Bem

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx
Written 29 September 1857


First published in The "New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. III, 1858
Reproduced from The New American Cyclopaedia
Source : Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 18
Collection(s): New American Cyclopaedia

Th e greater part of the article "Bern" was written by Marx. He gave a political characterisation of Bern and did the final editing. At the same time he reproduced, almost textually, the description of Bern's military activity during the Polish insurrection of 1830-31 and the 1848-49 revolutionary war in Transylvania contained in Engels' letters to Marx of September 11 or 12 and 18, 1857 (see present edition, Vol. 40). Marx's excerpts from articles about Bern have been preserved, including those from The English Cyclopaedia (Vol. V, London, 1856) and Meyer's Conversations-Lexicon (Vol. 4D, Hildburghausen, Amsterdam, Paris and Philadelphia, 1845).

Bern, Jozef, a Polish general, born at Tarnow, in Galicia, in l795,[1] died Dec. 10, 1850. The passion of his life was hatred of Russia. At the epoch when Napoleon, by victories and proclamations, was exciting a belief in the resurrection of Poland, Bern entered the corps of cadets at Warsaw, and received his military training at the artillery-school directed by Gen. Pelletier. On leaving this school, he was appointed lieutenant of the horseartillery; served in that capacity under Davout and Macdonald in the campaign of 1812; won the cross of the legion of honor by his cooperation in the defence of Dantzic[2] ; and, after the surrender of that fortress, returned to Poland. As the czar Alexander, affecting a great predilection for the Polish nation, now reorganized the Polish army, Bern entered the latter in 1815, as an officer of artillery, but was soon dismissed for fighting a duel with his superior. However, he was subsequently appointed military teacher at the artillery-school of Warsaw and promoted to the rank of captain. He now introduced the use of the Congreve rocket into the Polish army, recording the experiments made on this occasion in a volume originally published in French and then translated into German.[3] He was querulous and insubordinate, and, from 1820 to 1825, was several times arraigned before courts-martial, punished with imprisonment, released, imprisoned again, and at last sent to Kock, a remote Polish village, there to vegetate under strict police surveillance. He did not obtain his discharge from the Polish army until the death of Alexander, and the Petersburg insurrection[4] made Constantine lose sight of him. Leaving Russian Poland, Bern now retired to Lemberg, where he became an overseer in a large distillery, and elaborated a book on steam applied to the distillation of alcohol.[5]

When the Warsaw insurrection of 1830 broke out he joined it, after a few months was made a major of artillery, and fought, in May,[6] 1831, at the battle of Ostrolenka, where he was noticed for the skill and perseverance with which he fought against the superior Russian batteries.[7] When the Polish army had been finally repulsed in its attacks against the Russians who had passed the Narev, he covered the retreat by a bold advance with the whole of his guns. He was now created colonel, soon after general, and called to the command-in-chief of the Polish artillery. At the storming of Warsaw by the Russians he fought bravely, but, as a commander, committed the fault of not using his 40 guns, and allowing the Russians to take Vola, the principal point of defence. After the fall of Warsaw he emigrated to Prussia with the rest of the army, urged the men not to lay down their arms before the Prussians, and thus provoked a bloody and unnecessary struggle, called at that time the battle of Fischau. He then abandoned the army and organized in Germany committees for the support of Polish emigrants, after which he went to Paris.

His extraordinary character, in which a laborious fondness for the exact sciences was blended with restless impulses for action, caused him to readily embark in adventurous enterprises, whose failure gave an advantage to his enemies. Thus having in 1833, on his own responsibility, undertaken without success to raise a Polish legion for Don Pedro,[8] he was denounced as a traitor, and was fired at by one of his disappointed countrymen, in Bourges, where he came to engage the Poles for his legion. Travels through Portugal, Spain, Holland, Belgium, and France, absorbed his time during the period from 1834 to 1848.

In 1848, on the first appearance of revolutionary symptoms in Austrian Poland, he hastened to Lemberg and thence, Oct. 14, to Vienna, where all that was done to strengthen the works of defence and organize the revolutionary forces, was due to his personal exertions. The disorderly flight in which, Oct. 25, a sally of the Viennese mobile guard,[9] headed by himself, had resulted, wrung from him stern expressions of reproof, replied to by noisy accusations of treason, which, in spite of their absurdity, gained such influence that, but for fear of an insurrection on the part of the Polish legion, he would have been dragged before a court-martial. After his remarkable defence, Oct. 28, of the great barricade erected in the Jägernzeile, and after the opening of negotiations between the Vienna magistrates and Prince Windischgrätz, he disappeared. Suspicion, heightened by his mysterious escape, dogged him from Vienna to Pesth, where, on account of his prudent advice to the Hungarian government, not to allow the establishment of a special Polish legion, a Pole named Kolodjecki fired a pistol on the pretended traitor and severely wounded him.

The war in Transylvania, with the command of which the Hungarian government intrusted Bern, leaving it, however, to his own ingenuity to find the armies with which to carry it on, forms the most important portion of his military life, and throws a great light upon the peculiar character of his generalship. Opening the first campaign toward the end of Dec. 1848, with a force of about 8,000 men, badly armed, hastily collected, and consisting of most heterogeneous elements—raw Magyar levies, Honveds,[10] Viennese refugees, and a small knot of Poles, a motley crew reenforced in his progress through Transylvania by successive drafts from Szeklers,[11] Saxons, Slavs and Roumanians—Bern had about 2 months later ended his campaign, vanquished Puchner with an Austrian army of 20,000 men, Engelhardt with the auxiliary force of 6,000 Russians, and Urban with his freebooters. Compelling the latter to take refuge in the Bukovina, and the two former to withdraw to Wallachia, he kept the whole of Transylvania save the small fortress of Karlsburg. Bold surprises, audacious manoeuvres, forced marches, and the great confidence he knew how to inspire in his troops by his own example, by the skilful selection of covered localities, and by always affording artillery support at the decisive moment, proved him to be a first-rate general for the partisan and small mountain warfare of this first campaign. He also showed himself a master in the art of suddenly creating and disciplining an army; but being content with the first rough sketch of organization, and neglecting to form a nucleus of choice troops, which was a matter of prime necessity, his extemporized army was sure to vanish like a dream on the first serious disasters.

During his hold of Transylvania he did himself honor by preventing the useless and impolitic cruelties contemplated by the Magyar commissioners. The policy of conciliation between the antagonist nationalities aided him in swelling his force, in a few months, to 40,000 or 50,000 men, well provided with cavalry and artillery. If, notwithstanding, some admirable manoeuvres, the expedition to the Banat,[12] which he engaged in with this numerically strong army, produced no lasting effect, the circumstance of his hands being tied by the cooperation of the incapable Hungarian general,[13] must be taken into account.

The irruption into Transylvania of large Russian forces, and the defeats consequently sustained by the Magyars, called Bern back to the theatre of his first campaign. After a vain attempt to create a diversion in the rear of the enemy, by the invasion of Moldavia, he returned to Transylvania, there to be completely routed, July 31,[14] at Schässburg, by the 3 times stronger Russian forces under Lüders, escaping captivity himself only by a plunge into a morass from which some dispersed Magyar hussars happened to pick him up. Having collected the remainder of his forces, he stormed Hermannstadt for the second time, Aug. 5, but for want of reenforcements soon had to leave it, and after an unfortunate fight, Aug. 7, he retraced his steps to Hungary, where he arrived in time to witness the loss of the decisive battle at Temesvâr.[15] After a vain attempt to make a last stand at Lugos with what remained of the Magyar forces, he reentered Transylvania, kept his ground there against overwhelming forces, until Aug. 19, when he was compelled to take refuge in the Turkish territory.

With the purpose of opening to himself a new field of activity against Russia, Bern embraced the Mussulman faith, and was raised by the sultan[16] to the dignity of a pasha, under the name of Amurath, with a command in the Turkish army; but, on the remonstrances of the European powers, he was relegated to Aleppo. Having there succeeded in repressing some sanguinary excesses committed during Nov. 1850, on the Christian residents by the Mussulman populace,[17] he died about a month later, of a violent fever, for which he would allow no medical aid.

  1. ↑ Jôzef Bern was born in 1794 but because of his ill health was not registered until 1795.— Ed.
  2. ↑ A reference to the defence of Danzig (Gdansk) in 1813. Held by Napoleonic troops, it was besieged by the Prussians and Russians by land and sea for eleven and a half months. During that time the garrison sustained three regular sieges but finally had to capitulate. The allies entered the city on January 2, 1814.
  3. ↑ J. Bern, Erfahrungen über die Congrevschen Brand-Raketen bis zum Jahre 1819 in der Königl. Polnischen Artillerie gesammelt.— Ed.
  4. ↑ The insurrection of units of the St. Petersburg garrison on December 14, 1825 was headed by a secret society of Russian revolutionary nobles opposed to the autocracy and the feudal-serf system. They are known in history as the Decembrists. The Decembrists sought to prevent the taking of the oath to the new Emperor, Nicholas I, and to secure the introduction of civic liberties and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to decide the question of a Constitution. The insurrection was suppressed by Tsarist troops and its participants were subjected to severe reprisals. Five of its leaders were hanged and 121 participants were sentenced to hard labour and exile in Siberia.
  5. ↑ J. Bem, O machinach paroicych, Vol. I.— Ed.
  6. ↑ The Neu1 American Cyclopaedia has "June" here.— Ed.
  7. ↑ By the "Warsaw insurrection of 1830" Marx and Engels mean the Polish national liberation uprising of November 1830-October 1831. The majority of its participants were revolutionary gentry (szlachta) and its leaders came mainly from the aristocracy. It was suppressed by Russian troops, with the support of Prussia and Austria. The uprising was of major international significance because it diverted the forces of counter-revolution and thwarted their plans for an offensive against the bourgeois revolutions of 1830 in France and of 1830-31 in Belgium. At the battle of Ostrolenka on May 26, 1831 Tsarist troops under Dibich defeated the Polish insurgents. The final blow was delivered when the Russians captured Warsaw in September 1831, after storming its suburb Vola on September 6 (see below in the text). The remnants of the insurgent army fled to Prussia and Austria.
  8. ↑ Bern planned to take part in the civil war in Portugal (1828-34) between the absolutists (the feudal-clerical party), headed by Dom Miguel who had seized the Portuguese throne in 1828, and the constitutionalists (the liberal-bourgeois party) grouped around Queen Maria da Gloria and her father, Dom Pedro. Bern's plan did not materialise.
  9. ↑ The Viennese Mobile Guard, consisting mainly of workers and artisans, was formed by Bern during the October 1848 uprising in Vienna (see Note 102) as the most disciplined and efficient part of the insurgent armed forces.
  10. ↑ Honveds (literally: "defenders of the homeland")—the name of the soldiers of the Hungarian revolutionary army of 1848-49, which was formed by decision of the Hungarian revolutionary government on May 7, 1848.
  11. ↑ The Magyar inhabitants of Transylvania.— Ed.
  12. ↑ The expedition of Bern's army to the Banat (a region in the Serbian Voivodina, then part of Hungary) was undertaken in the spring of 1849. At the beginning of the 1848 revolution the Voivodina was the scene of the Serbs' growing national movement and of anti-feudal actions by democratic strata in town and country. However, the Serbian movement for autonomy was influenced by the liberal bourgeoisie, the nobility and the clergy and used by the Habsburgs against the Hungarian revolution. Military operations between the Voivodina Serbs and the Hungarians began in May 1848. In the Banat, inhabited by Hungarians, Germans and Romanians as well as Serbs, they were complicated by clashes between the Serbian and non-Serbian population. The struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces in the Serbian Voivodina, Transylvania, and other ethnic regions then included in Hungary, was hampered by the erroneous stand on the nationalities question adopted by the Hungarian bourgeois and aristocratic revolutionaries. Only shortly before the fall of the Hungarian Republic on July 28, 1849 did they officially agree to recognise the equality of all nationalities inhabiting Hungary.
  13. ↑ Kâroly Vecsey.— Ed.
  14. ↑ The New American Cyclopaedia has "July 29" here.— Ed.
  15. ↑ At the battle of Temesvdr (Timi§oara) on August 9, 1849, during the Hungarian national liberation war, the Austrian army under Haynau defeated the Hungarian Southern army which was trying to hold its positions until joining up with the Northern army of the Hungarian Commander-in-Chief Görgey. Four days later the Northern army capitulated to the Russians. The revolution in Hungary was suppressed.
  16. ↑ Abdul Mejid.— Ed.
  17. ↑ In the autumn of 1850 the Arab population of the city of Aleppo (Haleb) rose against the local Christians and the Turkish authorities. This rising grew into a rebellion against Turkish rule, which was put down by Turkish troops.