating troops on the front.  Engels observed also the adverse effect of technological progress in the bourgeois army, such as cannons breaking down barricades. He predicted that street fighting would become less common and concluded that along with the changing conditions of wars between nations, the conditions of wars between classes would also change. The above-mentioned statements were accompanied by his analyses of the organizational development of the bourgeois armies. The system of mass national armies initiated in the Napoleonic age would foster their penetration by revolutionary feelings. Already in his letter to Marx in 1851 Engels noticed that “It is a manifest fact that the disorganization of armies and a total relaxation of discipline have been both precondition and the consequence of all successful revolutions hitherto.” However, he drew consequences from failed revolutionary struggles. As Berger noticed, Engels was aware that revolutions “produced confusion, and confusion did not promote military efficiency. Unorganized enthusiasm would not win battles,” therefore in later years he “strongly supported a policy of avoiding any premature putsch.” 

Engels was also one of the first commentators who noticed the significance of the Civil War in the United States. He expected that it “would lead to great advances and usher in a new epoch in the technical side of warfare.” In his articles to Volunteer Journal for Lancashire and Cheshire he wrote about the unprecedented character of a positional warfare lasting for many months - it was the first war of that type fought on such a broad scale. He also pointed out the necessity of joint operations of combined military forces - the infantry, the cavalry and the artillery.  Engels was one of the first thinkers to postulate the necessity of increasing the manpower of regular armies, anticipating that modern wars would require much bigger volunteer armies for long-lasting battles. In Die Presse he stressed other aspects of modern wars to be found in the American conflict, such as the longest supply lines in history. He was impressed by the scale of the great strategic operations of the Union forces. However, he criticized those generals who were excessively in favour of so-called “manoeuvre warfare” and avoided decisive battles. At the same time, in the manner of Clausewitz with Marx, he saw the key role of the political objective of that war: that is the abolition of slavery and establishment of a democratic civil society based on modern production relationships, which would create a chance for a more open socialist activity than was possible in Europe. 

The last large-scale conflict that Engels discussed was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The experiences of this war led him to make far-reaching and accurate predictions concerning future world wars. Engels’s later works, drawing on his previous insights, stressed the influence of technological development on the modern army's organization and method of fighting. He underlined the inefficiency of Bonapartism, including the crisis and breakup of the largely professional but poorly commanded French army, which did could not defeat the German armies based on mass conscription. 

It appears that Engels then revised the conclusions drawn from his analyses of earlier wars, deciding that the future of militarism lay in the Prussian approach. The mobilisation system of armies in the last quarter of the 19th century was based on the Prussian Landwehr model. Engels claimed that due to its genesis, it was a partly revolutionary system as it derived from the Prussian resistance movement against Napoleon and his reformist ambitions; it was organized in order to support a planned war against the French. During the Franco-Prussian war in an article entitled “Fighting in France” he wrote that although Prussia was an absolute monarchy, its army organization system developed during the Napoleonic wars by Scharnhorst still maintained its partially revolutionary character, despite the contradiction involved in imposing long-lasting combat readiness in the service of an emperor.

Those analyses eventually led Engels to search for revolutionary potential in the bourgeois army. In “Socialism in Germany,” written just before his death, he claimed that German soldiers were ever more susceptible to the influences of socialism. In a speech given on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune he said that the army started reflecting the thoughts and feelings of the nation and that soldiers could oppose the bourgeoisie. According to some critics, such as Martin Berger, this reflected a passive approach which Engels started proclaiming in his old age, whereby one could just wait for the bourgeois army to become radicalised. Gilbert Achcar rejects this view, arguing that Engels meant that even when a part of the army started supporting the revolution, it would have to become involved in street fighting with the forces still supporting the old order. 

Theses of Engels overlap with modern assessments, according to which the Franco-Prussian war led to the spread of the Prussian organizational model and aggressive strategy that did not take into account high costs in human lives. Also confirmed was Engels’s assessment that the war did not solve the internal problems in Germany. According to Wawro the freedom of people in Germany was replaced with military-enforced unity, which necessarily had an external impact and paved the way for French revanchism. On this basis, Engels formulated his outline of the future conflict. His first important prediction appears in the preface to Sigismund Borkheim’s pamphlet:

And, finally, the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover, of an extent and violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other's throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery; irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen and no one will be around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will emerge as victor from the battle. Only one consequence is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the creation of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class. That is the prospect for the moment when the systematic development of mutual one-upmanship in armaments reaches its climax and finally brings forth its inevitable fruits.    

On the other hand, his narration focusing on two countries in the middle of Europe may appear too narrow.  At the same time, the dynamics of the future wars were far wider, extending far beyond pure militarism, including, among other elements, the growing imperialism, colonial conflicts, tensions between central and western Europe, and the Balkan conflicts.  He anticipated the eventual global victory of the working-class, seeking hope in the demise of the nationalism fed by militarism. But this perspective seems to have ignored the independence attempts in the countries enslaved by the main European powers, which turned out to be stronger than the revolutionary hopes.

In his letter to Richard Sorge of 7 January 1888 Engels took account of this dimension:

On the other hand, a war would set us back by many years. Chauvinism would swamp all else since there would be a struggle for survival. Germany would place some 5 million men under arms, or 10 per cent of the population, the others, say 4 or 5 per cent, Russia relatively less. But there would be some 10 to 15 million combatants in the field. And how they are to be fed beats me, it would mean devastation like that of the Thirty Years War. And it wouldn't be over quickly, despite the colossal military forces engaged. For France is protected by very extensive fortifications along its frontiers in the northwest and southeast, and the new works at Paris are models to their kind. So it will take a long time, and Russia is not to be reduced by storm either. Even if everything goes in accordance with Bismarck's wishes, therefore unprecedented demands will be made on the nation and it is quite possible that the postponement of a decisive victory and partial reverses would evoke revolution inside the country. 

The course of the war was almost identical to Engels’s predictions. These were drawn from his observations of the bloody wars 1848 to 1871, when he saw growing militarisation. But his conclusions may be rated as too far optimistic:

Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc, thus more and more hastening their financial collapse; and, on the other hand, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more extensively, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the warlords in command.

Unfortunately nothing of this happened directly, at least in Central and Western Europe. Disciplined European armies carried out a bloody combat for four long years. After such an exhaustive conflict, soldiers of the opposing armies hoped for peace and healing wounds, rather than a social revolution and the related risk of further bloodshed. Apart from that, many soldiers continued the combat, be it in the interventions against revolutionary Russia, or in paramilitary organizations such as Freikorps, fighting the revolution from within. Thus, Engels’s hopes that the ranks of the army would become dominated by socialists were in vain since everyone participated in the bloodbath anyway.

One year before his death in another letter to Sorge, Engels presented a very interesting forecast concerning events in the Far East:

The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America.

The author probably did not realize how long and bumpy China's way to the top of the world economy would really be. Still, he accurately anticipated the revolutions which started just several years after his death; in 1911 the Xinhai Revolution began that overthrew the old system of government and was an introduction to further fighting and transformations which eventually ended with the proclamation of the People's Republic of China. Engels probably did not expect that the Chinese communists quoting him and Marx as an authority would put their country on track towards capitalist modernization and making it a world economic power.

Conclusion

After Marx's death, Engels was the main authority of the socialist movement. Most of its activists believed in the inevitability of the outbreak of further wars, and anti-militarism was considered as the essence of left-wing views.

However, the enthusiastic assessments by authors such as Achcar and Kitchen -- that Engels was almost a military genius with brilliant predictions about future war -- must be considered exaggerated. Engels’s theory was not free of contradictions and overly optimistic expectations. On the one hand, placing the issues of war in the broader perspective of historical materialism allowed him to connect volitional and political factors with economic ones, so that his understanding of war was devoid of idealistic traces typical of nineteenth-century military theorists and Utopian, Blanquist fantasies. On the other hand, Engels, often swayed by stereotypes based on Napoleon’s doctrine, erroneously assessed the course of certain campaigns. By focusing on narrow analyses of militarism and the structure of individual armies, optimistically seeing them as opportunities for socialists, he may have not fully appreciated the power and importance of the growing imperialism. By rejecting conspiratorial methods, he hoped that “the same army that protected bourgeois society and served as the essential gauge to revolutionary opportunity helped to discipline the socialists” in order to prevent a premature putsch that would reinforce bourgeois power. He remained a revolutionist, but having experience in military affairs he wanted to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

Berger assessed that the inconclusiveness of Engels's considerations limited the influence of his conceptions in later years: “the end product of Engels' years of military study, was a terrible tactical vacuum,” which supposedly divided later socialists. Jean Jaurès and August Bebel demanded democratization of the army and return to the militia system, which would guarantee greater control to the working class. The open revisionists, who saw the impossibility of revolutionizing of the army, wanted to limit military policy to the prevention of possible provocations. On the other hand, the consistent revolutionists like Luxemburg and Lenin recognized that any spontaneous uprising of the masses would inevitably have to confront the bourgeois apparatus of violence. Yet, Blackledge in his recent book rightly points out that evidence does not support such a simplified claim. He points out that the masses have to deal with the new phenomenon of global capitalism, which today we know as imperialism. Thus: “twentieth-century Marxists came to view the geopolitical conflicts about which Engels and Marx had written to be of purely historical interest.”

The paradoxes and dilemmas occurring in the letters of Engels have retained topicality, because they indicate that socialist policies cannot have universal solutions. However, they provide a useful historical perspective for the dialectical tension between human praxis and the material conditions of modern militarism.