Читать книгу What You Do Is Who You Are - Бен Хоровиц, Ben Horowitz - Страница 15

To create his army, Louverture began with five hundred handpicked men who learned the art of war with him as he drilled and trained them assiduously. In this way, he was able to create the new culture with minimal divergence. He knew he had to elevate his fighters’ culture to make the army effective, but he also knew that his slave culture had great strengths and that creating a new civilization out of whole cloth—as Lenin would later try and fail to do—would never succeed. People don’t easily adopt new cultural norms and they simply can’t absorb an entirely new system all at once.

He used two preexisting cultural strengths to great effect. The first was the songs the slaves sang at their midnight celebrations of voodoo. Louverture was a devout Catholic who would later outlaw voodoo—but he was also a pragmatist who used the tools at hand. So he converted this simple, memorable vocal template into an advanced communications technology. The Europeans had no means of long-distance, encrypted communication, but his army did. His soldiers would place themselves in the woods surrounding the enemy, scattered in clumps. They would begin their voodoo songs—which were incomprehensible to the European troops—and when they reached a certain verse, it was the signal to attack in concert.

Second, many of Louverture’s soldiers brought military skills with them. Among his warriors were veterans of wars on the Angola-Congo coast. Louverture applied their guerrilla tactics, particularly their way of choosing to meet the enemy in the woods to envelop them and crush them with sheer numbers. As we will see, he would combine this stratagem with the most advanced European tactics to create a hybrid force unlike any his opponents had faced.