efense.

The difficulties in the path of an army in wars of opinions, as well as
in national wars, are very great, and render the mission of the general
conducting them very difficult. The events just mentioned, the contest
of the Netherlands with Philip II. and that of the Americans with the
English, furnish evident proofs of this; but the much more extraordinary
struggle of La Vendee with the victorious Republic, those of Spain,
Portugal, and the Tyrol against Napoleon, and, finally, those of the
Morea against the Turks, and of Navarre against the armies of Queen
Christina, are still more striking illustrations.

The difficulties are particularly great when the people are supported by
a considerable nucleus of disciplined troops. The invader has only an
army: his adversaries have an army, and a people wholly or almost wholly
in arms, and making means of resistance out of every thing, each
individual of whom conspires against the common enemy; even the
non-combatants have an interest in his ruin and accelerate it by every
means in their power. He holds scarcely any ground but that upon which
he encamps; outside the limits of his camp every thing is hostile and
multiplies a thousandfold the difficulties he meets at every step.

These obstacles become almost insurmountable when the country is
difficult. Each armed inhabitant knows the smallest paths and their
connections; he finds everywhere a relative or friend who aids him; the
commanders also know the country, and, learning immediately the
slightest movement on the part of the invader, can adopt the best
measures to defeat his projects; while the latter, without information
of their movements, and not in a condition to send out detachments to
gain it, having no resource but in his bayonets, and certain safety only
in the concentration of his columns, is like a blind man: his
combinations are failures; and when, after the most carefully-concerted
movements and the most rapid and fatiguing marches, he thinks he is
about to accomplish his aim and deal a terrible blow, he finds no signs
of the enemy but his camp-fires: so that while, like Don Quixote, he is
attacking windmills, his adversary is on his line of communications,
destroys the detachments left to guard it, surprises his convoys, his
depots, and carries on a war so disastrous for the invader that he must
inevitably yield after a time.

In Spain I was a witness of two terrible examples of this kind. When
Ney'