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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44635 ***
+
+ Transcriber's Note:
+
+ Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
+ possible, including inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes have been
+ made. They are listed at the end of the text.
+
+ Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+
+
+
+
+MILITARY MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
+
+
+
+
+ LONDON: PRINTED BY
+ SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
+ AND PARLIAMENT STREET
+
+
+
+
+ MILITARY MANNERS
+ AND CUSTOMS
+
+ BY
+
+ JAMES ANSON FARRER
+
+ AUTHOR OF
+ ‘PRIMITIVE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS’ ‘CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS’ ETC.
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ _‘Homo homini res sacra’_--Seneca
+
+ London
+ CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
+ 1885
+
+ [_The right of translation is reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the present volume I have attempted within the limits of the
+historical period and of our European civilisation, and without
+recognising any hard and fast line between ancient and modern,
+Christian and Pagan, to allude, in the places that seemed most
+appropriate, to all points in the history of war that appeared to be
+either of special interest or of essential importance. As examples
+of such points I may refer to the treatment of prisoners of war, or
+of surrendered garrisons; the rules about spies and surprises; the
+introduction of, and feeling about, new weapons; the meaning of parts
+of military dress; the origin of peculiar customs like the old one of
+kissing the earth before a charge; the prevalent rules of honour, as
+displayed in notions of justice in regard to reprisals, or of fairness
+in stratagems and deception. The necessity of observing in so vast a
+field the laws of proportion has enforced resort to such condensation,
+that on subjects which deserve or possess their tomes upon tomes, I
+have in many cases been unable to spend more than a page or a chapter.
+It is easier, however, to err on the side of length than of brevity,
+but on whichever side I have exceeded, I can only hope that others, who
+may feel the same interest with myself in the subject without having
+the same time to give to it, may derive a tithe of the pleasure from
+reading the following nine chapters that I have found in putting them
+together.
+
+The study, of course, is no new one, but there can be no objection
+to calling it by the new name of Bellology--a convenient term, quite
+capable of holding its own with Sociology or its congeners. The only
+novelty I have aimed at is one of treatment, and consists in never
+losing sight of the fact that to all military customs there is a moral
+and human side which has been only too generally ignored in this
+connection. To read books like Grose’s ‘Military Antiquities,’ one
+would think their writers were dealing with the manners, not of men but
+of ninepins, so utterly do they divest themselves of all human interest
+or moral feeling, in reference to the customs they describe with so
+laudable but toneless an accuracy.
+
+The starting-point of modern bellological studies will, undoubtedly,
+always be the Parliamentary Blue Book, containing the reports (less
+full than one might wish) of the Military International Conference
+that met at Brussels in 1874, to discuss the existing laws and customs
+of war, and to consider whether any modification of them were either
+possible or desirable. Most of the representatives appointed to attend
+by the several Powers were military men, so that we are carried by
+their conversation into the actual realities of modern warfare, with
+an authority and sense of truth that one is conscious of in no other
+military book. It is to be regretted that such a work, instructive as
+it is beyond any other on the subject, has never been printed in a
+form more popular than its official dress. It was from it that I first
+conceived the idea of the following pages, and in the sequel frequent
+reference will be made to it, as the source of the most trustworthy
+military information we possess, and as certain to be for some time
+to come the standard work on all the actual laws and customs of
+contemporary warfare.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+
+ THE LAWS OF WAR.
+
+ PAGE
+
+ The prohibition of explosive bullets in war 2
+
+ The importance of the Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868 3
+
+ The ultimate triumph of more destructive methods 4
+
+ Illustrated by history of the crossbow or the musket 5
+
+ Or of cannons, torpedoes, red-hot shot, or the bayonet 5
+
+ Numbers slain in modern and earlier warfare 8
+
+ The laws of war at the Brussels Conference of 1874 10
+
+ Do the laws of war tend to improve? 13
+
+ A negative answer suggested from reference 13
+
+ 1. To the use of poison in war 14
+
+ 2. To the bombardment of towns 15
+
+ 3. To the destruction of public buildings 16
+
+ 4. To the destruction of crops and fruit-trees 16
+
+ 5. To the murder of prisoners or the wounded 17
+
+ 6. To the murder of surrendered garrisons 18
+
+ 7. To the destruction of fishing-boats 19
+
+ 8. To the disuse of the declaration of war 19
+
+ 9. To the torture and mutilation of combatants and
+ non-combatants 20
+
+ 10. To the custom of contributions 20
+
+ The futile attempts of Grotius and Vattel to humanise warfare 21
+
+ The rights of war in the time of Grotius 24
+
+ The futility of international law with regard to laws of war 26
+
+ The employment of barbarian troops 26
+
+ The taking of towns by assault 27
+
+ The laws of war contrasted with the practice 28
+
+ War easier to abolish than to humanise 30
+
+
+ CHAPTER II.
+
+ WARFARE IN CHIVALROUS TIMES.
+
+ Delusion about character of war in days of chivalry 32
+
+ The common slaughter of women and children 33
+
+ The Earl of Derby’s sack of Poitiers 34
+
+ The massacres of Grammont and Gravelines 35
+
+ The old poem of the Vow of the Heron 36
+
+ The massacre of Limoges by Edward the Black Prince 37
+
+ The imprisonment of ladies for ransom 38
+
+ Prisoners of war starved to death 39
+
+ Or massacred, if no prospect of ransom 41
+
+ Or blinded or otherwise mutilated 42
+
+ The meaning of a surrender at discretion 44
+
+ As illustrated by Edward III. at Calais 44
+
+ And by several instances in the same and the next century 45
+
+ The practice of burning in aid of war 47
+
+ And of destroying sacred buildings 47
+
+ The practice of poisoning the air 49
+
+ The use of barbarous weapons 50
+
+ The influence of religion on war 51
+
+ The Church in vain on the side of peace 52
+
+ Curious vows of the knights 54
+
+ The slight personal danger incurred in war by them 54
+
+ The explanation of their magnificent costume 55
+
+ Field sports in war-time 56
+
+ The desire of gain the chief motive of war 57
+
+ The identity of soldiers and brigands 57
+
+ The career and character of the Black Prince 59
+
+ The place of money in the history of chivalry 61
+
+ Its influence as a war-motive between England and France 62
+
+ General low character of chivalrous warfare 64
+
+
+ CHAPTER III.
+
+ NAVAL WARFARE.
+
+ Robbery the first object of maritime warfare 66
+
+ The piratical origin of European navies 67
+
+ Merciless character of wars at sea 69
+
+ Fortunes made by privateering in England 71
+
+ Privateers commissioned by the State 72
+
+ Privateers defended by the publicists 73
+
+ Distinction between privateering and piracy 73
+
+ Failure of the State to regulate privateering 74
+
+ Privateering condemned by Lord Nelson 77
+
+ Privateering abolished by the declaration of Paris in 1856 78
+
+ Modern feeling against seizure of private property at sea 79
+
+ Naval warfare in days of wooden ships 80
+
+ Unlawful methods of maritime war 81
+
+ The Emperor Leo VI.’s ‘Treatise on Tactics’ 83
+
+ The use of fire-ships 84
+
+ Death the penalty for serving in fire-ships 85
+
+ Torpedoes originally regarded as ‘bad’ war 85
+
+ English and French doctrine of rights of neutrals 86
+
+ Enemy’s property under neutral flag secured by Treaty of Paris 87
+
+ Shortcomings of the Treaty of Paris with regard to--
+
+ 1. A definition of what is contraband 88
+
+ 2. The right of search of vessels under convoy 88
+
+ 3. The practice of Embargoes 89
+
+ 4. The _Jus Angariæ_ 90
+
+ The International Marine Code of the future 91
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV.
+
+ MILITARY REPRISALS.
+
+ International law on legitimate reprisals 93
+
+ The Brussels Conference on the subject 95
+
+ Illustrations of barbarous reprisals 97
+
+ Instances of non-retaliation 98
+
+ Savage reprisals in days of chivalry 100
+
+ Hanging the commonest reprisals for a brave defence 101
+
+ As illustrated by the warfare of the fifteenth century 102
+
+ Survival of the custom to our own times 104
+
+ The massacre of a conquered garrison still a law of war 105
+
+ The shelling of Strasburg by the Germans 106
+
+ Brutal warfare of Alexander the Great 107
+
+ The connection between bravery and cruelty 110
+
+ The abolition of slavery in its effects on war 112
+
+ The storming of Magdeburg, Brescia, and Rome 112
+
+ Cicero on Roman warfare 114
+
+ The reprisals of the Germans in France in 1870 115
+
+ Their revival of the custom of taking hostages 117
+
+ Their resort to robbery as a plea of reprisals 118
+
+ General Von Moltke on perpetual peace 119
+
+ The moral responsibility of the military profession 121
+
+ The Press as a potent cause of war 122
+
+ Plea for the abolition of demands for unconditional surrender 123
+
+ Such as led to the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 123
+
+
+ CHAPTER V.
+
+ MILITARY STRATAGEMS.
+
+ Grotius’ theory of fair stratagems 126
+
+ The teaching of international law 127
+
+ Ancient and modern naval stratagems 127
+
+ Early Roman dislike of such stratagems 132
+
+ As ambuscades, feigned retreats, or night attacks 132
+
+ The degenerate standard of Frontinus and Polyænus 135
+
+ The Conference stratagem of modern Europe 136
+
+ The distinction between perfidy and stratagem 139
+
+ The perfidy of Francis I. 140
+
+ Vattel’s theory about spies 141
+
+ Frederick the Great’s military instructions about spies 142
+
+ Lord Wolseley on spies and truth in war 144
+
+ The custom of hanging or shooting spies 145
+
+ Better to keep them as prisoners of war 146
+
+ Balloonists regarded as spies 147
+
+ The practice of military surprises 148
+
+ Death formerly the penalty for capture in a surprise 150
+
+ Stratagems of uncertain character 151
+
+ Such as forged despatches or false intelligence 151
+
+ The use of the telegraph in deceiving the enemy 151
+
+ May prisoners of war be compelled to propagate lies? 152
+
+ General character of the military code of fraud 153
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI.
+
+ BARBARIAN WARFARE.
+
+ Variable notions of honour 156
+
+ Primitive ideas of a military life 156
+
+ What is civilised warfare? 158
+
+ Advanced laws of war among several savage tribes 159
+
+ Symbols of peace among savages 161
+
+ The Samoan form of surrender 162
+
+ Treaties of peace among savages 162
+
+ Abeyance of laws of war in hostilities with savages 163
+
+ Zulus blown up in caves with gun-cotton 165
+
+ Women and men kidnapped for transport service on the Gold Coast 166
+
+ Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the New World 167
+
+ Contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions 167
+
+ Wars with natives of English and French in America 170
+
+ High rewards offered for scalps 171
+
+ The use of bloodhounds in war 171
+
+ The use of poison and infected clothes 172
+
+ Penn’s treaty with the Indians 173
+
+ How Missionaries come to be a cause of war 176
+
+ Explanation of the failure of modern missions 178
+
+ The mission stations as centres of hostile intrigues 179
+
+ Plea for the State-regulation of missions 181
+
+ Depopulation under Protestant influences 181
+
+ The prevention of false rumours--_Tendenzlügen_ 182
+
+ Civilised and barbarian warfare 183
+
+ No real distinction between them 184
+
+
+ CHAPTER VII.
+
+ WAR AND CHRISTIANITY.
+
+ The war question at the time of the Reformation 185
+
+ The remonstrances of Erasmus against the custom 186
+
+ Influence of Grotius on the side of war 187
+
+ The war question in the early Church 188
+
+ The Fathers against the lawfulness of war 190
+
+ Causes of the changed views of the Church 192
+
+ The clergy as active combatants for over a thousand years 193
+
+ Fighting bishops 193
+
+ Bravery in war and ecclesiastical preferment 196
+
+ Pope Julius II. at the siege of Mirandola 197
+
+ The last fighting bishop 197
+
+ Origin and meaning of the declaration of war 198
+
+ Superstition in the naming of weapons, ships, &c. 200
+
+ The custom of kissing the earth before a charge 201
+
+ Connection between religious and military ideas 202
+
+ The Church as a pacific agency 204
+
+ Her efforts to set limits to reprisals 207
+
+ The altered attitude of the modern Church 208
+
+ Early Reformers only sanctioned _just_ wars 208
+
+ Voltaire’s reproach against the Church 210
+
+ Canon Mozley’s sermon on war 212
+
+ The answer to his apology 214
+
+
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ CURIOSITIES OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE.
+
+ Increased severity of discipline 218
+
+ Limitation of the right of matrimony 219
+
+ Compulsory Church parade and its origin 219
+
+ Atrocious military punishments 221
+
+ Reasons for the military love of red 223
+
+ The origin of bear-skin hats 223
+
+ Different qualities of bravery 225
+
+ Historical fears for the extinction of courage 225
+
+ The conquests of the cause of Peace 227
+
+ Causes of the unpopularity of military service 228
+
+ The dulness of life in the ranks 228
+
+ The prevalence of desertion 230
+
+ Articles of war against Malingering 231
+
+ Military artificial ophthalmia 233
+
+ The debasing influence of discipline 234
+
+ Illustrated from the old flogging system 235
+
+ The discipline of the Peninsular army 236
+
+ Attempts to make the service more popular 239
+
+ By raising the private’s wages 239
+
+ By shortening his term of service 240
+
+ The old recruiting system of France and Germany 241
+
+ The conscription imminent in England 242
+
+ The question of military service for women 242
+
+ The probable results of the conscription 243
+
+ Militarism answerable for Socialism 246
+
+
+ CHAPTER IX.
+
+ THE LIMITS OF MILITARY DUTIES.
+
+ The old feeling of the moral stain of bloodshed 250
+
+ Military purificatory customs 250
+
+ Modern change of feeling about warfare 252
+
+ Descartes on the profession of arms 254
+
+ The old-world sentiment in favour of piracy 255
+
+ The central question of military ethics 257
+
+ May a soldier be indifferent to the cause of war? 257
+
+ The right to serve made conditional on a good cause 258
+
+ By St. Augustine, Bullinger, Grotius, and Sir James Turner 258
+
+ Old Greek feeling about mercenary service 260
+
+ Origin of our mercenary as opposed to gratuitous service 260
+
+ Armies raised by military contractors 261
+
+ The value of the distinction between foreign and native
+ mercenaries 262
+
+ Original limitation of military duty 264
+
+ To the actual defence of the realm 264
+
+ Extension of the notion of allegiance 265
+
+ The connection of the military oath with the first Mutiny Act 265
+
+ Recognised limits to the claims on a soldier’s obedience 266
+
+ The falsity of the common doctrine of duty 266
+
+ Illustrated by the devastation of the Palatinate by the French 267
+
+ And by the bombardment of Copenhagen by the English 268
+
+ The example of Admiral Keppel 270
+
+ Justice between nations 271
+
+ Its observation in ancient India and Rome 271
+
+ St. Augustine and Bayard on justice in war 273
+
+ Grotius on good grounds of war 273
+
+ The military claim to exemption from moral responsibility 276
+
+ The soldier’s first duty to his conscience 279
+
+ The admission of this principle involves the end of war 280
+
+
+
+
+MILITARY MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE LAWS OF WAR.
+
+ _Ce sont des lois de la guerre. Il faut estre bien cruel bien
+ souvent pour venir au bout de son ennemi; Dieu doit estre
+ bien miséricordieux en nostre endroict, qui faisons tant de
+ maux._--MARSHAL MONTLUC.
+
+ The prohibition of explosive bullets in war--The importance of the
+ Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868--The ultimate triumph of
+ more destructive methods--Illustrated by history of the cross-bow
+ or the musket; or of cannons, torpedoes, red-hot shot, or the
+ bayonet--Numbers slain in modern and earlier warfare--The laws of
+ war at the Brussels Conference of 1874--Do the laws of war tend to
+ improve?--A negative answer suggested from reference: (1) to the
+ use of poison in war; (2) to the bombardment of towns; (3) to the
+ destruction of public buildings; (4) to the destruction of crops
+ and fruit trees; (5) to the murder of prisoners or the wounded; (6)
+ to the murder of surrendered garrisons; (7) to the destruction of
+ fishing boats; (8) to the disuse of the declaration of war; (9) to
+ the torture and mutilation of combatants and non-combatants; (10)
+ to the custom of contributions--The futile attempts of Grotius
+ and Vattel to humanise warfare--The rights of war in the time of
+ Grotius--The futility of international law with regard to laws of
+ war--The employment of barbarian troops--The taking of towns by
+ assault--The laws of war contrasted with the practice--War easier
+ to abolish than to humanise.
+
+
+It is impossible to head a chapter ‘The Laws of War’ without thinking
+of that famous chapter on Iceland headed ‘The Snakes of Iceland,’
+wherein the writer simply informed his readers that there were none in
+the country. ‘The laws of war’ make one think of the snakes of Iceland.
+
+Nevertheless, a summary denial of their existence would deprive the
+history of the battle-field of one of its most interesting features;
+for there is surely nothing more surprising to an impartial observer of
+military manners and customs than to find that even in so just a cause
+as the defence of your own country limitations should be set to the
+right of injuring your aggressor in any manner you can.
+
+What, for instance, can be more obvious in such a case than that no
+suffering you can inflict is needless which is most likely permanently
+to disable your adversary? Yet, by virtue of the International
+Declaration of St. Petersburg, in 1868, you may not use explosive
+bullets against him, because it is held that they would cause him
+needless suffering. By the logic of war, what can be clearer than that,
+if the explosive bullet deals worse wounds, and therefore inflicts
+death more readily than other destructive agencies, it should be
+used? or else that those too should be excluded from the rules of the
+game--which might end in putting a stop to the game altogether?
+
+The history of the explosive bullet is worth recalling, for its
+prohibition is a straw to clutch at in these days of military revival.
+Like the plague, and perhaps gunpowder, it had an Eastern origin. It
+was used originally in India against elephants and tigers. In 1863 it
+was introduced into the Russian army, and subsequently into other
+European armies, for use against ammunition-waggons. But it was not
+till 1867 that a slight modification in its construction rendered it
+available for the destruction of mankind. The world owes it to the
+humanity of the Russian Minister of War, General Milutine, that at this
+point a pause was made; and as the Czar, Alexander II., was no less
+humane than his minister, the result was the famous Declaration, signed
+in 1868 by all the chief Powers (save the United States), mutually
+foregoing in their future wars by land or sea the use of projectiles
+weighing less than 400 grammes (to save their use for artillery),
+either explosive or filled with inflammable substances. The Court of
+Berlin wished at the time for some other destructive contrivances to be
+equally excluded, but the English Government was afraid to go further;
+as if requiring breathing time after so immense an effort to diminish
+human suffering, before proceeding in so perilous a direction.
+
+The Declaration of St. Petersburg, inasmuch as it is capable of
+indefinite expansion, is a somewhat awkward precedent for those who
+in their hearts love war and shield its continuance with apologetic
+platitudes. How, they ask, can you enforce agreements between nations?
+But this argument begins to totter when we remember that there is
+absolutely no superior power or tribunal in existence which can enforce
+the observance of the St. Petersburg Declaration beyond the conscience
+of the signatory Powers. It follows, therefore, that if international
+agreements are of value, there is no need to stop short at this or that
+bullet: which makes the arbitration-tribunal loom in the distance
+perceptibly nearer than it did before.
+
+At first sight, this agreement excluding the use of explosive bullets
+would seem to favour the theory of those who see in every increase in
+the peril of war the best hope of its ultimate cessation. A famous
+American statesman is reported to have said, and actually to have
+appealed to the invention of gunpowder in support of his statement,
+that every discovery in the art of war has, from this point of view,
+a life-saving and peace-promoting influence.[1] But it is difficult
+to conceive a greater delusion. The whole history of war is against
+it; for what has that history been but the steady increase of the
+pains and perils of war, as more effective weapons of destruction have
+succeeded one another? The delusion cannot be better dispelled than by
+consideration of the facts that follow.
+
+It has often seemed as if humanity were about to get the better of
+the logical tendency of the military art. The Lateran Council of 1139
+(a sort of European congress in its day) not only condemned Arnold of
+Brescia to be burnt for heresy, but anathematised the cross-bow for its
+inhumanity. It forbade its use in Christian warfare as alike hateful to
+God and destructive of mankind.[2] Several brave princes disdained to
+employ cross-bow shooters, and Innocent III. confirmed the prohibition
+on the ground that it was not fair to inflict on an enemy more than the
+least possible injury.[3] The long-bow consequently came into greater
+use. But Richard I., in spite of Popes or Councils or Chivalry, revived
+the use of the cross-bow in Europe; nor, though his death by one
+himself was regarded as a judgment from Heaven, did its use from that
+time decline till the arquebus and then the musket took its place.
+
+Cannons and bombs were at first called diabolical, because they
+suggested the malice of the enemy of mankind, or serpentines, because
+they seemed worse than the poison of serpents.[4] But even cannons were
+at first only used against fortified walls, and there is a tradition
+of the first occasion when they were directed against men.[5] And
+torpedoes, now used without scruple, were called infamous and infernal
+when, under the name of American Turtles, they were first tried by the
+American Colonies against the ships of their mother country.
+
+In the sixteenth century, that knight ‘without fear or reproach,’ the
+Chevalier Bayard, ordered all musketeers who fell into his hands to
+be slain without mercy, because he held the introduction of fire-arms
+to be an unfair innovation on the rules of lawful war. So red-hot
+shot (or balls made red hot before insertion in the cannon) were at
+first objected to, or only considered fair for purposes of defence,
+not of attack. Yet, what do we find?--that Louis XIV. fired some
+12,000 of them into Brussels in 1694; that the Austrians fired them
+into Lille in 1792; and that the English batteries fired them at the
+ships in Sebastopol harbour, which formed part of the Russian defences.
+Chain-shot and bar-shot were also disapproved of at first, or excluded
+from use by conventions applying only to particular wars; now there
+exists no agreement precluding their use, for they soon became common
+in battles at sea.
+
+The invention of the bayonet supplies another illustration. The
+accounts of its origin are little better than legends: that it was
+invented so long ago as 1323 by a woman of Bayonne in defence of the
+ramparts of that city against the English; or by Puséygur, of Bayonne,
+about 1650; or borrowed by the Dutch from the natives of Madagascar;
+or connected with a place called the Redoute de la Baïonnette in the
+Eastern Pyrenees, where the Basques, having exhausted their ammunition
+against the Spaniards, are said to have inserted their knives into
+the muzzles of their guns. But it is certain that as soon as the idea
+was perfected by fixing the blade by rings outside the muzzle (in
+the latter quarter of the seventeenth century), battles became more
+murderous than ever, though the destruction of infantry by cavalry
+was diminished. The battle of Neerwinden in 1693, in which the French
+general, Luxembourg, defeated the Prince of Orange, is said to have
+been the first battle that was decided by a charge with a bayonet, and
+the losses were enormous on both sides.[6]
+
+History, in fact, is full of such cases, in which the victory has
+uniformly lain ultimately with the legitimacy of the weapon or method
+that was at first rejected as inhumane. For the moment, the law of
+nations forbids the use of certain methods of destruction, such as
+bullets filled with glass or nails, or chemical compounds like kakodyl,
+which could convert in a moment the atmosphere round an army into one
+of deadly poison;[7] yet we have nothing like certainty--we have not
+even historical probability--that these forbidden means, or worse
+means, will not be resorted to in the wars of the future, or that
+reluctance to meet such forms of death will in the least degree affect
+either their frequency or their duration.
+
+It is easy to explain this law of history. The soldier’s courage, as he
+faces the mitrailleuse with the same indifference with which he would
+face snow-balls or bread-pellets, is a miracle of which discipline is
+the simple explanation; for whether the soldier be hired or coerced to
+face death, it is all one to him against what kind of bullet he rushes,
+so long as discipline remains--as Helvetius the French philosopher
+once defined it, the art of making soldiers more afraid of their own
+officers than of their enemy.[8] To Clearchus, the Lacedæmonian, is
+attributed the saying that a soldier should always fear his own general
+more than the enemy: a mental state easily produced in every system of
+military mechanism. Whatever form of death be in front of a man, it
+is less certain than that in his rear. The Ashantees as they march
+to battle sing a song which is the soldier’s philosophy all the world
+over: ‘If I go on, I shall die; if I stay behind I shall be killed; it
+is better to go on.’[9]
+
+How often is it said, in extenuation of modern warfare, that it is
+infinitely less destructive than that of ancient or even mediæval
+times; and that the actual loss of life in battle has not kept pace
+with the development of new and more effective life-taking implements!
+Yet it is difficult to imagine a stranger paradox, or a proposition
+that, if true, would reflect greater descredit on our mechanical
+science. If our Gatling guns, or Nordenfeldt 5-barrels capable of
+firing 600 rounds a minute, are less effective to destroy an enemy than
+all the paraphernalia of a mediæval army, why not in that case return
+to weapons that by the hypothesis better fulfilled the purposes of war?
+This question is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of this soothing delusion;
+but as a matter of fact, there is no comparison in destructiveness
+between our modern warfare and that of our ancestors. The apparent
+difference in our favour arises from a practice alluded to by Philip
+de Commines, which throws a flood of light upon the subject: ‘There
+were slain in this battle about 6,000 men, which, to people that are
+unwilling to lie, may seem very much; but in my time I have been in
+several actions, where for one man that was really slain they have
+reported a hundred, thinking by such an account to please their
+masters; and they sometimes deceive them with their lies.’ That is to
+say, as a rule the number of the slain should be divided by a hundred.
+
+This remark applies even to battles like Crecy or Agincourt, where the
+numbers slain were unusually high, and where they are said to have been
+accurately ascertained by counting after the victory. When Froissart on
+such authority quotes 1,291 as the total number of warriors of knightly
+or higher rank slain at Crecy, it is possible of course that he is not
+the victim of deception; but what of the 30,000 common soldiers for
+whose death he also vouches? A monk of St. Albans, also a contemporary,
+speaks only of an unknown number (_et vulgus cujus numerus ignoratur_);
+which in the account of the Abbot Hugo was put definitely at more than
+100,000. It is evident from this that the greatest laxity prevailed
+in reference to chronicling the numbers of the slain; so that if we
+take 3,000 instead of 30,000 as the sum total of common soldiers slain
+at Crecy, it is probable that we shall be nearer the truth than if we
+implicitly accept Froissart’s statement.
+
+The same scepticism will of course hold good of the battles of the
+ancient world. Is it likely, for instance, that in a battle in which
+the Romans are said only to have lost 100 men, the Macedonians should
+have lost 20,000?[10] Or again, is it possible, considering the
+difficulty of the commissariat of a large army, even in our own days
+of trains and telegraphs and improved agriculture, that Marius in one
+battle can have slain 200,000 Teutons, and taken 90,000 prisoners?
+But whilst no conclusion is possible but that the figures of the older
+histories are altogether too untrustworthy to afford any basis for
+comparison, the calculation rests on something more like fair evidence,
+that in the fortnight between August 4, 1870, the date of the battle
+of Wissembourg, and August 18, that of Gravelotte, including the
+battles of Woerth and Forbach on August 6, of Courcelles on the 14th,
+and of Vionville on the 16th more than 100,000 French and Germans
+met their death on the battle-field, to say nothing of those who
+perished afterwards in agonies in the hospitals. Recent wars have been
+undoubtedly shorter than they often were in olden times, but their
+brevity is founded on no reason that can ensure its recurrence: nor, if
+100,000 are to be miserably cast out of existence, is the gain so very
+great, if the task, instead of being spread over a number of years,
+requires only a fortnight for its accomplishment.
+
+For the nearest approach to a statement of what the laws of war in our
+own time really are, we must turn to the Brussels Conference, which
+met in 1874 at the summons of the same great Russian to whom the world
+owes the St. Petersburg Declaration, and which constituted a genuine
+attempt to mitigate the evils of war by an international agreement and
+definition of their limits. The idea of such a plan was originally
+suggested by the Instructions published in 1863 by President Lincoln
+for the government of the armies of the United States in the civil
+war.[11] The project for such an international agreement, originally
+submitted by the Russian Government for discussion, was very much
+modified before even a compromise of opinion could be arrived at on
+the several points it contained. And the project so modified, as a
+preliminary basis for future agreement, owing to the timid refusal
+of the English Government to take further part in the matter, never,
+unfortunately, reached its final stage of a definite code;[12] but it
+remains nevertheless the most authoritative utterance extant of the
+laws generally thought to be binding in modern warfare on the practices
+and passions of the combatants. The following articles from the project
+as finally modified are undoubtedly the most important:--
+
+_Art. 12._ The laws of war do not allow to belligerents an unlimited
+power as to the choice of means of injuring the enemy.
+
+_Art. 13._ According to this principle are strictly forbidden--
+
+ _a._ The use of poison or poisoned weapons.
+
+ _b._ Murder by treachery of individuals belonging to the hostile
+ nation or army.
+
+ _c._ Murder of an antagonist who, having laid down his arms, or having
+ no longer the means of defending himself, has surrendered at
+ discretion.
+
+ _d._ The declaration that no quarter will be given.
+
+
+ _e._ The use of arms, projectiles, or substances which may cause
+ unnecessary suffering, as well as of those prohibited by the
+ Declaration of St. Petersburg in 1868.
+
+ _f._ Abuse of the flag of truce, the national flag, or the military
+ insignia or uniform of the enemy, as well as the distinctive badges
+ of the Geneva Convention.
+
+ _g._ All destruction or seizure of the enemy’s property which is not
+ imperatively required by the necessity of war.
+
+_Art. 15._ Fortified places are alone liable to be besieged. Towns,
+agglomerations of houses or villages which are open or undefended,
+cannot be attacked or bombarded.
+
+_Art. 17._ ... All necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as
+possible buildings devoted to religion, arts, sciences, and charity,
+hospitals and places where sick and wounded are collected, on condition
+that they are not used at the same time for military purposes.
+
+_Art. 18._ A town taken by storm shall not be given up to the
+victorious troops for plunder.
+
+_Art. 23._ Prisoners of war ... should be treated with humanity.... All
+their personal effects except their arms are to be considered their own
+property.
+
+_Arts. 36, 37._ The population of an occupied territory cannot be
+compelled to take part in military operations against their own
+country, nor to swear allegiance to the enemy’s power.
+
+_Art. 38._ The honour and rights of the family, the life and property
+of individuals, as well as their religious convictions and the exercise
+of their religion, should be respected.
+
+Private property cannot be confiscated.
+
+_Art. 39._ Pillage is expressly forbidden.
+
+There is at first sight a pleasing ring of humanity in all this,
+though, as yet, it only represents the better military spirit, which is
+always far in advance of actual military practice. In the monotonous
+history of war there are always commanders who wage it with less
+ferocity than others, and writers who plead for the mitigation of
+its cruelties. As in modern history a Marlborough, a Wellington, or
+a Villars forms a pleasant contrast to a Feuquières, a Belleisle, or
+a Blücher, so in ancient history a Marcellus or a Lucullus helps us
+to forget a Marius or an Alexander; and the sentiments of a Cicero or
+Tacitus were as far in advance of their time as those of a Grotius or
+Vattel were of theirs. According to the accident of the existence of
+such men, the laws of war fluctuate from age to age; but, the question
+arises, Do they become perceptibly milder? do they ever permanently
+improve?
+
+It will be said that they do, because it will be said that they have;
+and that the annals of modern wars present nothing to resemble the
+atrocities that may be collected from ancient or mediæval history. Yet
+such statements carry no conviction. Deterioration seems as likely as
+improvement; and unless the custom is checked altogether, the wars of
+the twentieth century may be expected to exceed in barbarity anything
+of which we have any conception. A very brief inquiry will suffice to
+dispel the common assurances of improvement and progress.
+
+Poison is forbidden in war, says the Berlin Conference; but so it
+always was, even in the Institutes of Menu, and with perhaps less
+difference of opinion in ancient than in modern times. Grotius and
+Vattel and most of their followers disallow it, but two publicists
+of grave authority defend it, Bynkershoeck and Wolff. The latter
+published his ‘Jus Gentium’ as late as 1749, and his argument is worth
+translating, since it can only be met by arguments which equally apply
+to other modes of military slaughter. ‘Naturally it is lawful to kill
+an enemy by poison; for as long as he is our enemy, he resists the
+reparation of our right, so that we may exercise against his person
+whatever suffices to avert his power from ourselves or our possessions.
+Therefore it is not unfair to get rid of him. But, since it comes to
+the same thing whether you get rid of him by the sword or by poison
+(which is self-evident, because in either case you get rid of him, and
+he can no longer resist or injure you), it is naturally lawful to kill
+an enemy by poison.’ And so, he argues with equal force, of poisoned
+weapons.[13] That poison is not in use in our day we do not therefore
+owe to our international lawyers, but to the accident of tradition. In
+Roman history the theory appears to have been unanimous against it.
+‘Such conduct,’ says the Roman writer Florus of a general who poisoned
+some springs in order to bring some cities in Asia to a speedier
+surrender, ‘although it hastened his victory, rendered it infamous,
+since it was done not only against divine law, but against ancestral
+customs.’[14] Our statesman Fox refused indignantly to avail himself
+of an offer to poison Napoleon, but so did the Roman consuls refuse a
+similar proposal with regard to Pyrrhus; and Tiberius and the Roman
+senate replied to a plan for poisoning Arminius, that the Roman people
+punished their enemies not by fraud or in secret, but openly and in
+arms.
+
+The history of bombarding towns affords an instance of something
+like actual deterioration in the usages of modern warfare. Regular
+and simple bombardment, that is, of a town indiscriminately and not
+merely its fortresses, has now become the established practice. Yet,
+what did Vattel say in the middle of the last century? ‘At present we
+generally content ourselves with battering the ramparts and defences of
+a place. To destroy a town with bombs and red-hot balls is an extremity
+to which we do not proceed without cogent reasons.’ What said Vauban
+still earlier? ‘The fire must be directed simply at the defences and
+batteries of a place ... and not against the houses.’ Then what of the
+English bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, when the cathedral and some
+300 houses were destroyed; what of the German bombardment of Strasburg
+in 1870, where rifled mortars were used for the first time,[15] and the
+famous library and picture gallery destroyed; and what lastly of the
+German bombardment of Paris, about which, strangely enough, even the
+military conscience of the Germans was struck, so that in the highest
+circles doubts about the propriety of such a proceeding at one time
+prevailed from a moral no less than from a military point of view?[16]
+
+With respect again to sacred or public buildings, warfare tends to
+become increasingly destructive. It was the rule in Greek warfare to
+spare sacred buildings, and the Romans frequently spared sacred and
+other buildings, as Marcellus, for instance, at Syracuse.[17] Yet when
+the French ravaged the Palatinate in 1689 they not only set fire to the
+cathedrals, but sacked the tombs of the ancient Emperors at Spiers.
+Frederick II. destroyed some of the finest buildings at Dresden and
+Prague. In 1814 the English forces destroyed the Capitol at Washington,
+the President’s house, and other public buildings;[18] and in 1815 the
+Prussian general, Blücher, was with difficulty restrained from blowing
+up the Bridge of Jena at Paris and the Pillar of Austerlitz. Military
+men have always the excuse of reprisals or accident for these acts of
+Vandalism. Yet Vattel had said (in language which but repeated the
+language of Polybius and Cicero): ‘We ought to spare those edifices
+which do honour to human society, and do not contribute to the enemy’s
+strength, such as temples, tombs, public buildings, and all works of
+remarkable beauty.’
+
+Of as little avail has been the same writer’s observation that those
+who tear up vines and cut down fruit trees are to be looked upon
+as savage. The Fijian islanders were barbarians enough, but even
+they used as a rule to spare their enemies’ fruit trees; so did the
+ancient Indians; and the Koran forbids the wanton destruction of fruit
+trees, palm trees, corn and cattle. Then what shall we think of the
+armies of Louis XIV. in the Palatinate not only burning castles,
+country-houses, and villages, but ruthlessly destroying crops, vines,
+and fruit trees?[19] or of the Prussian warrior, Blücher, destroying
+the ornamental trees at Paris in 1815?
+
+It is said that the Germans refused to let the women and children leave
+Strasburg before they began to bombard it in 1870.[20] Yet Vattel
+himself tells us how Titus, at the siege of Jerusalem, suffered the
+women and children to depart, and how Henri IV., besieging Paris, had
+the humanity to let them pass through his lines.
+
+It was in a campaign of this century, 1815, that General Roquet
+collected the French officers, and bade them tell the grenadiers that
+the first man who should bring him in a Prussian prisoner should be
+shot; and it was in reprisals for this that a few days later the
+Prussians killed the French wounded at Genappe.[21]
+
+Grotius, after quoting the fact that a decree of the Amphictyons
+forbade the destruction of any Greek city in war, asserts the existence
+of a stronger bond between the nations of Christendom than between
+the states of ancient Greece. And then we remember how the Prussians
+bombarded the Danish town of Sönderborg, and almost utterly destroyed
+it, though it lay beyond the possibility of their possession; and we
+think of Peronne in France reduced to ruins, with the greater part of
+its fine cathedral, in 1870; and of the German shells directed against
+the French fire-engines that endeavoured to save the Strasburg Library
+from the flames that consumed it; and we wonder that so great a jurist
+could have been capable of so grievous a delusion.
+
+To murder a garrison that had made an obstinate defence, or in order
+to terrorise others from doing the same, was a right of modern war
+disputed by Grotius, but admitted by Vattel not to be totally exploded
+a century later. Yet they both quote cases which prove that to murder
+enemies who had made a gallant defence was regarded in ancient times as
+a violation of the laws of war.
+
+To murder enemies who had surrendered was as contrary to Greek or
+Roman as it ever was to Christian warfare. The general Greek and
+Roman practice was to allow quarter to an enemy who surrendered, and
+to redeem or exchange their prisoners.[22] There was indeed, by the
+laws of war, a right to slay or enslave them, and though both rights
+were sometimes exercised with great barbarity, the extent to which the
+former right was exercised has been very much exaggerated. Otherwise,
+why should Diodorus Siculus, in the century preceding our era, have
+spoken of mercy to prisoners as the common law (τὰ κοινὰ νόμιμα), and
+of the violation of such law as an act of exceptional barbarity?[23]
+It may be fairly doubted whether the French prisoners in the English
+hulks during the war with Napoleon suffered less than the Athenian
+prisoners in the mines of Syracuse; and as to quarter, what of the
+French volunteers or Franc-tireurs who in 1870 fell into the hands of
+the Germans, or of the French peasants, who, though levied and armed
+by the local authorities under the proclamation of Napoleon, were, if
+taken, put to death by the Allies in 1814?
+
+Some other illustrations tend further to show that there is no real
+progress in war, and that many of the fancied mitigations of it are
+merely accidental and ephemeral features.
+
+The French and English in olden time used to spare one another’s
+fishing boats and their crews. ‘Fishermen,’ said Froissart, ‘though
+there may be war between France and England, never injure one another;
+they remain friends, and assist each other in case of need, and buy
+and sell their fish whenever one has a larger quantity than the other,
+for if they were to fight we should have no fresh fish.’[24] Yet in
+the Crimean war, the English fleets in the Baltic seized or burnt the
+fishing boats of the Finns, and destroyed the cargoes of fish on which,
+having been salted in the summer months, they were dependent for their
+subsistence during the winter.[25]
+
+Polybius informs us that the Œtolians were regarded as the common
+outlaws of Greece, because they did not scruple to make war without
+declaring it. Invasions of that sort were regarded as robberies, not
+as lawful wars. Yet declarations of war may now be dispensed with, the
+first precedent for doing so having been set by Gustavus Adolphus.
+
+Gustavus Adolphus, in 1627, issued some humane Articles of War, which
+forbade, among other things, injuries to old men, women, and children.
+Yet within a few years the Swedish soldiery, like other troops of their
+time, made the gratuitous torture and mutilation of combatants or
+non-combatants a common episode of their military proceedings.[26]
+
+When Henry V. of England invaded France, early in the fifteenth
+century, he forbade in his General Orders the wanton injury of
+property, insults to women, or gratuitous bloodshed. Yet four centuries
+later the character of war had so little changed that we find the Duke
+of Wellington, when invading the same country, lamenting in a General
+Order that, ‘according to all the information which the Commander
+of the Forces had received, outrages of all descriptions’ had been
+committed by his troops, ‘in presence even of their officers, who took
+no pains whatever to prevent them.’[27]
+
+The French complain that their last war with Germany was not war,
+but robbery; as if pillage and war had ever been distinct in fact
+or were distinguishable in thought. There appears to have been very
+little limit to the robbery that was committed under the name of
+contributions; yet Vattel tells us that, though in his time the
+practice had died out, the belligerent sovereigns, in the wars of Louis
+XIV., used to regulate by treaty the extent of hostile territory in
+which each might levy contributions, together with the amount which
+might be levied, and the manner in which the levying parties were to
+conduct themselves.[28]
+
+Is it not proved then by the above facts, that the laws of war
+rather fluctuate from age to age within somewhat narrow limits than
+permanently improve, and that they are apt to lose in one direction
+whatever they gain in another? Humanity in warfare now, as in
+antiquity, remains the exception, not the rule; and may be found now,
+as at all times, in books or in the finer imaginations of a few, far
+more often than in the real life of the battle-field. The plea of
+shortening the horrors of war is always the plea for carrying them to
+an extreme; as by Louvois for devastating the Palatinate, or by Suchet,
+the French general, for driving the helpless women and children into
+the citadel of Lerida, and for then shelling them all night with the
+humane object of bringing the governor to a speedier surrender.[29]
+
+Writers on the Law of Nations have in fact led us into a Fool’s
+Paradise about war (which has done more than anything else to keep
+the custom in existence), by representing it as something quite mild
+and almost refined in modern times. Vattel, the Swiss jurist, set the
+example. He published his work on the rights of nations two years
+after the Seven Years’ War had begun, and he speaks of the European
+nations in his time as waging their wars ‘with great moderation and
+generosity,’ the very year before Marshal Belleisle gave orders to
+make Westphalia a desert. Vattel too it was who first appealed to the
+amenities that occasionally interrupt hostilities in support of his
+theory of the generosity of modern warfare.
+
+But what after all does it come to, if rival generals address each
+other in terms of civility or interchange acceptable gifts? At
+Sebastopol, the English Sir Edmond Lyons sent the Russian Admiral
+Machinoff the present of a fat buck, the latter acknowledging the
+compliment with the return of a hard Dutch cheese. At Gibraltar, when
+the men of Elliot’s garrison were suffering severely from scurvy,
+Crillon sent them a cartload of carrots. These things have always
+occurred even in the fiercest times of military barbarism. At the
+siege of Orleans (1429) the Earl of Suffolk sent the French commander
+Dunois a present of dessert, consisting of figs, dates, and raisins;
+and Dunois in return sent Suffolk some fur for his cloak; yet there was
+little limit in those days to the ferocity shown in war by the French
+and English to one another. A ransom was extorted even for the bodies
+of the slain. The occasional gleams of humanity in the history of war
+count for nothing in the general picture of its savagery.
+
+The jurists in this way have helped to give a totally false colour to
+the real nature of war; and scarcely a day passes in a modern campaign
+that does not give the lie to the rules laid down in the ponderous
+tomes of the international-law writers. It is said that Gustavus
+Adolphus always had with him in camp a copy of ‘Grotius,’ as Alexander
+is said to have slept over Homer. The improbability of finding a copy
+of ‘Grotius’ in a modern camp may be taken as an illustration of the
+neglect that has long since fallen on the restraints with which our
+publicists have sought to fetter our generals, and of the futility of
+all such endeavours.
+
+All honour to Grotius for having sought to make warfare a few degrees
+less atrocious than he found it; but let us not therefore deceive
+ourselves into an extravagant belief in the efficacy of his labours.
+Kant, who lived later, and had the same problem to face, cherished no
+such delusion as to the possibility of humanising warfare, but went
+straight to the point of trying to stop it altogether; and Kant was in
+every point the better reasoner. Either would doubtless have regarded
+the other’s reasoning on the subject as Utopian; but which with the
+better reason?
+
+Grotius took the course of first stating what the extreme rights of
+war were, as proved by precedent and usage, and of then pleading for
+their mitigation on the ground of religion and humanity. In either case
+he appealed to precedent, and only set the better against the worse;
+leaving thereby the rights of war in utter confusion, and quite devoid
+of any principle of measurement.
+
+Let us take as an illustration of his method the question of the
+slaughter of women and children. This he began with admitting to be
+a strict right of war. Profane history supplied him with several
+instances of such massacres, and so more especially did Biblical
+history. He refrained, he expressly tells us, from adducing the slaying
+of the women and children of Heshbon by the Hebrews, or the command
+given to them to deal in the same way with the people of Canaan, for
+these were the works of God, whose rights over mankind were far greater
+than those of man over beasts. He preferred, as coming nearer to the
+practice of his own time, the testimony of that verse in the Psalms
+which says, ‘Blessed shall he be who shall dash thy children against a
+stone.’ Subsequently he withdrew this right of war, by reference to the
+better precedents of ancient times. It does not appear to have occurred
+to him that the precedents of history, if we go to them for our rules
+of war, will prove anything, according to the character of the actions
+we select. Camillus (in Livy) speaks of childhood as inviolable even
+in stormed cities; the Emperor Severus, on the other hand, ordered his
+soldiers to put all persons in Britain to the sword indiscriminately,
+and in his turn appealed to precedent, the order, namely, of Agamemnon,
+that of the Trojans not even children in their mothers’ womb should
+be spared from destruction. The children of Israel were forbidden in
+their wars to cut down fruit trees; yet when they warred against the
+Moabites, ‘they stopped all the wells of water and felled all the good
+trees.’ It was only possible in this way to distinguish the better
+custom from the worse, not the right from the wrong; either being
+equally justifiable on a mere appeal to historical instances.
+
+The rules of war which prevailed in the time of Grotius--the early
+time of the Thirty Years’ War--may be briefly summarised from his work
+as follows. The rights of war extended to _all_ persons within the
+hostile boundaries, the declaration of war being essentially directed
+against every individual of a belligerent nation. Any person of a
+hostile nation, therefore, might be slain wherever found, provided it
+were not on neutral territory. Women and children might be lawfully
+slain (as it will be shown that they were also liable to be in the
+best days of chivalry); and so might prisoners of war, suppliants for
+their lives, or those who surrendered unconditionally. It was lawful
+to assassinate an enemy, provided it involved no violation of a tacit
+or express agreement; but it was unlawful to use poison in any form,
+though fountains, if not poisoned, might be made undrinkable. Anything
+belonging to an enemy might be destroyed: his crops, his houses, his
+flocks, his trees, even his sacred edifices, or his places of burial.
+
+That these extreme rights of war were literally enforced in the
+seventeenth century admits of no doubt; nor if any of them have at all
+been mitigated, can we attribute it so much to the humane attempt of
+Grotius and his followers to set restrictions on the rightful exercise
+of predominant force, as to the accidental influence of individual
+commanders. It has been well remarked that the right of non-combatants
+to be unmolested in war was recognised by generals before it was ever
+proclaimed by the publicists.[30] And the same truth applies to many
+other changes in warfare, which have been oftener the result of a
+temporary military fashion, or of new ideas of military expediency,
+than of obedience to Grotius or Vattel. They set themselves to as
+futile a task as the proverbial impossibility of whitening the negro;
+with this result--that the destructiveness of war, its crimes, and
+its cruelties, are something new even to a world that cannot lose the
+recollection of the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, or the devastation of
+the Palatinate in 1689.[31]
+
+The publicists have but recognised and reflected the floating
+sentiments of their time, without giving us any definite principle by
+which to separate the permissible from the non-permissible practice in
+war. We have seen how much they are at issue on the use of poison. They
+are equally at issue as to the right of employing assassination; as to
+the extent of the legitimate use of fraud; as to the right of beginning
+a war without declaration; as to the limits of the invader’s rights of
+robbery; as to the right of the invaded to rise against his invader; or
+as to whether individuals so rising are to be treated as prisoners of
+war or hanged as assassins. Let us consider what they have done for us
+with regard to the right of using savages for allies, or with regard to
+the rights of the conqueror over the town he has taken by assault.
+
+The right to use barbarian troops on the Christian battle-field is
+unanimously denied by all the modern text-writers. Lord Chatham’s
+indignation against England’s employment of them against her revolted
+colonies in America availed as little. Towards the end of the Crimean
+war Russia prepared to arm some savage races within her empire, and
+brought Circassians into Hungary in 1848.[32] France employed African
+Turcos both against Austria in 1859 and against Prussia in 1870; and it
+is within the recollection of the youngest what came of the employment
+by Turkey of Bashi-Bazouks. Are they likely not to be used in future
+because Bluntschli, Heffter, or Wheaton prohibits them?
+
+To take a town by assault is the worst danger a soldier can have to
+face. The theory therefore had a show of reason, that without the
+reward of unlimited licence he could never be brought to the breach.
+Tilly is said to have replied, when he was entreated by some of his
+officers to check the rapine and bloodshed that has immortalised
+the sack of Magdeburg in 1631: ‘Three hours’ plundering is the
+shortest rule of war. The soldier must have something for his toil
+and trouble.’[33] It is on such occasions, therefore, that war shows
+itself in its true character, and that M. Girardin’s remark, ‘_La
+guerre c’est l’assassinat, la guerre c’est le vol,_’ reads like a
+revelation. The scene never varies from age to age; and the storming of
+Badajoz and San Sebastian by the English forces in the Peninsular War,
+or of Constantine in Algeria by the French in 1837, teaches us what
+we may expect to see in Europe when next a town is taken by assault,
+as Strasburg might have been in 1870. ‘No age, no nation,’ says Sir
+W. Napier, ‘ever sent forth braver troops to battle than those who
+stormed Badajoz’ (April 1812). Yet for two days and nights there
+reigned in its streets, says the same writer, ‘shameless rapacity,
+brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty, and murder.’[34] And what
+says he of San Sebastian not a year and a half later? A thunderstorm
+that broke out ‘seemed to be a signal from hell for the perpetration
+of villany which would have shamed the most ferocious barbarians of
+antiquity.’ ... ‘The direst, the most revolting cruelty was added to
+the catalogue of crime: one atrocity ... staggers the mind by its
+enormous, incredible, indescribable barbarity.’[35] If officers lost
+their lives in trying to prevent such deeds--whose very atrocity, as
+some one has said, preserves them from our full execration, because it
+makes it impossible to describe them--is it likely that the gallant
+soldiers who crowned their bravery with such devilry would have been
+one whit restrained by the consideration that in refusing quarter, or
+in murdering, torturing, or mutilating non-combatants, they were acting
+contrary to the rules of modern warfare?
+
+If, then, we temper theory with practice, and desert our books for the
+facts of the battle-field (so far as they are ever told in full), we
+may perhaps lay down the following as the most important laws of modern
+warfare:
+
+1. You may not use explosive bullets; but you may use conical-shaped
+ones, which inflict far more mutilation than round ones, and even
+explosive bullets if they do not fall below a certain magnitude.
+
+2. You may not poison your enemy, because you thus take from him the
+chance of self-defence: but you may blow him up with a fougass or
+dynamite, from which he is equally incapable of defending himself.
+
+3. You may not poison your enemy’s drinking-water; but you may infect
+it with dead bodies or otherwise, because that is only equivalent to
+turning the stream.
+
+4. You may not kill helpless old men, women, or children with the sword
+or bayonet; but as much as you please with your Congreve rockets,
+howitzers, or mortars.
+
+5. You may not make war on the peaceable occupants of a country; but
+you may burn their houses if they resist your claims to rob them of
+their uttermost farthing.
+
+6. You may not refuse quarter to an enemy; but you may if he be not
+equipped in a particular outfit.
+
+7. You may not kill your prisoners of war; but you may order your
+soldiers not to take any.
+
+8. You may not ask a ransom for your prisoners; but you may more than
+cover their cost in the lump sum you exact for the expenses of the war.
+
+9. You may not purposely destroy churches, hospitals, museums, or
+libraries; but ‘military exigencies’ will cover your doing so, as they
+will almost anything else you choose to do in breach of any other
+restrictions on your conduct.
+
+And it is into these absurdities that the reasonings of Grotius and his
+followers have led us. The real dreamers, it appears, have been, not
+those who, like Henri IV., Sully, St. Pierre, or Kant, have dreamed of
+a world without wars, but those who have dreamed of wars waged without
+lawlessness, passion, or crime. On them be thrown back the taunts of
+Utopianism which they have showered so long on the only view of the
+matter which is really logical and consistent. On them, at least, rests
+the shadow, and must rest the reproach, of an egregious failure, unless
+recent wars are of no account and teach no lesson. And if their failure
+be real and signal, what remains for those who wish for better things,
+and for some check on deeds that threaten our civilisation, but to turn
+their backs on the instructors they once trusted; to light their fires
+rather than to load their shelves with Grotius, Vattel, and the rest;
+and to throw in their lot for the future with the opinion, hitherto
+despised, though it was Kant’s, and the endeavour hitherto discredited,
+though it was Henry the Great’s, Sully’s, and Elizabeth’s--the opinion,
+that is, that it were easier to abolish war than to humanise it, and
+that only in the growth of a spirit of international confidence lies
+any possible hope of its ultimate extinction?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+WARFARE IN CHIVALROUS TIMES.
+
+ _Voi m’avete fatto tornare quest’arte del soldo quasi che nulla, ed
+ io ne l’aveva presupposta la più eccellente e la più onorevole che
+ si facesse._--MACHIAVELLI, _Dell’Arte della Guerra_.
+
+ Delusion about character of war in days of chivalry--The common
+ slaughter of women and children--The Earl of Derby’s sack of
+ Poitiers--The massacres of Grammont and Gravelines--The old poem
+ of the Vow of the Heron--The massacre of Limoges by Edward the
+ Black Prince--The imprisonment of ladies for ransom--Prisoners
+ of war starved to death; or massacred, if no prospect of ransom;
+ or blinded or otherwise mutilated--The meaning of a surrender at
+ discretion, as illustrated by Edward III. at Calais; and by several
+ instances in the same and the next century--The practice of burning
+ in aid of war; and of destroying sacred buildings--The practice of
+ poisoning the air--The use of barbarous weapons--The influence of
+ religion on war--The Church in vain on the side of peace--Curious
+ vows of the knights--The slight personal danger incurred in war by
+ them--The explanation of their magnificent costume--Field-sports
+ in war-time--The desire of gain the chief motive to war--The
+ identity of soldiers and brigands--The career and character of the
+ Black Prince--The place of money in the history of chivalry--Its
+ influence as a war-motive between England and France--General low
+ character of chivalrous warfare.
+
+
+For an impartial estimate of the custom of war, the best preparation
+is a study of its leading features in the days of chivalry. Not only
+are most of our modern military usages directly descended from that
+period, though many claim a far remoter ancestry, and go back to the
+days of primitive savagery, but it is the tradition of chivalry that
+chiefly keeps alive the delusion that it is possible for warfare to be
+conducted with humanity, generosity, and courtesy.
+
+Hallam, for instance, observes that in the wars of our Edward III.,
+‘the spirit of honourable as well as courteous behaviour towards
+the foe seems to have arrived at its highest point;’ and he refers
+especially to the custom of ransoming a prisoner on his parole, and to
+the generous treatment by the Black Prince of the French king taken
+captive at Poitiers.
+
+In order to demonstrate the extreme exaggeration of this view, and to
+show that with war, as with the greater crimes, moral greatness is only
+connected accidentally, occasionally, or in romance, it is necessary
+to examine somewhat closely the warfare of the fourteenth century.
+Chivalry, according to certain historians, was during that century in
+process of decline; but the decline, if any, was rather in the nature
+of its forms and ceremonies than of its spirit or essence. It was
+the century of the most illustrious names in chivalry, in France of
+Bertrand du Guesclin, in England of the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny,
+Sir John Chandos. It was the century of the battles of Crecy, Poitiers,
+Avray, and Navarette. It was the century of the Order of the Star in
+France, of the Garter and the Bath in England. Above all, it was the
+century of Froissart, who painted its manners and thoughts with a
+vividness so surpassing that to read his pages is almost to live in his
+time. So that the fourteenth century may fairly be taken as the period
+in which chivalry reached its highest perfection, and in which the
+military type of life and character attained its noblest development.
+It is the century of which we instinctively think when we would imagine
+a time when the rivalry of brave deeds gave birth to heroism, and the
+rivalry of military generosity invested even the cruelties of the
+battle-field with the halo of romance.
+
+Imagination, however, plays us false here as elsewhere. Froissart
+himself, who described wars and battles and noble feats of arms
+with a candour equal to his honest delight in them, is alone proof
+enough that there seldom was a period when war was more ferociously
+conducted; when the laws in restraint of it, imposed by the voice
+of morality or religion, were less felt; when the motives for it as
+well as the incentives of personal courage, were more mercenary; or
+when the demoralisation consequent upon it were more widely or more
+fatally spread. The facts that follow in support of this conclusion
+come, in default of any other special reference, solely from that
+charming chronicler; allusions to other sources being only necessary
+to prove the existence of a common usage, and to leave no room for the
+theory that the cases gathered from Froissart were but occasional or
+accidental occurrences.
+
+Even savage tribes, like the Zulus, spare the lives of women and
+children in war, and such a restraint is the first test of any warfare
+claiming to rank above the most barbarous. But in the fourteenth
+century such indiscriminate slaughter was the commonest episode of
+war: a fact not among the least surprising when we remember that the
+protection of women and the defenceless was one of the special clauses
+of the oath taken by knights at the ceremony of investiture. Five
+days after the death of Edward III., and actually during negotiations
+between France and England, the admirals of France and Spain, at the
+command of the King of France, sailed for Rye, which they burnt,
+slaying the inhabitants, whether men or women (1377); and it is a
+reasonable supposition that the same conduct marked their further
+progress of pillage and incendiarism in the Isle of Wight.
+
+Nor were such acts only the incidents of maritime warfare, and
+perpetrated merely by the pirates of either country; for they occurred
+as frequently in hostilities by land, and in connection with the
+noblest names of Christendom. At Taillebourg, in Saintonge, the Earl
+of Derby had all the inhabitants put to the sword, in reprisals for
+the death of one knight, who during the assault on the town had met
+with his death. So it fared during the same campaign with three other
+places in Poitou, the chronicler giving us more details with reference
+to the fate of Poitiers. There were no knights in the town accustomed
+to war and capable of organising a defence; and it was only people of
+the poorer sort who offered a brave but futile resistance to the army.
+When the town was won, 700 people were massacred; ‘for the Earl’s
+people put every one to the sword, men, women, and little children.’
+The Earl of Derby took no steps to stop the slaughter, but after many
+churches and houses had been destroyed, he forbade under pain of death
+any further incendiarism, apparently for no other reason than that he
+wished to stay there for ten or twelve days. A few years later, when
+the French had recovered Poitiers, the English knights, who had been
+there, marched away to Niort, which, on the refusal of the inhabitants
+to admit them, they forthwith attacked and speedily won, owing to the
+absence, as at Poitiers, of any knights to direct the defence. The male
+and female inhabitants alike were put to the sword. All these instances
+occur in one short chapter of Froissart.
+
+Sometimes this promiscuous slaughter even raised its perpetrators to
+higher esteem. An episode of this sort occurred in the famous war
+between the citizens of Ghent and the Earl of Flanders. The Lord
+d’Enghien, with 4,000 cavaliers and a large force of foot, besieged the
+town of Grammont, which was attached to Ghent. About four o’clock one
+fine Sunday in June, the besiegers gained the town, and the slaughter,
+says Froissart, was very great of men, women, and children, for to
+none was mercy shown. Upwards of 500 of the inhabitants were killed;
+numbers of old people and women were burnt in their beds; and the town
+being then set on fire in more than two hundred places, was speedily
+reduced to ashes. ‘Fair son,’ said the Earl of Flanders, greeting his
+returning relative, ‘you are a valiant man, and if it please God will
+be a gallant knight, for you have made a handsome beginning.’ History,
+however, may rejoice that so promising a career was checked in the bud;
+for the young nobleman’s death in a skirmish within a few days made his
+first feat of arms also his last.
+
+A similar story is connected with the memory of the fighting Bishop of
+Norwich, famous in those days. Having been authorised by Pope Urban
+VI. to make war on Pope Clement VII., he went and besieged the town of
+Gravelines with shot and wild-fire, ‘till in the end our men entered
+the town with their Bishop, when they at his commandment destroying
+both man, woman, and child, left not one alive of all those who
+remained in the town.’[36] This was in 1383; and it will be observed
+how then, just as in later days, the excuse of superior orders served
+as an excuse for the perpetration of any crime, provided only it were
+committed in war.
+
+It would be an error to suppose that these things were the mere
+accident of war, due to the passion of the moment, or to the feeble
+control of leaders over their men. In a very curious old French poem,
+called ‘The Vow of the Heron,’ indisputable evidence exists that the
+slaughter of women and children was not only often premeditated before
+the opening of hostilities, but that an oath binding a man to it was
+sometimes given and accepted as a token of commendable bravery. The
+poem in question deals with historical events and persons; and if not
+to be taken as literal history, undoubtedly keeps within the limits
+of probability, as proved by other testimony of the manners of those
+times. Robert, Count of Artois, exiled from France, comes to England,
+and bringing a roasted heron before Edward III. and his court, prays
+them to make vows by it before eating of it (in accordance with the
+custom which attached to such oaths peculiar sanctity) concerning the
+deeds of war they would undertake against the kingdom of France. Edward
+III., the Earl of Salisbury, Sir Walter Manny, the Earl of Derby,
+Lord Suffolk, having all sworn according to the Count’s wishes, Sir
+Fauquemont, striving to outdo them in the profession of military zeal,
+swore that if the king would cross the sea to invade France, he would
+always appear in the van of his troops, carrying devastation and fire
+and slaughter, and sparing not altars, nor relations, nor friends,
+neither helpless women nor children.[37]
+
+Let the reader reflect that these things occurred in war, not of
+Christians against infidels, but of Christians with one another, and
+in a period commonly belauded for its advance in chivalrous humanity.
+The incidents related were of too common occurrence to call for special
+remark by their chronicler; but the peculiar atrocities of the famous
+sack of Limoges, by the express orders of Edward the Black Prince,
+were too much even for Froissart. It is best to let him tell his own
+story from the moment of the entry of the besieging force: ‘The Prince,
+the Duke of Lancaster, the Earls of Cambridge and of Pembroke, Sir
+Guiscard d’Angle, and the others, with their men, rushed into the town.
+You would then have seen pillagers active to do mischief, running
+through the town, slaying men, women, and children, according to their
+commands. It was a most melancholy business, for all ranks, ages, and
+sexes cast themselves on their knees before the Prince, begging for
+mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened
+to none, but all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found,
+even those who were not guilty; for, I know not why, the poor were
+not spared, who could not have had any part in this treason; but they
+suffered for it, and indeed more than those who had been the leaders
+of the treachery. There was not that day in the city of Limoges any
+heart so hardened or that had any sense of religion, who did not deeply
+bewail the unfortunate events passing before their eyes; for upwards
+of 3,000 men, women, and children were put to death that day. God have
+mercy on their souls, for they were veritable martyrs.’ Yet the man
+whose memory is stained with this crime, among the blackest in history,
+was he whom not his own country alone, but the Europe of his day,
+dubbed the Mirror of Knighthood; and those who blindly but (according
+to the still prevalent sophistry of militarism) rightly carried out
+his orders counted among them at least three of the noblest names in
+England.
+
+The absence in chivalry of any feeling strong enough to save the lives
+of women from the sword of the warrior renders improbable _à priori_
+any keen scruples against making them prisoners of war. In France such
+scruples were stronger than in England. The soldiers of the Black
+Prince took captive the Duchess of Bourbon, mother to the King of
+France, and imprisoned her in the castle of Belleperche; whence she was
+afterwards conducted into Guyenne, and ransom exacted for her liberty.
+Similar facts mark the whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth
+century. When the Crusaders under Richard I. took Messina by assault,
+they carried off with their other lawful spoils all the noblest women
+belonging to the Sicilians.[38] Edward I. made prisoners of the queen
+of Robert Bruce and her ladies, and of the Countess of Buchan, who had
+crowned Bruce. The latter, he said, as she had not used the sword,
+should not perish by it; but for her lawless conspiracy she should be
+shut up in a chamber of stone and iron, circular as the crown she gave;
+and at Berwick she should be suspended in the open air, a spectacle to
+travellers, and for her everlasting infamy. Accordingly, a turret was
+fitted up for her with a strong cage of lattice-work, made of strong
+posts and bars of iron.[39] In the fifteenth century, the English, in
+their war upon the French frontier, according to Monstrelet, ‘made many
+prisoners, and even carried off women, as well noble as not, whom they
+kept in close confinement until they ransomed themselves.’[40] The
+notion, therefore, that in those times any special courtesy was shown
+in war to the weaker sex must be received with extreme latitude. In
+1194, Henry, Emperor of the Romans, having taken Salerno in Apulia by
+storm, actually put up for auction to his troops the wives and children
+of the chief citizens whom he had slain and exiled.
+
+To pass to the treatment of prisoners of war, who, be it remembered,
+were only those who could promise ransom. The old historian Hoveden,
+speaking of a battle that was fought in 1173, says that there fell in
+it more than 10,000 Flemings; the remainder, who were taken captive,
+being thrown into prison in irons, and there starved to death. There
+is no evidence whether, or for how long, starving remained in vogue;
+but the iron chains were habitual, down even to the fourteenth century
+or later, among the Germans and Spaniards, the extortion of a heavier
+ransom being the motive for increasing the weight of chain and the
+general discomfort of prison. To let a prisoner go at large on parole
+for his ransom was an advance initiated by the French, that sprang
+naturally out of a state of hostilities in which most of the combatants
+became personally acquainted, but it was still conduct so exceptional
+that Froissart always speaks of it in terms of high eulogy. It was also
+an advance that often sprang out of the plainest necessities of the
+case, as when, after the battle of Poitiers, the English found their
+prisoners to be double their own numbers, wherefore in consideration of
+the risk they ran, they either received ransom from them on the spot
+or gave them their liberty in exchange for a promise to bring their
+ransom-money at Christmas to Bordeaux. Bertrand du Guesclin did the
+same by the English knights after their defeat at Pontvalin; and it was
+in reference to this last occasion that Froissart calls attention to
+the superiority of the French over the Germans in not shackling their
+prisoners with a view to a heavier ransom. ‘Curses on them for it,’ he
+exclaims of the Germans; ‘they are a people without pity or honour,
+and they ought never to receive quarter. The French entertained their
+prisoners well and ransomed them courteously, without being too hard
+upon them.’
+
+Nevertheless we must suspect that this sort of courtesy was rather
+occasional than habitual. Of this same Du Guesclin, whom St.-Palaye
+calls the flower of chivalry,[41] two stories are told that throw a
+different but curious light on the manners of those times. Having on
+one occasion defeated the English and taken many of them prisoners,
+Du Guesclin tried to observe the rules of distributive justice in
+the partition of the captives, but failing of success and unable to
+discover to whom the prisoners really belonged, he and Clisson (who
+were brothers in arms) in order to terminate the differences which the
+victorious French had with one another on the subject, conceived that
+the only fair solution was to have them all massacred, and accordingly
+more than 500 Englishmen were put to death in cold blood outside the
+gates of Bressière.[42] So, on a second occasion, such a quantity
+of English were taken that ‘there was not, down to the commonest
+soldier, anyone who had not some prisoner of whom he counted to win a
+good ransom; but as there was a dispute between the French to know to
+whom each prisoner belonged, Du Guesclin, to put them all on a level,
+ordered them to put all to the sword, and only the English chiefs were
+spared.’[43] This ferocious warrior, the product and pride of his
+time, and the favourite hero of French chivalry, was hideous in face
+and figure; and if we think of him, with his round brown face, his
+flat nose, his green eyes, his crisp hair, his short neck, his broad
+shoulders, his long arms, short body, and badly made legs, we have
+evidently one of the worst specimens of that type which was for so long
+the curse of humanity, the warrior of mediæval Europe.
+
+In respect, therefore, of Hallam’s statement that the courtesy of
+chivalry gradually introduced an indulgent treatment of prisoners which
+was almost unknown to antiquity, it is clear that it would be unwise to
+press too closely the comparison on this head between pre-Christian and
+post-Christian warfare. At the siege of Toledo, the Besque de Vilaines,
+a fellow-soldier of Du Guesclin in the Spanish war, in order to
+intimidate the besieged into a surrender, had as many gallows erected
+in front of the city as he had taken prisoners, and actually had more
+than two dozen hung by the executioner with that object. In the pages
+of Livy or Thucydides there may be many a bad deed recorded, but at
+least there is nothing worse than the deeds of the Besque de Vilaines,
+or of Du Guesclin, Constable of France, or of Edward the Black Prince
+of England.
+
+There is another point besides the fettering of prisoners in which
+attention is drawn in Froissart to the exceptional barbarity of
+the Spaniards; and in no estimate of the military type of life in
+the palmiest days of chivalry would it be reasonable to omit all
+consideration of Spain. In the war between Castile and Portugal,
+the forces under Don John of Castile laid siege to Lisbon, closely
+investing it; and if any Portuguese were taken prisoners in a skirmish
+or otherwise, their eyes were put out, their legs, arms, or other
+members torn off, and in such plight they were sent back to Lisbon with
+the message that when the town was taken mercy would be shown to none.
+Such was the story told by the Portuguese ambassador to the Duke of
+Lancaster, and repeated on his authority by Froissart. For the credit
+of humanity, to say nothing of chivalry, one would fain disbelieve
+the tale altogether, or regard it as an episode that stood by itself
+and apart from the general practice of the age, since it is the only
+one of the kind related by Froissart. But the frequency as much as
+the rarity of a practice may account for the silence of an annalist,
+and there is little doubt that mutilation of the kind described was
+common in the chivalrous period, even if obsolete or nearly so in the
+fourteenth century. Blinding and castration were not only punishments
+inflicted for offences against the forest laws of the Norman kings of
+England, but were the common fate of captive enemies in arms throughout
+Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This, for instance, was
+the treatment of their Welsh prisoners by the Earls of Shrewsbury
+and Chester in 1098; as also of William III., King of Sicily, at the
+hands of Henry, Emperor of the Romans, in 1194. At the close of the
+twelfth century, in the war between Richard I. of England and Philip
+Augustus of France, blinding was resorted to on both sides; for Hoveden
+expressly says: ‘The King of France had the eyes put out of many of the
+English king’s subjects whom he had made prisoners, and this provoked
+the King of England, unwilling as he was, to similar acts of impiety.’
+And to take a last instance, in 1225, the Milanese having taken
+prisoners 500 Genoese crossbowmen, deprived each of them of an eye and
+an arm, in revenge for the injury done by their bows.[44] So that it
+would be interesting, if possible, to learn from some historian the
+date and cause of the cessation of customs so profoundly barbarous and
+brutal.
+
+By the rules, again, of chivalrous warfare all persons found within
+a town taken by assault were liable, and all the male adults likely,
+to be killed. Bertrand du Guesclin made it a maxim before attacking a
+place to threaten its commander with the alternative of surrender or
+death; a military custom perhaps as old as war itself, and one that
+has descended unchanged to our own times. Only by a timely surrender
+could the besieged cherish any hope for their lives or fortunes; and
+even the offer of a surrender might be refused, and an unconditional
+surrender be insisted upon instead. This is proved by the well-known
+story of Edward III. at the siege of Calais, a story sometimes called
+in doubt merely for resting solely on the authority of Froissart. The
+governor of Calais offered to surrender the town and all things in it,
+in return for a simple permission to leave it in safety. Sir Walter
+Manny replied that the king was resolved that they should surrender
+themselves solely to his will, to ransom or kill them as he pleased.
+The Frenchman retorted that they would suffer the direst extremities
+rather than submit to the smallest boy in Calais faring worse than the
+rest. The king obstinately refused to change his mind, till Sir Walter
+Manny, pressing upon him the reluctance of his officers to garrison his
+castles with the prospect of reprisals which such an exercise of his
+war-right would render probable, Edward so far relented as to insist
+on having six citizens of Calais left to the absolute disposal of his
+revenge. When the six who offered themselves as a sacrifice for the
+rest of their fellow-citizens reached the presence of the king, the
+latter, though all the knights around him were moved even to tears,
+gave instant orders to behead them. All who were present pleaded for
+them, and above all, Sir Walter Manny, in accordance with his promise
+to the French governor; but it was all in vain, and but for the
+entreaties of the queen, those six citizens would have fallen victims
+to the savage wrath of the pitiless Edward.
+
+Two facts support the probable truth of the above narrative from
+Froissart. In the first place, it is in perfect keeping with the
+conduct of the same warrior at the taking of Caen. When the king heard
+what mischief the inhabitants had inflicted on his army by their
+vigorous defence, he gave orders that all the rest of the inhabitants
+should be slain and the town burnt;[45] and had it not been for the
+remonstrances of Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, there is little reason to
+doubt but that he would thus have glutted, as he craved to do, the
+intense native savagery of his soul. In the second place, the story is
+in perfect keeping with the common war-rule of that and later times, by
+virtue of which a conqueror might always avail himself of the distress
+of his enemy to insist upon a surrender at discretion, which of course
+was equivalent to a surrender to death or anything else.
+
+How commonly death was inflicted in such cases may be shown from
+some narratives of capitulations given by Monstrelet. When Meaux
+surrendered to Henry V., six of the defenders were reserved by name to
+be delivered up to justice (such was the common expression), and four
+were shortly after beheaded at Paris.[46] When Meulan surrendered to
+the regent, the Duke of Bedford, numbers were specially excepted from
+those to whom the Duke granted their lives, ‘to remain at the disposal
+of the lord regent.’[47] When some French soldiers having taken refuge
+in a fort were so closely besieged by the Earl Marshal of England as to
+be obliged to surrender at discretion, many of them were hanged.[48]
+When the garrison of Guise capitulated to Sir John de Luxembourg, a
+general pardon was granted to all, except to certain who were to be
+delivered up to justice.[49] When the same captain, with about one
+thousand men, besieged the castle of Guetron, wherein were some sixty
+or eighty Frenchmen, the latter proposed to surrender on condition
+of the safety of their lives and fortunes; ‘they were told they must
+surrender at discretion. In the end, however, it was agreed to by the
+governor that from four to six of his men should be spared by Sir
+John. When this agreement had been settled and pledges given for its
+performance, the governor re-entered the castle, and was careful not to
+tell his companions the whole that had passed at the conference, giving
+them to understand in general that they were to march away in safety;
+but when the castle was surrendered all within it were made prisoners.
+On the morrow, by the orders of Sir John de Luxembourg, they were all
+strangled and hung on trees hard by, except the four or six before
+mentioned--one of their companions serving for the executioner.’[50]
+One more of these black acts, so common among the warriors of chivalry,
+and this point perhaps will be accepted as proved. The French had
+gained possession of the castle of Rouen, but after twelve days were
+obliged to surrender at discretion to the English; ‘they were all made
+prisoners, and put under a good guard; and shortly after, one hundred
+and fifty were beheaded at Rouen.’[51]
+
+Let us pass next from the animate to the inanimate world as affected
+by warfare. The setting on fire of Grammont in more than two hundred
+places is a fair sample of the normal use of arson as a military weapon
+in the chivalrous period. To burn an undefended town or village was
+accounted no meanness; and was as frequent as the destruction of crops,
+fruit trees, or other sources of human subsistence. The custom of
+tearing up vines or fruit trees contrasts strongly with the command of
+Xerxes to his forces to spare the groves of trees upon their march; and
+any reader of ancient history will acknowledge the vast deterioration
+from the pagan laws of war which every page of the history of Christian
+chivalry reveals and exposes.
+
+But little as was the forbearance displayed in war towards defenceless
+women and children, or to the crops and houses that gave them food and
+shelter, it might perhaps have been expected that, at a time when no
+serious dissent had come to divide Christianity, and when the defence
+of religion and religious ceremonies were among the professed duties of
+knighthood, churches and sacred buildings should have enjoyed especial
+immunity from the ravages of war. Even in pagan warfare the temples
+of the enemy as a rule were spared; such an act as the destruction of
+the sacred edifices of the Marsi by the Romans under Germanicus being
+contrary to the better traditions of Roman military precedent.
+
+Permissible as it was by the rules of war, says Polybius, to destroy
+an enemy’s garrisons, cities, or crops, or anything else by which his
+power might be weakened, it was the part of mere rage and madness to
+destroy such things as their statues or temples, by which no benefit
+or injury accrued to one side or the other; nor are allusions to
+violations of this rule numerous in pre-Christian warfare.[52] The
+practice of the Romans and Macedonians to meet peaceably together in
+time of war on the island of Delos, on account of its sanctity as
+the reputed birthplace of Apollo,[53] has no parallel in the history
+of war among the nations of Christendom. The most that can be said
+for the fourteenth century in this respect is that slightly stronger
+scruples protected churches and monasteries than the lives of women and
+children. This is implied in Froissart’s account of the storming of
+Guerrande: ‘Men, women, and children were put to the sword, and fine
+churches sacrilegiously burnt; at which the Lord Lewis was so much
+enraged, that he immediately ordered twenty-four of the most active to
+be hanged on the spot.’
+
+But the slightest embitterment of feeling removed all scruples
+in favour of sacred buildings. Richard II., having with his army
+crossed the Tweed, took up his quarters in the beautiful abbey of
+Melrose; after which the monastery, though spared in all previous
+wars with Scotland, was burnt, because the English had determined,
+says Froissart, to ruin everything in Scotland before returning home,
+in revenge for the recent alliance entered into by that country with
+France. The abbey of Dunfermline, where the Scotch kings used to be
+buried, was also burnt in the same campaign; and so it fared with all
+other parts of Scotland that the English overran; for they ‘spared
+neither monasteries nor churches, but put all to fire and flame.’
+
+Neither did any greater degree of chivalry display itself in the
+matter of the modes and weapons of warfare. Although reason can urge
+no valid objection against the means of destruction resorted to
+by hostile forces, whether poisoned arrows, explosive bullets, or
+dynamite, yet certain things have been generally excluded from the
+category of fair military practices, as for example the poisoning of
+an enemy’s water. But the warriors of the fourteenth century, even if
+they stand acquitted of poisoning rivers and wells, had no scruples
+about poisoning the air: which perhaps is nearly equivalent. The great
+engines they called Sows or Muttons, like that one, 120 feet wide and
+40 feet long, from which Philip von Artefeld and the men of Ghent cast
+heavy stones, beams of wood, or bars of hot copper into Oudenarde, must
+have made life inside such a place unpleasant enough; but worse things
+could be injected than copper bars or missiles of wood. The Duke of
+Normandy, besieging the English garrison at Thin-l’Evêque, had dead
+horses and other carrion flung into the castle, to poison the garrison
+by the smell; and since the air was hot as in midsummer, it is small
+wonder that the dictates of reason soon triumphed over the spirit of
+resistance. And at the siege of Grave the chivalry of Brabant made a
+similar use of carrion to empoison the garrison into a surrender.
+
+Even in weapons different degrees of barbarity are clearly discernible,
+according as they are intended to effect a disabling wound, or a wound
+that will cause needless laceration and pain by the difficulty of their
+removal. A barbed arrow or spear betokens of course the latter object,
+and it is worth visiting the multi-barbed weapons in Kensington Museum
+from different parts of the world, to learn to what lengths military
+ingenuity may go in this direction. The spear heads of the Crusaders
+were barbed;[54] and so were the arrows used at Crecy and elsewhere,
+as may be seen on reference to the manuscript pictures, the object
+being to make it impossible to extract them without laceration of
+the flesh. The sarbacane or long hollow tube was in use for shooting
+poisoned arrows at the enemy;[55] and pictures remain of the vials
+of combustibles that were often attached to the end of arrows and
+lances.[56]
+
+The above facts clearly show the manner and spirit with which our
+ancestors waged war in the days of what Hallam calls chivalrous virtue:
+one of the most stupendous historical impostures that has ever become
+an accepted article of popular belief. The military usages of the
+Greeks and Romans were mild and polished, compared to the immeasurable
+savagery which marked those of the Christians of Froissart’s day. As
+for the redeeming features, the rare generosity or courtesy to a foe,
+they might be cited in almost equal abundance from the warfare of the
+Red Indians; but what sheds a peculiar stain on that of the Chevaliers
+is the ostentatious connection of religion with the atrocities of
+those blood-seeking marauders. The Church by a peculiar religious
+service blessed and sanctified both the knight and his sword; and the
+most solemn rite of the Christian faith was profaned to the level of
+a preliminary of battle. At Easter and Christmas, the great religious
+festivals of a professedly peace-loving worship, the Psalm that was
+deemed most appropriate to be sung in the chapels of the Pope and the
+King of France was that beginning, ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus meus, qui
+docet manus meas ad bellum et digitos meos ad prœlia.’
+
+It was a curious feature of this religion of war that, when Edward
+III.’s forces invaded France, so strict was the superstition that led
+them to observe the fast of Lent, that among other things conveyed
+into the country were vessels and boats of leather wherewith to obtain
+supplies of fish from the lakes and ponds of the enemy.
+
+It is indeed passing strange that Christianity, which could command so
+strict an observance of its ordinances as is implied in the transport
+of boats to catch fish for Lent, should have been powerless to place
+any check whatever on the ferocious militarism of the time; and the
+very little that was ever done by the Church to check or humanise
+warfare is an eternal reflection on the so-called conversion of Europe
+to Christianity. Nevertheless the Church, to do her justice, used what
+influence she possessed on the side of peace in a manner she has long
+since lost sight of; nor was the Papacy in its most distracted days
+ever so indifferent to the evils of war as the Protestant Church has
+been since, and is still. Clement VI. succeeded in making peace between
+France and England, just as Alexander III. averted a war between the
+two countries in 1161. Innocent VI. tried to do the same; and Urban V.
+returned from Rome to Avignon, hoping to effect the same good object.
+Gregory XI. was keenly distressed at the failure of efforts similar to
+those of his predecessors. The Popes indeed endeavoured to stop wars,
+as they endeavoured to stop tournaments, or the use of the crossbow;
+but they were defeated by the intense barbarism of chivalry; nor can it
+be laid to the charge of the Church of Rome, as it can to that of the
+Church of the Reformation, that she ever folded her hands in despairful
+apathy before a custom she admitted to be evil. The cardinals and
+archbishops of those days were constantly engaged in pacific, nor
+always futile, embassies. And the prelates would frequently preach to
+either side arguments of peace: a fact that contrasts badly with the
+almost universal silence and impotence of the modern pulpit, either to
+stay a war or to mitigate its barbarities.
+
+But it is true that they knew equally well how to play on the martial
+as on the pacific chord in their audiences; for the eloquence of an
+Archbishop of Toulouse turned sixty towns and castles to the interest
+and rights of the French king in his quarrel with England; and the
+preaching of prelates and lawyers in Picardy had a similar effect in
+other large towns. Nor were the English clergy slower than the French
+to assert the rights of their king and country, for Simon Tibald,
+Bishop of London, made several long and fine sermons to demonstrate (as
+always is demonstrated in such cases) that the King of France had acted
+most unjustly in renewing the war, and that his conduct was at total
+variance both with equity and reason.
+
+But these appeals to the judgment of their congregations by the clergy
+are also a proof that in the fourteenth century the opinion of the
+people did not count for so little as is often supposed in the making
+of peace and war. Yet the power of the people in this respect was
+doubtless as insignificant as it still is in our own days: nothing
+being more remarkable, even in the free government of modern England,
+than the influence of the people in theory and their influence in fact
+on the most important question that regards their destinies.
+
+Nor are the moral causes difficult to trace which in those times made
+wars break out so frequently and last so long, that those who now read
+of them can only marvel how civilisation ever emerged at all, even to
+the imperfect degree to which it is given to us to enjoy it. The love
+of adventure and the hope of fame were of course among the principal
+motives. The saying of Adam Smith, that the great secret of education
+is the direction of personal vanity to proper objects, contains the
+key to all advance that has ever been made in civilisation, and to
+every shortcoming. The savagery of the middle ages was due to the
+direction of personal vanity exclusively into military channels, so
+that the desire for distinction often displayed itself in forms of
+perfect absurdity, as in the case of the young English knights who went
+abroad with one eye veiled, binding themselves by a vow to their ladies
+neither to see with their eyes nor to reply to anything asked of them
+till they had signalised themselves by the performance of some wondrous
+deed in France. The gradual opening up in later days of other paths to
+distinction than that of arms has very much diminished the danger to
+the public peace involved in the worthless education of our ancestors.
+
+Nor was the personal distinction of the warrior gained at any great
+risk of personal danger. The personal danger in war decreased in
+exact ratio with the rank of the combatant, and it was only the lower
+orders of the social hierarchy who unreservedly risked their lives.
+In case of defeat they had no ransom to offer for mercy, and appear
+almost habitually to have been slain without any. If it was a common
+thing for either side to settle before a battle the names of those on
+the other who should be admitted to ransom, it was no uncommon thing
+to determine, as the English did before Crecy, to give no quarter to
+the enemy at all. But as a rule the battle-field was of little more
+peril to the knight than the tournament; and though many perished when
+powerless to avert the long thin dagger, called the _miséricorde_, from
+the interstices of their armour or the vizor of their helmets, yet the
+striking fact in Froissart is the great number of battles, skirmishes,
+and sieges in which the same names occur, proving how seldom their
+bearers were wounded, disabled, or killed. This of course was due
+mainly to the marvellous defensive armour they wore, which justifies
+the wonder not merely how they fought but even how they moved. Whether
+encased in coats of mail, sewn upon or worn over the gambeson or thick
+undergarment of cloth or leather, or in plates of solid steel, at first
+worn over the mail and then instead of it, and often with the plastron
+or breastplate of forged iron beneath both hauberk and gambeson, they
+evidently had little to fear from arrow, sword, or lance, unless
+when they neglected to let down the vizor of the helmet, as Sir John
+Chandos did, when he met with his death from a lance wound in the eye
+(1370). Their chief danger lay in the hammering of battle-axes on their
+helmets, which stunned or wounded, but seldom killed them. But the foot
+soldiers and light cavalry, though generally well equipped, were less
+well protected by armour than the knights, the hauberk or coat of mail
+being allowed in France only to persons possessed of a certain estate;
+so that the knights were formidable less to one another than to those
+who by the conditions of the combat could not be so formidable to
+themselves.
+
+The surcoat was also a defence to the knight, as indicating the ransom
+he could pay for his life. Otherwise it is impossible to account for
+his readiness to go into action with this long robe flowing over his
+plate of steel and all his other accoutrements. Had Sir John Chandos
+not been entangled in his long surcoat when he slipped, he might have
+lived to fight many another battle to the honour of English chivalry.
+Richness of armour served also the same purpose as the surcoat. At
+the battle of Nicopoli, when the flower of the French nobility met
+with so disastrous a defeat at the hands of the Turks, the lords of
+France were, says Froissart, so richly dressed out in their emblazoned
+surcoats as to look like little kings, and many for a time owed their
+lives to the extreme richness of their armour, which led the Saracens
+to suppose them greater lords than they could really boast to be. So
+again the elaborate gold necklaces worn by distinguished officers in
+the seventeenth century were probably rather symbols of the ransom
+their wearers could pay, than worn merely for ostentation and vanity.
+It was to carelessness on this score that the Scotch owed their great
+losses at the battle of Musselborough in 1548: for (to put the words of
+Patin in modern dress) their ‘vileness of port was the cause that so
+many of the great men and gentlemen were killed and so few saved. The
+outward show, the semblance and sign whereby a stranger might discern a
+villain from a gentleman, was not among them to be seen.’
+
+War under these conditions chiefly affected the lives of the great by
+pleasantly relieving the monotony of peaceful days. In time of peace
+they had few occupations but hawking, hunting, and tilting, and during
+hostilities those amusements continued. Field sports, sometimes spoken
+of by their eulogists as the image of war, were not absent during its
+reality. Edward III. hunted and fished daily during his campaign in
+France, having with him thirty falconers on horseback, sixty couples
+of staghounds, and as many greyhounds. And many of his nobles followed
+his example in taking their hawks and hounds across the Channel.
+
+But the preceding causes of the frequency of war in the days of
+chivalry are quite insignificant when compared with that motive
+which nowadays mainly finds vent in the peaceful channels of
+commerce--namely, the common desire of gain. The desire for glory had
+far less to do with it than the desire of lucre; nor is anything from
+the beginning to the end of Froissart more conspicuously displayed
+than the merely mercenary motive for war. The ransom of prisoners
+or of towns, or even ransom for the slain,[57] afforded a short and
+royal road to wealth, and was the chief incentive, as it was also the
+chief reward of bravery. The Chevalier Bayard made by ransoms in the
+course of his life a sum equal to 4,000_l._, which in those days must
+have been a fortune;[58] and Sir Walter Manny in a single campaign
+enriched himself by 8,000_l._ in the same way.[59] So that the story is
+perfectly credible of the old Scotch knight, who in a year of universal
+peace prayed, ‘Lord, turn the world upside down that gentlemen may make
+bread of it.’ Loot and rapine, the modern attractions of the brigand,
+were then in fact the main temptations of the knight or soldier; and
+the distinction between the latter and the brigand was far less than
+it had been in the pre-Christian period, or than it is in more modern
+times. Indeed the very word _brigand_ meant, originally, merely a
+foot-soldier who fought in a brigade, in which sense it was used by
+Froissart; and it was only the constant addiction of the former to
+the occupations of the highwayman that lent to the word brigand its
+subsequent evil connotation.
+
+But it was not merely the common soldier to whom the first question in
+a case of war was the profit to be gained by it; for men of the best
+families of the aristocracy were no less addicted to the land piracy
+which then constituted war, as is proved by such names as Calverly,
+Gournay, Albret, Hawkwood, and Guesclin. The noble who was a soldier
+in war often continued to fight as a robber after peace was made, nor
+thought it beneath him to make wretched villagers compound for their
+lives; and in spite of truces and treaties, pillage and ransom afforded
+his chief and often his sole source of livelihood. The story of Charles
+de Beaumont dying of regret for the ransom he had lost, because by
+mistake he had slain instead of capturing the Duke of Burgundy at the
+battle of Nancy, is a fair illustration of the dominion then exercised
+by the lowest mercenary feelings over the nobility of Europe.
+
+This mercenary side of chivalrous warfare has been so lost sight of in
+the conventional descriptions of it, that it is worth while to bring
+into prominence how very little the cause of war really concerned those
+who took part in it, and how unfounded is the idea that men troubled to
+fight for the weak or the oppressed under fine impulses of chivalry,
+and not simply in any place or for any object that held out to them
+the prospect of gain. How otherwise is it possible to account for the
+conduct of the Black Prince, in fighting to restore Pedro the Cruel
+to the throne of Castile, from which he had been displaced in favour
+of Henry of Trastamare not merely by the arms of Du Guesclin and the
+French freebooters, but by the wishes and consent of the people? Any
+thought for the people concerned, or of sympathy for their liberation,
+as little entered into the mind of the Black Prince as if the question
+had concerned toads or rabbits. Provided it afforded an occasion for
+fighting, it mattered nothing that Pedro had ruled oppressively; that
+he had murdered, or at least was believed to have murdered, his wife,
+the sister of the reigning King of France: nor that he had even been
+condemned by the Pope as an enemy to the Christian Church. Yet before
+the battle of Navarette (1367), in which Henry was completely defeated,
+the Prince did not hesitate in his prayers for victory to assert that
+he was waging war solely in the interests of justice and reason; and it
+was for his success in this iniquitous exploit (a success which only
+awaited his departure from the country to be followed by a rising in
+favour of the monarch he had deposed) that the Prince won his chief
+title to fame; that London exhausted itself in shows, triumphs, and
+festivals in his honour; and that Germans, English, and Flemish with
+one accord entitled him ‘the mirror of knighthood.’ The Prince was only
+thirteen when he fought at Crecy, and he fought with courage: he was
+only ten years older when he won the battle of Poitiers, and he behaved
+with courtesy to the captive French king, from whom he looked for an
+extortionate ransom: but the extravagant eulogies commonly heaped upon
+him prove how little exalted in reality was the military ideal of his
+age. His sack of Limoges, famous among military atrocities, has already
+been spoken of; nor should it be forgotten, as another indication of
+his character, that when two messengers brought him a summons from the
+King of France to answer the appeal of the Gascons of Aquitaine, he
+actually imprisoned them, showing himself however in this superior to
+his nobles and barons, who actually advised capital punishment as the
+fittest salary to the envoys for their pains.
+
+The Free Companies, or hordes of robbers, who ravaged Europe through
+all the period of chivalry and constituted the greatest social
+difficulty of the time, were simply formed of knights and men-at-arms,
+who, when a public war no longer justified them in robbing and
+murdering on behalf of the State, turned robbers and murderers on their
+own account. After the treaty of Bretigny had put a stop to hostilities
+between France and England (1360), 12,000 of these men, men of rank
+and family as well as needy adventurers, and under leaders of every
+nationality, resolved sooner than lay down their arms to march into
+Burgundy, there to relieve by the ransoms they might levy the poverty
+they could not otherwise avert. Many a war had no other justification
+than the liberation of one people from their outrages by turning them
+upon another. Thus Du Guesclin led his White Company into Spain on
+behalf of Henry the Bastard, less to avenge the cruelties of Pedro than
+to free France from the curse of her unemployed chivalry; and Henry the
+Bastard, when by such help he had wrested the kingdom of Castile from
+his brother Pedro, designed an invasion of Granada simply to divert
+from his own territories the allies who had placed him in possession of
+them. This was a constant source of war in those days, just as in our
+own the existence of large armies leads of necessity to wars for their
+employment; and even the Crusades derive some explanation from the
+operation of the motive indicated.
+
+No historical microscope, indeed, will detect any difference between
+the Free Companies and the regular troops, since not only the latter
+merged into the former, but both were actuated by the sole pursuit
+of gain, and equally indifferent to ideas of honour or patriotism.
+The creed of both was summed up in the following regretful speech,
+attributed to Aymerigot Marcel, a great captain of the pillaging
+bands: ‘There is no pleasure in the world like that which men such as
+ourselves enjoyed. How happy were we when, riding out in search of
+adventures, we met a rich abbot, a merchant, or a string of mules, well
+laden with draperies, furs, or spices, from Montpellier, Beziers, and
+other places! All was our own, or ransomed according to our will. Every
+day we gained money, ... we lived like kings, and when we went abroad
+the country trembled; everything was ours both in going and returning.’
+
+In the days of chivalry, this desire of gain, however gotten, pervaded
+and vitiated all classes of men from the lowest to the highest. Charles
+IV. of France, when his sister Isabella, queen of Edward II., fled to
+him, promised to help her with gold and silver, but secretly, lest
+it should bring him into war; and then when messengers from England
+came with gold and silver and jewels for himself and his ministers,
+both he and his council became in a short time as cold to the cause
+of Isabella as they had been warm, the king even going so far as to
+forbid any of his subjects under pain of banishment to help his sister
+in her projected return. And again, when Edward III. was about to make
+war with France, was he not told that his allies were men who loved to
+gain wealth, and whom it was necessary to pay beforehand? And did he
+not find that a judicious distribution of florins was as effective in
+winning over to his interests a duke, a marquis, an archbishop, and the
+lords of Germany, as the poorer citizens of the towns of Flanders?
+
+Money, therefore, or its equivalent, and not the title to the crown of
+France, was at the root of the wars waged abroad by the English under
+Edward III. The question of title simply served as pretext, covering
+the baser objects of the invasion. No historical fact is clearer,
+ignored though it has been in the popular histories of England, than
+that the unpopularity of his successor, Richard II., arose from his
+marriage with the daughter of the King of France, and from his desire
+for peace between the two kingdoms, of which the marriage was the
+proof and the security. When his wish for peace led to the formation
+of a war and a peace party among the English nobility, Froissart says:
+‘The poorer knights and archers were of course for war, as their sole
+livelihood depended upon it.[60] They had learnt idleness and looked to
+war as a means of support.’ In reference to the great peace conference
+held at Amiens in 1391, he observes: ‘Many persons will not readily
+believe what I am about to say, though it is strictly true, that the
+English are fonder of war than of peace. During the reign of Edward, of
+happy memory, and in the lifetime of his son the Prince of Wales, they
+made such grand conquests in France, and by their victories and ransoms
+of towns, castles, and men gained such wealth, that the poorest knights
+became rich; and those who were not gentlemen by birth, by gallantly
+hazarding themselves in these wars, were ennobled by their valour and
+worth. Those who came after them were desirous of following the same
+road.... Even the Duke of Gloucester, son of King Edward, inclined to
+the opinion of the commons, as did many other knights and squires who
+were desirous of war to enable them to support their state.’[61]
+
+No other country, indeed, pleased these English brigand knights so well
+as France for the purpose of military plunder. Hence the English who
+returned from the expedition to Castile complained bitterly that in the
+large towns where they expected to find everything, there was nothing
+but wines, lard, and empty coffers; but that it was quite otherwise
+in France, where they had often found in the cities taken in war such
+wealth and riches as astonished them; it was in a war with France
+therefore that it behoved them to hazard their lives, for it was very
+profitable, not in a war with Castile or Portugal, where there was
+nothing but poverty and loss to be suffered.[62]
+
+With this evidence from Froissart may be compared a passage from Philip
+de Commines, where he says, in speaking of Louis XI. towards the end of
+the following century: ‘Our master was well aware that the nobility,
+clergy, and commons of England are always ready to enter upon a war
+with France, not only on account of their old title to its crown, but
+by the desire of gain, for it pleased God to permit their predecessors
+to win several memorable battles in this kingdom, and to remain in
+possession of Normandy and Guienne for the space of 350 years, ...
+during which time they carried over enormous booty into England. Not
+only in plunder which they had taken in the several towns, but in the
+richness and quality of their prisoners, who were most of them great
+princes and lords, and paid them vast ransoms for their liberty; so
+that every Englishman afterwards hoped to do the same thereby and
+return home laden with spoils.’[63]
+
+Such, then, were the antecedents of the evil custom of war which has
+descended to our own time; and we shall have taken the first step to
+its abolition when we have thus learnt to read its real descent and
+place in history, and to reject as pure hallucination the idea that
+in the warfare of the past any more than of the present there was
+anything noble or great or glorious. That brave deeds were often done
+and noble conduct sometimes displayed in it must not blind us to its
+other and darker features. It was a warfare in which not even women and
+children were safe from the sword or lance of the knight or soldier;
+nor sacred buildings exempt from their rage. It was a warfare in
+which the occasional mercy shown had a mercenary taint; in which the
+defeated were only spared for their ransom; and in which prisoners were
+constantly liable to torture, mutilation, and fetters. Above all, it
+was a warfare in which men fought more from a sordid greed of gain than
+from any love or attachment to their king or country, so that all sense
+of loyalty would speedily evaporate if a king like Richard II. chanced
+to wish to live peaceably with his neighbours.
+
+It is not unimportant to have thus shown the warfare of chivalry in its
+true light. For it is the delusion with regard to it, which more than
+anything else keeps alive those romantic notions about war and warriors
+that are the most fatal hindrance to removing both from the face of the
+earth. We clearly drive militarism to its last defences, if we deprive
+it of every period and of almost every name on which it is wont to rely
+as entitling it to our admiration or esteem.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+NAVAL WARFARE.
+
+ _Una et ea vetus causa bellandi est profunda cupido imperii et
+ divitiarum._--SALLUST.
+
+ Robbery the first object of maritime warfare--The piratical origin
+ of European navies--Merciless character of wars at sea--Fortunes
+ made by privateering in England--Privateers commissioned by
+ the State--Privateers defended by the publicists--Distinction
+ between privateering and piracy--Failure of the State to regulate
+ privateering--Privateering condemned by Lord Nelson--Privateering
+ abolished by the Declaration of Paris in 1856--Modern feeling
+ against seizure of private property at sea--Naval warfare in days
+ of wooden ships--Unlawful methods of maritime war--The Emperor
+ Leo VI.’s ‘Treatise on Tactics’--The use of fire-ships--Death
+ the penalty for serving in fire-ships--Torpedoes originally
+ regarded as ‘bad’ war--English and French doctrine of rights of
+ neutrals--Enemy’s property under neutral flag secured by Treaty of
+ Paris--Shortcomings of the Treaty of Paris with regard to:--(1)
+ A definition of what is contraband; (2) The right of search of
+ vessels under convoy; (3) The practice of embargoes; (4) The _jus
+ angariæ_--The International Marine Code of the future.
+
+
+The first striking difference between military and naval warfare is
+that, while--in theory, at least--the military forces of a country
+confine their attacks to the persons and power of their enemy, the
+naval forces devote themselves primarily to the plunder of his
+property and commerce. If on land the theory of modern war exempts
+from spoliation all of an enemy’s goods that do not contribute to his
+military strength, on sea such spoliation is the professed object of
+maritime warfare. And the difference, we are told, is ‘the necessary
+consequence of the state of war, which places the citizens or subject
+of the belligerent states in hostility to each other, and prohibits
+all intercourse between them,’[64] although the very reason for the
+immunity of private property on land is that war is a condition of
+hostility between the military forces of two countries, and not between
+their respective inhabitants.[64]
+
+Writers on public law have invented many ingenious theories to explain
+and justify, on rational grounds, so fundamental a difference between
+the two kinds of warfare. ‘To make prize of a merchant ship,’ says
+Dr. Whewell, ‘is an obvious way of showing (such a ship) that its own
+State is unable to protect it at sea, and thus is a mode of attacking
+the State;’[65] a reason that would equally justify the slaughter
+of nonagenarians. According to Hautefeuille, the differences flows
+naturally from the conditions of hostilities waged on different
+elements, and especially from the absence at sea of any fear of a
+rising _en masse_ which, as it may be the result of wholesale robbery
+on land, serves to some extent as a safeguard against it.[66]
+
+A simpler explanation may trace the difference to the maritime Piracy
+which for many centuries was the normal relation between the English
+and Continental coasts, and out of which the navies of Europe were
+gradually evolved. Sir H. Nicolas, describing the naval state of the
+thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth century, proves by abundant
+facts the following picture of it: ‘During a truce or peace ships were
+boarded, plundered, and captured by vessels of a friendly Power as if
+there had been actual war. Even English merchant ships were attacked
+and robbed as well in port as at sea by English vessels, and especially
+by those of the Cinque Ports, which seem to have been nests of robbers;
+and, judging from the numerous complaints, it would appear that a
+general system of piracy existed which no government was strong enough
+to restrain.’[67]
+
+The governments of those days were, however, not only not strong
+enough to restrain, but, as a rule, only too glad to make use of these
+pirates as auxiliaries in their wars with foreign Powers. Some English
+ships carrying troops to France having been dispersed by a storm, the
+sailors of the Cinque Ports were ordered by Henry III., in revenge, to
+commit every possible injury on the French; a commission undertaken
+with such zeal on their part that they slew and plundered not only all
+the foreigners they could catch, but their own countrymen returning
+from their pilgrimages (1242). During the whole reign of Henry IV.
+(1399-1413), though there existed a truce between France and England,
+the ordinary incidents of hostilities continued at sea just as if the
+countries had been at open war.[68] The object on either side was
+plunder and wanton devastation; nor from their landing on each other’s
+coasts, burning each other’s towns and crops, and carrying off each
+other’s property, did the country of either derive the least benefit
+whatever. The monk of St. Denys shows that these pirates were really
+the mariners on whom the naval service of England chiefly depended in
+time of war, for he says, in speaking of this period: ‘The English
+pirates, discontented with the truce and unwilling to abandon their
+profitable pursuits, determined to infest the sea and attack merchant
+ships. Three thousand of the most skilful sailors of England and
+Bayonne had confederated for that purpose, and, as was supposed, with
+the approbation of their king.’ It was not till the year 1413 that
+Henry V. sought to put a stop to the piratical practices of the English
+marine, and he then did so without requiring a reciprocal endeavour on
+the part of the other countries of Europe.[69]
+
+Maritime warfare being thus simply an extension of maritime piracy, the
+usages of the one naturally became the usages of the other; the only
+difference being that in time of war it was with the licence and pay of
+the State, and with the help of knights and squires, that the pirates
+carried on their accustomed programme of incendiarism, massacres, and
+robberies.
+
+From this connection, therefore, a lower character of warfare prevailed
+from the first on sea than on land, and the spirit of piracy breathed
+over the waters. No more mercy was shown by the regular naval service
+than was shown by pirates to the crew of a captured or surrendered
+vessel, for wounded and unwounded alike were thrown into the sea. When
+the fleet of Breton pirates defeated the English pirates in July 1403,
+and took 2,000 of them prisoners, they threw overboard the greater
+part of them;[70] and in the great sea-fight between the English and
+Spanish fleets of 1350, the whole of the crew of a Spanish ship that
+surrendered to the Earl of Lancaster were thrown overboard, ‘according
+to the barbarous custom of the age.’[71]
+
+Two other stories of that time still further display the utter want
+of anything like chivalrous feeling in maritime usages. A Flemish
+ship, on its way to Scotland, having been driven by a storm on the
+English coast, near the Thames, and its crew having been slain by the
+inhabitants, the king rewarded the assassins with the whole of the
+cargo, and kept the ship and the rigging for himself (1318).[72] In
+1379, when a fleet of English knights, under Sir John Arundel, on its
+way to Brittany, was overtaken by a storm, and the jettison of other
+things failed to relieve the vessels, sixty women, many of whom had
+been forced to embark, were thrown into the sea.[73]
+
+The piratical origin, therefore, of the navies of Europe sufficiently
+explains the fact that plunder, which is less the rule than an incident
+of war on land, remains its chief object and feature at sea. The fact
+may further be explained by the survival of piracy long sanctioned by
+the States under the guise of Privateering. If we would understand the
+popularity of wars in England in the old privateering days, we must
+recall the magnificent fortunes which were often won as prize-money in
+the career of legalised piracy. During the war which was concluded in
+1748 by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, England captured of French and
+Spanish ships collectively 3,434, whilst she herself lost 3,238; but,
+small compensation as this balance of 196 ships in her favour may seem
+after a contest of some nine years, the pecuniary balance in her favour
+is said to have amounted to 2,000,000_l._[74]
+
+We now begin to see why our forefathers rang their church bells at the
+announcement of war, as they did at the declaration of this one against
+Spain. War represented to large classes what the gold mines of Peru
+represented to Spain--the best of all possible pecuniary speculations.
+In the year 1747 alone the English ships took 644 prizes; and of what
+enormous value they often were! Here is a list of the values which the
+cargoes of these prizes not unfrequently reached:
+
+ That of the ‘Héron,’ a French ship, 140,000_l._
+ That of the ‘Conception,’ a French ship, 200,000_l._
+ That of ‘La Charmante,’ a French East Indiaman, 200,000_l._
+ That of the ‘Vestal,’ a Spanish ship, 140,000_l._
+ That of the ‘Hector,’ a Spanish ship, 300,000_l._
+ That of the ‘Concordia,’ a Spanish ship, 600,000_l._[75]
+
+Two Spanish register ships are recorded to have brought in 350_l._
+to every foremast man who took part in their capture. In 1745 three
+Spanish vessels returning from Peru having been captured by three
+privateersmen, the owners of the latter received to their separate
+shares the sum of 700,000_l._, and every common seaman 850_l._ Another
+Spanish galleon was taken by a British man-of-war with a million
+sterling in bullion on board.
+
+These facts suffice to dispel the wonder we might otherwise feel at
+the love our ancestors had for mixing themselves up, for any pretext
+or for none, in hostilities with Continental Powers. Our policy was
+naturally spirited, when it meant chances like these for all who lacked
+either the wit or the will to live honestly, and returns like these on
+the capital invested in the patriotic equipment of a few privateers.
+But what advantage ultimately accrued to either side, after deduction
+made for all losses and expenses, or how far these national piracies
+contributed to the speedier restoration of peace, were questions that
+apparently did not enter within the range of military reasoning to
+consider.
+
+Everything was done to make attractive a life of piracy spent in the
+service of the State. Originally every European State claimed some
+interest in the prizes it commissioned its privateers to take; but the
+fact that each in turn surrendered its claim proves the difficulty
+there was in getting these piratical servants to submit their plunder
+to the adjudication of the prize-courts. Originally all privateers
+were bound to deliver captured arms and ammunition to their sovereign,
+and to surrender a percentage of their gains to the State or the
+admiral; but it soon came to pass that sovereigns had to pay for the
+arms they might wish to keep, and that the percentage deducted was
+first diminished and then abolished altogether. At first 30 per cent.
+was deducted in Holland, which fell successively to 18 per cent., to
+10 per cent., to nothing; and in England the 10 per cent. originally
+due to the admiral was finally surrendered.[76] The crew also enjoyed
+an additional prize of money for every person slain or captured on an
+enemy’s man-of-war or privateer, and for every cannon in proportion to
+its bore.[77]
+
+Of all the changes of opinion that have occurred in the world’s
+history, none is more instructive than that which gradually took place
+concerning privateering, and which ended in its final renunciation by
+most of the maritime Powers in the Declaration of Paris in 1856.
+
+The weight of the publicists’ authority was for long in its favour.
+Vattel only made the proviso of a just cause of war the condition for
+reconciling privateering with the comfort of a good conscience.[78]
+Valin defended it as a patriotic service, in that it relieved the State
+from the expense of fitting out war-vessels. Emerigon denounced the
+vocation of pirates as infamous, while commending that of privateers
+as honest and even glorious. And for many generations the distinction
+between the two was held to be satisfactory, that the privateer acted
+under the commission of his sovereign, the pirate under no one’s but
+his own.
+
+Morally, this distinction of itself proved little. Take the story of
+the French general Crillon, who, when Henri III. proposed to him to
+assassinate the Duc de Guise, is said to have replied, ‘My life and my
+property are yours, Sire; but I should be unworthy of the French name
+were I false to the laws of honour.’ Had he accepted the commission,
+would the deed have been praiseworthy or infamous? Can a commission
+affect the moral quality of actions? The hangman has a commission,
+but neither honour nor distinction. Why, then, should a successful
+privateer have been often decorated with the title of nobility or
+presented with a sword by his king?[79]
+
+Historically, the distinction had even less foundation. In olden times
+individuals carried on their own robberies or reprisals at their own
+risk; but their actions did not become the least less piratical when,
+about the thirteenth century, reprisals were taken under State control,
+and became only lawful under letters of marque duly issued by a
+sovereign or his admirals. In their acts, conduct, and whole procedure,
+the commissioned privateers of later times differed in no discernible
+respects from the pirates of the middle ages, save in the fact of being
+utilised by the State for its supposed benefit: and this difference,
+only dating as it did from the time when the prohibition to fit out
+cruisers in time of war without public authority first became common,
+was evidently one of date rather than of nature.
+
+Moreover, the attempt of the State to regulate its piratical service
+failed utterly. In the fourteenth century it was customary to make
+the officers of a privateer swear not to plunder the subjects of the
+commissioning belligerent, or of friendly Powers, or of vessels
+sailing under safe-conducts; in the next century it became necessary,
+in addition to this oath, to insist on heavy pecuniary sureties;[80]
+and such sureties became common stipulations in treaties of peace.
+Nearly every treaty between the maritime Powers after about 1600
+contained stipulations in restraint of the abuses of privateering;
+on the value of which, the complaints that arose in every war that
+occurred of privateers exceeding their powers are a sufficient comment.
+The numerous ordinances of different countries threatening to punish
+as pirates all privateers who were found with commissions from _both_
+belligerents, give us a still further insight into the character of
+those servants of the State.
+
+In fact, so slight was the distinction founded on the possession of
+a commission, that even privateers with commissions were sometimes
+treated as actual pirates and not as legitimate belligerents. In the
+seventeenth century, the freebooters and buccaneers who ravaged the
+West Indies, and who consisted of the outcasts of England and the
+Continent, though they were duly commissioned by France to do their
+utmost damage to the Spanish colonies and commerce in the West Indies,
+were treated as no better than pirates if they happened to fall into
+the hands of the Spaniards. And especially was this distinction
+disallowed if there were any doubt concerning the legitimacy of the
+letters of marque. England, for instance, refused at first to treat
+as better than pirates the privateers of her revolted colonists in
+America; and in the French Revolution she tried to persuade the Powers
+of Europe so to deal with privateers commissioned by the republican
+government. Russia having consented to this plan, its execution was
+only hindered by the honourable refusal of Sweden and Denmark to accede
+to so retrograde an innovation.[81]
+
+An illusory distinction between the prize of a pirate and that of
+a privateer was further sustained by the judicial apparatus of the
+prize-court. The rights of a captor were not complete till a naval
+tribunal of his own country had settled his claims to the ships or
+cargo of an enemy or neutral. By this device confiscation was divested
+of its likeness to plunder, and a thin veneer of legality was laid on
+the fundamental lawlessness of the whole system. Were it left to the
+wolves to decide on their rights to the captured sheep, the latter
+would have much the same chance of release as vessels in a prize-court
+of the captor. A prize-court has never yet been equally representative
+of either belligerent, or been so constituted as to be absolutely
+impartial between either.
+
+But, even granted that a prize-court gave its verdicts with the
+strictest regard to the evidence, of what nature was that evidence
+likely to be when it came chiefly from the purser on board the
+privateer, whose duty it was to draw up a verbal process of the
+circumstances of every visit or capture, and who, as he was paid and
+nominated by the captain of the privateer, was dependent for his
+profits in the concern on the lawfulness of the prizes? How easy to
+represent that a defenceless merchant vessel had offered resistance to
+search, and that therefore by the law of nations she and her cargo
+were lawful prize! How tempting to falsify every circumstance that
+really attended the capture, or that legally affected the captors’
+rights to their plunder!
+
+These aspects of privateering soon led unbiassed minds to a sounder
+judgment about it than was discernible in received opinion. Molloy, an
+English writer, spoke of it, as long ago as 1769, as follows: ‘It were
+well they (the privateers) were restrained by consent of all princes,
+since all good men account them but one remove from pirates, who
+without any respect to the cause, or having any injury done them, or so
+much as hired for the service, spoil men and goods, making even a trade
+and calling of it.’[82] Martens, the German publicist, at the end of
+the same century, called privateering a privileged piracy; but Nelson’s
+opinion may fairly count for more than all; and of his opinion there
+remains no doubt whatever. In a letter dated August 7, 1804, he wrote:
+‘If I had the least authority in controlling the privateers, whose
+conduct is so disgraceful to the British nation, I would instantly take
+their commissions from them.’ In the same letter he spoke of them as
+a horde of sanctioned robbers;[83] and on another occasion he wrote:
+‘The conduct of all privateering is, as far as I have seen, so near
+piracy, that I only wonder any civilised nation can allow them. The
+lawful as well as the unlawful commerce of the neutral flag is subject
+to every violation and spoliation.’[84] Yet it was for the sake of
+such spoliation, which England chose to regard as her maritime right
+and to identify with her maritime supremacy, that, under the pretext
+of solicitude for the liberties of Europe, she fought her long war
+with France, and made herself the enemy in turn of nearly every other
+civilised Power in the world.
+
+The Declaration of Paris, the first article of which abolished
+privateering between the signatory Powers, was signed by Lord Clarendon
+on behalf of England; but on the ground that it was not formally a
+treaty, never having been ratified by Parliament or the Crown, it has
+actually been several times proposed in the English Parliament to
+violate the honour of England by declaring that agreement null and
+void.[85] Lord Derby, in reference to such proposals, said in 1867:
+‘We have given a pledge, not merely to the Powers who signed with
+us, but to the whole civilised world.’ This was the language of real
+patriotism, which esteems a country’s honour its highest interest; the
+other was the language of the plainest perfidy. In November 1876, the
+Russian Government was also strongly urged, in the case of war with
+England, to issue letters of marque against British commerce, in spite
+of the international agreement to the contrary.[86] It is not likely
+that it would have done so; but these motions in different countries
+give vital interest to the history of privateering as one of the
+legitimate modes of waging war.
+
+Moreover, since neither Spain, the United States, nor Mexico signed
+the Declaration of Paris, war with any of them would revive all the
+atrocities and disputes that have embittered previous wars in which
+England has been engaged. The precedent of former treaties, such as
+that between Sweden and the United Provinces in 1675, the United States
+and Prussia in 1785, and the United States and Italy in 1871, by which
+either party agreed in the event of war not to employ privateers
+against the other, affords an obvious sample of what diplomacy might
+yet do to diminish the chances of war between the signatory and the
+non-signatory Powers.
+
+The United States would have signed the Declaration of Paris if it had
+exempted the merchant vessels of belligerents as well from public armed
+vessels as from privateers: and this must be looked to as the next
+conquest of law over lawlessness. Russia and several other Powers were
+ready to accept the American amendment, which, having at first only
+fallen through owing to the opposition of England, was subsequently
+withdrawn by America herself. Nevertheless, that amendment remains the
+wish not only of the civilised world, but of our own merchants, whose
+carrying trade, the largest in the world, is, in the event of England
+becoming a belligerent, in danger of falling into the hands of neutral
+countries. In 1858 the merchants of Bremen drew up a formal protest
+against the right of ships of war to seize the property and ships of
+merchants.[87] In the war of 1866 Prussia, Italy, and Austria agreed
+to forego this time-honoured right of mutual plunder; and the Emperor
+of Germany endeavoured to establish the same limitation in the war of
+1870. The old maxim of war, of which the custom is a survival, has
+long since been disproved by political economy--the doctrine, namely,
+that a loss to one country is a gain to another, or that one country
+profits by the exact extent of the injury that it effects against the
+property of its adversary. Having lost its basis in reason, it only
+remains to remove it from practice.
+
+If we turn for a moment from this aspect of naval warfare to the actual
+conduct of hostilities at sea, the desire to obtain forcible possession
+of an enemy’s vessels must clearly have had a beneficial effect in
+rendering the loss of life less extensive than it was in battles on
+land. To capture a ship, it was desirable, if possible, to disable
+without destroying it; so that the fire of each side was more generally
+directed against the masts and rigging than against the hull or lower
+parts of the vessel. In the case of the ‘Berwick,’ an English 74-gun
+ship, which struck her colours to the French frigate, the ‘Alceste,’
+only four sailors were wounded, and the captain, whose head was taken
+off by a bar-shot, was the only person slain; and ‘so small a loss was
+attributed to the high firing of the French, who, making sure of the
+‘Berwick’s’ capture, and wanting such a ship entire in their fleet,
+were wise enough to do as little injury as possible to her hull.’[88]
+The great battle between the English and Dutch fleets off Camperdown
+(1795) was exceptional both for the damage inflicted by both on the
+hulls of their adversaries, and consequently for the heavy loss of
+life on either side. ‘The appearance of the British ships at the close
+of the action was very unlike what it generally is when the French
+or Spaniards have been the opponents of the former. Not a single mast
+nor even a top-mast was shot away; nor were the rigging and sails of
+the ships in their usual tattered state. It was at the hulls of their
+adversaries that the Dutchmen had directed their shot.’[89] As the
+English naturally retaliated, though ‘as trophies the appearance of
+the Dutch prizes was gratifying,’ as ships of war ‘they were not the
+slightest acquisition to the navy of England.’[90]
+
+When this happened, as it could not but often do in pitched naval
+battles, the Government sometimes made good to the captors the value of
+the prizes that the serious nature of the conflict had caused them to
+lose. Thus in the case of the six French prizes made at the Battle of
+the Nile, only three of which ever reached Plymouth, the Government,
+‘in order that the captors might not suffer for the prowess they had
+displayed in riddling the hulls of the captured ships, paid for each of
+the destroyed 74s, the “Guerrier,” “Heureux,” and “Mercure,” the sum of
+20,000_l._, which was as much as the least valuable of the remaining
+74s had been valued at.’
+
+It is curious to notice distinctions in naval warfare between lawful
+and unlawful methods similar to those conspicuous on land. Such
+projectiles as bits of iron ore, pointed stones, nails, or glass, are
+excluded from the list of things that may be used in _good war_; and
+the Declaration of St. Petersburg condemns explosive bullets as much
+on one element as on the other. Unfounded charges by one belligerent
+against another are, however, always liable to bring the illicit
+method into actual use on both sides under the pretext of reprisals;
+as we see in the following order of the day, issued at Brest by the
+French Vice-Admiral Marshal Conflans (Nov. 8, 1759): ‘It is absolutely
+contrary to the law of nations to make bad war, and to shoot shells at
+the enemy, who must always be fought according to the rules of honour,
+with the arms generally employed by polite nations. Yet some captains
+have complained that the English have used such weapons against them.
+It is, therefore, only on these complaints, and with an extreme
+reluctance, that it has been resolved to embark hollow shells on
+vessels of the line, but it is expressly forbidden to use them unless
+the enemy begin.’[91]
+
+So the English in their turn charged the French with making bad
+war. The wound received by Nelson at Aboukir, on the forehead, was
+attributed to a piece of iron or a langridge shot.[92] And the wounds
+that the crew of the ‘Brunswick’ received from the ‘Vengeur’ in the
+famous battle between the French and English fleets in June 1794, are
+said to have been peculiarly distressing, owing to the French employing
+langridge shot of raw ore and old nails, and to their throwing
+stinkpots into the portholes, which caused most painful burnings and
+scaldings.[93] It is safest to discredit such accusations altogether,
+for there is no limit to the barbarities that may come into play, in
+consequence of too ready a credulity.
+
+Red-hot shot, legitimate for the defence of land forts against ships,
+used not to be considered good war in the contests of ships with one
+another. In the three hours’ action between the ‘Lively’ and the
+‘Tourterelle,’ a French privateer, the use by the latter of hot-shot,
+‘not usually deemed honourable warfare,’ was considered to be wrong,
+but a wrong on the part of those who equipped her for sea more than
+on the part of the captain who fired them.[94] The English assailing
+batteries that fired red-hot shot against Glückstadt in 1813 are said
+to have resorted to ‘a mode of warfare very unusual with us since the
+siege of Gibraltar.’[95]
+
+The ‘Treatise on Tactics,’ by the Emperor Leo VI., carries back the
+record of the means employed against an enemy in naval warfare to
+the ninth century. The things he recommends as most effective are:
+cranes, to let fall heavy weights on the enemy’s decks; caltrops,
+with iron spikes, to wound his feet;[96] jars full of quicklime,
+to suffocate him; jars containing combustibles, to burn him; jars
+containing poisonous reptiles, to bite him; and Greek fire with its
+noise like thunder, to frighten as well as burn him.[97] Many of these
+methods were of immemorial usage; for Scipio knew the merits of jars
+full of pitch, and Hannibal of jars full of vipers.[98] Nothing was
+too bad for use in those days; nor can it be ascertained when or why
+they ceased to be used. Greek fire was used with great effect in the
+sea-battles between the Saracens and Christians; and it is a fair cause
+for wonder that the invention of gunpowder should have so entirely
+superseded it as to cause its very manufacture to have been forgotten.
+Neither does history record the date of, nor the reason for, the disuse
+of quicklime, which in the famous fight off Dover in 1217 between
+the French and English contributed so greatly to the victory of the
+latter.[99]
+
+It is difficult to believe that sentiments of humanity should have
+caused these methods to be discarded from maritime hostilities; but
+that such motives led to a certain mitigation in the use of fire-ships
+appears from a passage in Captain Brenton’s ‘Naval History,’ where he
+says: ‘The use of fire-ships has long been laid aside, to the honour of
+the nation which first dispensed with this barbarous aggravation of the
+horrors of war.’ That is to say, as he explains it, though fire-ships
+continued to accompany the fleets, they were only used in an anchorage
+where there was a fair chance of the escape of the crew against which
+they were sent; they ceased to be used, as at one time, to burn or
+blow up disabled ships, which the conqueror dared not board and carry
+into port, and which were covered with the wounded and dying. The last
+instance in which they were so used by the English was in the fight
+off Toulon, in 1744; and their use on that occasion is said to have
+received merited reproach from an historian of the day.[100]
+
+As the service of a fire-ship was one that required the greatest
+bravery and coolness--since it was, of course, attacked in every
+possible way, and it was often difficult to escape by the boat chained
+behind it--it displays the extraordinary inconsistency of opinion about
+such matters that it should have been accounted rather a service of
+infamy than of honour. Molloy, in 1769, wrote of it as the practice of
+his day to put to death prisoners made from a fire-ship: ‘Generally
+the persons found in them are put to death if taken.’[101] And another
+writer says: ‘Whether it be from a refined idea, or from the most
+determined resentment towards those who act in fire-ships, may be
+difficult to judge; but there is rarely any quarter given to such as
+fall into the enemy’s power.’[102]
+
+Clock-machines, or torpedoes, were introduced into European warfare by
+the English, being intended to destroy Napoleon’s ships at Boulogne in
+1804. It is remarkable that the use of them was at first reprobated by
+Captain Brenton, and by Lord St. Vincent, who foresaw that other Powers
+would in turn adopt the innovation.[103] The French, who picked up some
+of them near Boulogne, called them infernal machines. But at present
+they seem fairly established as part of good warfare, in default of any
+international agreement against them, such as that which exists against
+explosive bullets.
+
+The same International Act which abolished privateering between the
+signatory Powers settled also between them two other disputed points
+which for centuries were a frequent cause of war and jealousy--namely,
+the liability of the property of neutrals to be seized when found in
+the ships of an enemy, and of the property of an enemy to be seized
+when found in the ships of a neutral.
+
+Over the abstract right of belligerents so to deal with the ships
+or property of neutral Powers the publicists for long fought a
+battle-royal, contending either that a neutral ship should be regarded
+as neutral territory, or that an enemy’s property was lawful prize
+anywhere. Whilst the French or Continental theory regarded the
+nationality of the vessel rather than of its cargo, so that the goods
+of a neutral might be fairly seized on an enemy’s vessel, but those
+of an enemy were safe even in a neutral ship; the English theory was
+diametrically the opposite, for the Admiralty restored a neutral’s
+property taken on an enemy’s vessel, but confiscated an enemy’s goods
+if found on a neutral vessel. This difference between the English
+rule and that of other countries was a source of endless contention.
+Frederick II. of Prussia, in 1753, first resisted the English claim to
+seize hostile property sailing under a neutral flag. Then came against
+the same claim the first Armed Neutrality of 1780, headed by Russia,
+and again in 1801 the second armed coalition of the Northern Powers.
+The difference of rule was, therefore, as such differences always must
+be, a source of real weakness to England, on account of the enemies it
+raised against her all over the world. Yet the Continental theory of
+free ships making free goods was considered for generations to be so
+adverse to the real interests of England, that Lord Nelson, in 1801,
+characterised it in the House of Lords as ‘a proposition so monstrous
+in itself, so contrary to the law of nations, and so injurious to the
+maritime interests of England, as to justify war with the advocates
+of such a doctrine, so long as a single man, a single shilling, or a
+single drop of blood remained in the country.’[104] The Treaty of Paris
+has made binding the Continental rule, and in spite of Lord Nelson free
+ships now make free goods.
+
+The fact, therefore, that if England were now at war with France she
+could not take French property (unless it were contraband) from a
+Russian or American ship, we owe not to the publicists who were divided
+about it, nor to naval opinion which was decided against it, but to the
+accidental alliance between France and England in the Crimean war. In
+order to co-operate together, each waived its old claim, according to
+which France would have been free to seize the property of a neutral
+found on Russian vessels, and England to seize Russian property on the
+vessels of a neutral. As the United States and other neutral Powers
+as well would probably have resisted by arms the claim of either so
+to interfere with their neutrality, the mutual concession was one of
+common prudence; and as the same opposition would have been perennial,
+it was no great sacrifice on the part of either to perpetuate and
+extend by a treaty at the close of the war the agreement that at first
+was only to last for its continuance.
+
+Much, however, as that treaty has done for the peace of the world, by
+assimilating in these respects the maritime law of nations, it has left
+many customs unchanged to challenge still the attention of reformers.
+It is therefore of some practical interest to consider of what nature
+future changes should be, inasmuch as, if we cannot agree to cease from
+fighting altogether, the next best thing we can do is to reduce the
+pretexts for it to as few as possible.
+
+The reservation, then, in favour of confiscating property that is
+contraband of war has left the right of visiting and searching neutral
+or hostile merchantmen for contraband untouched; though nothing has
+been a more fruitful source of quarrel than the want of a common
+definition of what constitutes contraband. Anything which, without
+further manipulation, adds directly to an enemy’s power, as weapons
+of war, are contraband by universal admission; but whether corn and
+provisions are, as some text-writers assert and others deny; whether
+coined money, horses, or saddles are, as was decided in 1863 between
+the Northern Powers of Europe; whether tar and pitch for ships are, as
+was disputed between England and Sweden for 200 years; whether coal
+should be, as Prince Bismarck claimed against England in 1870; or
+whether rice is a war-threatening point of difference between England
+and France in this very year of grace; these are questions that remain
+absolutely undecided, or are left to the treaties between the several
+Powers or the arbitrary caprice of belligerents.
+
+The Declaration of Paris was equally silent as to the right (demanded
+by all the Powers save England) for ships of war, which have always
+been exempt from search, to exempt from search also the merchant
+vessels sailing under their convoy. So fundamental a divergence between
+the maritime usages of different countries can only be sustained under
+the peril of incurring hostility and war, without any corresponding
+advantage in compensation.
+
+The Declaration of Paris has also left untouched the old usage of
+embargoes. A nation wronged by another may still seize the vessels of
+that other which may be in its ports, in order to secure attention to
+its claims; restoring them in the event of a peaceable settlement,
+but confiscating them if war ensues. The resemblance of this practice
+of hostile embargo to robbery, ‘occurring as it does in the midst of
+peace ... ought,’ says an American jurist, ‘to make it disgraceful and
+drive it into disuse.’[105] It would be as reasonable to seize the
+persons and property of all the merchants resident in the country, as
+used to be done by France and England. In 1795, Holland, having been
+conquered by France, became thereby an enemy of England. Accordingly,
+‘orders were issued to seize all Dutch vessels in British ports;’ in
+virtue of which, several gun-ships and between fifty and sixty merchant
+vessels in Plymouth Sound were detained by the port admiral.[106] It is
+difficult to conceive anything less defensible as a practice between
+civilised States.
+
+It equally descends from the barbarous origin of maritime law that all
+ships of an enemy wrecked on our coast, or forced to take refuge in our
+harbours by stress of weather or want of provisions, or in ignorance
+of the existence of hostilities, should become ours by right of war.
+There are generous instances to the contrary. The Spanish Governor of
+Havana in 1746, when an English vessel was driven into that hostile
+port by stress of weather, refused to seize the vessel and take the
+captain prisoner; and so did another Spanish governor in the case of
+an English vessel whose captain was ignorant that Honduras was hostile
+territory. But these cases are the exception; the rule being, that a
+hostile Power avails itself of a captain’s ignorance or distress to
+make him a prisoner and his ship a prize of war; another proof, if
+further needed, how very little magnanimity really enters into the
+conduct of hostilities.
+
+It is a still further abuse of the rights of war that a belligerent
+State may do what it pleases, not only with all the vessels of its
+own subjects, but with all those of neutrals as well which happen to
+be within its jurisdiction at the beginning of a war; that it may, on
+paying the owners the value of their freight beforehand, confiscate
+such vessels and compel them to serve in the transport of its troops
+or its munitions of war. Yet this is the so-called _jus angariæ_, to
+which Prince Bismarck appealed when in the war with France the Germans
+sank some British vessels at the mouth of the Seine.[107] It is true we
+received liberal compensation, but the right is none the less one which
+all the Powers are interested in abolishing.
+
+If, then, from the preceding retrospect it appears that whatever
+advance we have made on the maritime usages of our ancestors has been
+due solely to international agreement, and to a friendly concert
+between the chief Powers of the world, acting with a view to their
+permanent and collective interests, the inference is evidently in
+favour of any further advance being only possible in the same way. The
+renunciations of each Power redound to the benefit of each and all;
+nor can the gain of the world involve any real loss for the several
+nations that compose it. We shall therefore, perhaps, not err far from
+the truth, if we imagine the following articles, in complement of those
+formulated in Paris in 1856, to constitute the International Marine
+Code which will be found in the future to be most calculated to remove
+sources of contention between nations, and best adapted, therefore, to
+the permanent interests of the contracting parties:
+
+ 1. Privateering is and remains abolished.
+
+ 2. The merchant vessels and cargoes of belligerents shall be exempted
+ from seizure and confiscation.
+
+ 3. The colonies of either belligerent shall be excluded from the field
+ of legitimate hostilities, and the neutrality of their territory
+ shall extend to their ships and commerce.
+
+ 4. The right of visiting and searching neutral or hostile merchantmen
+ for contraband of war shall be abolished.
+
+ 5. Contraband of war shall be defined by international agreement; and
+ to deal in such contraband shall be made a breach of the civil
+ law, prohibited and punished by each State as a violation of its
+ proclamation of neutrality.
+
+ 6. Except in the case of contraband as aforesaid, all trade shall
+ be lawful between the subjects of either belligerent, since
+ individuals are no more involved in the quarrel between their
+ respective governments at sea than they are on land.
+
+ 7. The only limitation to commerce shall be so effective a blockade of
+ an enemy’s ports as shall render it impossible for ships to enter
+ or leave them; and the mere notification that a port is blockaded
+ shall not justify the seizure of ships that have sailed from, or
+ are sailing to, them in any part of the world.
+
+ 8. The right to lay hostile embargoes on the ships of a friendly
+ Power, by reason of a dispute arising between them, shall be
+ abolished.
+
+ 9. The right to confiscate or destroy the ships of a friendly Power
+ for the service of a belligerent State, the _jus angariæ_, shall be
+ abolished.
+
+What, then, would remain for the naval forces of maritime Powers to do?
+Everything, it may be replied, which constitutes legitimate warfare,
+and conforms to the elementary conception of a state of hostility; the
+blockading of hostile ports, and all the play of attack and defence
+that may be imagined between belligerent navies. Whatsoever is more
+than this--the plunder of an enemy’s commerce, embargoes on his ships,
+the search of neutral vessels--not only cometh of piracy, as has been
+shown, but is in fact piracy itself, without any necessary connection
+with the conduct of legitimate hostilities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MILITARY REPRISALS.
+
+ _Si quis clamet iniquum non dare pœnas qui peccavit, respondeo
+ multo esse iniquius tot innocentium millia citra meritum in
+ extremam vocari calamitatem._--ERASMUS.
+
+ International law on legitimate reprisals--The Brussels Conference
+ on the subject--Illustrations of barbarous reprisals--Instances
+ of non-retaliation--Savage reprisals in days of chivalry--Hanging
+ the commonest reprisals for a brave defence, as illustrated by the
+ warfare of the fifteenth century--Survival of the custom to our own
+ times--The massacre of a conquered garrison still a law of war--The
+ shelling of Strasburg by the Germans--Brutal warfare of Alexander
+ the Great--The connection between bravery and cruelty--The
+ abolition of slavery in its effects on war--The storming of
+ Magdeburg, Brescia, and Rome--Cicero on Roman warfare--The
+ reprisals of the Germans in France in 1870--Their revival of the
+ custom of taking hostages--Their resort to robbery as a plea
+ of reprisals--General Von Moltke on perpetual peace--The moral
+ responsibility of the military profession--The Press as a potent
+ cause of war--Plea for the abolition of demands for unconditional
+ surrender, such as led to the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.
+
+
+On no subject connected with the operations of war has International
+Law come as yet to lamer conclusions than concerning Military
+Reprisals, or the revenge that may be fairly exacted by one belligerent
+from the other for violation of the canons of honourable warfare.
+
+General Halleck, for instance, whilst as against an enemy who puts in
+force the extreme rights of war he justifies a belligerent in following
+suit, denies the right of the latter to do so against an enemy who
+passes all bounds and conducts war in a downright savage fashion.
+Whilst therefore, according to him, the law of retaliation would never
+justify such acts as the massacre of prisoners, the use of poison, or
+promiscuous slaughter, he would consider as legitimate reprisals acts
+like the sequestration by Denmark of debts due from Danish to British
+subjects in retaliation for the confiscation by England of the Danish
+fleet in 1807, or Napoleon’s seizure of all English travellers in
+France in retaliation for England’s seizure and condemnation of French
+vessels in 1803.[108] And a French writer, in the same spirit, denies
+that the French Government would have been justified in retaliating on
+Russia, when the Czar had his French prisoners of war consigned to the
+mines of Siberia.[109]
+
+The distinction is clearly untenable on any rational theory of the laws
+of retributive justice. You may retaliate for the lesser, but not for
+the greater injury! You may check resort to infamous hostilities by the
+threat of reprisals, but must fold your hands and submit, if your enemy
+becomes utterly barbarous! You may restrain him from burning your crops
+by burning his, but must be content to go without redress if he slays
+your wives and children!
+
+How difficult the question really is appears from the attempt made
+to settle it at the Brussels Conference of 1874, when the following
+clauses formed part of the original Russian project submitted to the
+consideration of that meeting:
+
+_Section IV._ 69. ‘Reprisals are admissible in extreme cases only, due
+regard being paid as far as possible to the laws of humanity when it
+shall have been unquestionably proved that the laws and customs of war
+have been violated by the enemy, and that they have had recourse to
+measures condemned by the law of nations.’
+
+70. ‘The selection of the means and extent of the reprisals should be
+proportionate to the degree of the infraction of the law committed by
+the enemy. Reprisals that are disproportionately severe are contrary to
+the rules of international law.’
+
+71. ‘Reprisals should be allowed only on the authority of the
+commander-in-chief, who shall likewise determine the degree of their
+severity and their duration.’
+
+The delicacy of dealing with such a subject, when the memories of
+the Franco-German war were still fresh and green, led ultimately to
+a unanimous agreement to suppress these clauses altogether, and to
+leave the matter, as the Belgian deputy expressed it, in the domain
+of unwritten law till the progress of science and civilisation should
+bring about a completely satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, the
+majority of men will be inclined, in reference to this resolution,
+to say with the Russian Baron Jomini, the skilful President of that
+Military Council: ‘I regret that the uncertainty of silence is to
+prevail with respect to one of the most bitter necessities of war.
+If the practice could be suppressed by this reticence, I could not
+but approve of this course; but if it is still to exist among the
+necessities of war, this reticence and this obscurity may, it is to be
+feared, remove any limits to its existence.’
+
+The necessity of some regulation of reprisals, such as that contained
+in the clauses suggested at Brussels, is no less attested by the events
+of the war of 1870 than by the customs in this respect which have at
+all times prevailed, and which, as earlier in time, form a fitting
+introduction to those later occurrences.
+
+That the fear of reprisals should act as a certain check upon the
+character of hostilities is too obvious a consideration not to have
+always served as a wholesome restraint upon military licence. When, for
+instance, Philip II. of Spain in his war with the Netherlands ordered
+that no prisoners of war should be released or exchanged, nor any
+contributions be accepted as an immunity from confiscation, the threat
+of retaliation led to the withdrawal of his iniquitous proclamation.
+Nor would other similar instances be far to seek.
+
+Nevertheless, it is evident that, as seldom as war itself is prevented
+by consideration of the forces in opposition, will its peculiar
+excesses, which constitute its details, be restrained by the fear of
+retaliatory measures; and inasmuch as the primary offence is more
+often the creation of rumour than a proved fact, the usual result
+of reprisals is, not that one belligerent amends its ways, but that
+both belligerents become more savage and enter on a fatal career of
+competitive atrocities. In the wars of the fifteenth century between
+the Turks and Venetians, ‘Sultan Mahomet would not suffer his
+soldiers to give quarter, but allowed them a ducat for every head, and
+the Venetians did the same.’[110] When the Duke of Alva was in the
+Netherlands, the Spaniards, at the siege of Haarlem, threw the heads of
+two Dutch officers over the walls. The Dutch in return beheaded twelve
+Spanish prisoners, and sent their heads into the Spanish trenches.
+The Spaniards in revenge hung a number of prisoners in sight of the
+besieged; and the latter in return killed more prisoners; and so it
+went on during all the time that Alva was in the country, without the
+least improvement resulting from such sanguinary reprisals.[111] At
+the siege of Malta, the Grand Master, in revenge for some horrible
+Turkish barbarities, massacred all his prisoners and shot their heads
+from his cannon into the Turkish camp.[112] In one of the wars of Louis
+XIV., the Imperialist forces having put to death a French lieutenant
+and thirty troopers a few hours after having promised them quarter,
+Feuquières, for reprisals, slew the whole garrison of two towns that he
+won by surprise, though the number so slain in each instance amounted
+to 650 men (1689).[113]
+
+To all these cases the question asked by Vattel very pertinently
+applies: ‘What right have you to cut off the nose and ears of the
+ambassador of a barbarian who has treated your ambassador in that
+manner?’ The question is not an easy one to answer, for we have no more
+right in war than in civil life to punish the innocent for the guilty
+apart from the ordinary accidents of hostilities, even if otherwise
+we must dispense with redress altogether. To do so by intention and
+in cold blood is ferocious, whatever the pretext of justification,
+and is never worth the passing gratification it affords. The citizens
+of Ghent, in their famous war with the Earl of Flanders, not only
+destroyed his house, but the silver cradle and bathing tub he had used
+as a child and the very font in which he had been baptized; but such
+reprisals are soon regretted, and read very pitiably in the eyes of the
+after-world.
+
+It is pleasanter to record some instances where abstinence from
+reprisals has not been without its reward. It is said that Cæsar in
+Iberia, when, in spite of a truce, the enemy killed many of his men,
+instead of retaliating, released some of his prisoners and thereby
+brought the foe to regard him with favour. We read in Froissart that
+the Lisboners refrained from retaliating on the Castilians, when the
+latter mutilated their Portuguese prisoners; and the English Government
+acted nobly when it refused to reciprocate the decree of the French
+Convention (though that also was meant as a measure of reprisals) that
+no English or Hanoverian prisoner should be allowed any quarter.[114]
+But the best story of this kind is that told by Herodotus of Xerxes
+the Persian. The Spartans had thrown into a well the Persian envoys who
+had come to demand of them earth and water. In remorse they sent two of
+their nobles to Xerxes to be killed in atonement; but Xerxes, when he
+heard the purport of their visit, answered them that he would not act
+like the Spartans, who by killing his heralds had broken the laws that
+were regarded as sacred by all mankind, and that, of such conduct as he
+blamed in them, he would never be guilty himself.[115]
+
+But the most curious feature in the history of reprisals is the fact
+that they were once regarded as justly exacted for the mere offence
+of hostile opposition or self-defence. Grotius states that it was the
+almost constant practice of the Romans to kill the leaders of an enemy,
+whether they had surrendered or been captured, on the day of triumph.
+Jugurtha indeed was put to death in prison; but the more usual practice
+appears to have been to keep conquered potentates in custody, after
+they had been led in triumph before the consul’s chariot. This was the
+fate of Perseus, king of Macedonia, who was also allowed to retain
+his attendants, money, plate, and furniture;[116] of Gentius, king of
+Illyria;[117] of Bituitus, king of the Arvernians. Prisoners of less
+distinction were sold as slaves, or kept in custody till their friends
+paid their ransom.
+
+But in the mediæval history of Europe, in the so-called times of
+chivalry, a far worse spirit prevailed with regard to the treatment
+of captives. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the brightest memories of
+chivalry, was responsible for the promiscuous slaughter of three days
+which the Crusaders exacted for the six weeks’ siege which it had cost
+them to take Jerusalem (1099). The Emperor Barbarossa had 1,190 Swabian
+prisoners delivered to the executioner at Milan, or shot from military
+engines.[118] Charles of Anjou reserved many prisoners, taken at the
+battle of Beneventum, to be killed as criminals on his entrance into
+Naples. When the French took the castle of Pesquière from the Venetians
+by storm, they slew all but three who surrendered to the pleasure of
+the king; and Louis XII., who counted for a humane monarch, though his
+victims offered 100,000 ducats for their lives, swore that he would
+neither eat nor drink till they were hanged (1509).[119]
+
+The indignation of the Roman Senate on one occasion with a consul
+who had sold as slaves 10,000 Ligurian prisoners, though they had
+surrendered at discretion,[120] was a sentiment that never affected the
+warriors of mediæval Christendom. A surrender at discretion ceased to
+constitute a claim for mercy. Where the pagan held it wrong to enslave,
+the Christian never hesitated to kill. Froissart’s story of the six
+citizens of Calais, whom Edward III. was with difficulty restrained
+from hanging for the obstinate siege which their town had resisted,
+throws a light over the war customs of that time, which other incidents
+of history abundantly confirm. The record of the capitulations of
+cities or garrisons is no pleasant one, but it is a record which must
+be touched upon, in order that war and its still prevalent maxims may
+be judged at their proper value. We need scarcely travel further than
+the fifteenth century alone in search of facts to place in its proper
+light this aspect of martial atrocities.
+
+When the town of Rouen surrendered to Henry V. of England, the latter
+stipulated for three of the citizens to be left to his disposal, of
+whom two purchased their lives, and the third was beheaded (1419).[121]
+When the same king the year following was besieging the castle of
+Montereau, he sent some twenty prisoners to treat with the governor
+for a surrender; but when the governor refused to treat, even to save
+their lives, and when, after a fearful leave-taking with their wives
+and relatives, they had been escorted back to the English army, ‘the
+King of England ordered a gallows to be erected and had them all hanged
+in sight of those within the castle.’[122] When the English took the
+castle of Rougemont by storm, and some sixty of its defenders alive,
+with the loss of only one Englishman, Henry V., in revenge for his
+death, caused all the prisoners to be drowned in the Loire.[123] When
+Meaux surrendered to the same king, it was stipulated that six of
+its bravest defenders should be delivered up to _justice_, four of
+whom were beheaded at Paris, and its commander at once hung to a tree
+outside the walls of the city (1422).[124]
+
+Not that there was any special cruelty in the English mode of warfare.
+They simply conformed to the customs of the time, as we may see by
+reference to the French and Burgundian wars into which they allowed
+themselves to be drawn. In 1434, the garrison of Chaumont ‘was soon
+so hardly pressed that it surrendered at discretion to the Duke of
+Burgundy (Philip the Good), who had upwards of 100 of them hanged;’ and
+as with the townsmen, so with those in the castle.[125] Bournonville,
+who commanded Soissons for the Duke of Burgundy, and whom Monstrelet
+calls ‘the flower of the warriors of all France,’ was beheaded at
+Paris, after the capture of the town, by order of the king and council,
+and his body hung to a gibbet, like a common malefactor’s (1414).[126]
+When Dinant was taken by storm by the Burgundians, the prisoners,
+about 800, were drowned before Bovines (1466).[127] When the town of
+Saint-frou surrendered to the Duke of Burgundy, ten men, left to the
+disposal of that warrior, were beheaded; and so it fared also with
+the town of Tongres (1467).[128] After the storming and slaughter at
+Liège, before the Duke of Burgundy (Charles the Bold) left the city,
+‘a great number of those poor creatures who had hid themselves in the
+houses when the town was taken and were afterwards made prisoners, were
+hanged’ (1468).[129] At Nesle, most of those who were taken alive were
+hung, and some had their hands cut off (1472).[130] After the battle
+of Granson, the Swiss retook two castles from the French, and hung
+all the Burgundians they found in them. They then retook the town and
+castle of Granson, and ordered 512 Germans whom the Burgundians had
+hung to be cut down, and as many of the Burgundians as were still in
+Granson to be suspended on the same halters (1476). In the skirmishes
+that occurred in a time of truce on the frontiers of Picardy, between
+the French king’s forces and those of the Duke of Austria, ‘all the
+prisoners that were taken on both sides were immediately hanged,
+without permitting any, of what degree or rank soever, to be ransomed’
+(1481). And as a climax to these facts, let us recall the decree of the
+Duke of Anjou, who, when Montpellier was taken by siege, condemned 600
+prisoners to be put to death, 200 by the sword, 200 by the halter, and
+200 by fire, and who, but for the remonstrances of a cardinal and a
+friar, would undoubtedly have executed his sentence.
+
+Ghastly facts enough these! and a strange insight they afford us into
+the real character of a profession which, in the days when these things
+were its commonest occurrences, was held to be the noblest of all, but
+of which it is only too patent that its mainsprings were simply the
+brigand’s love of plunder and of bloodshed. One story may be quoted
+to show that in this respect the sixteenth century was no improvement
+on the fifteenth. In the war between the Dutch and the Spaniards, the
+captain of Weerd Castle, having previously refused to surrender to Sir
+Francis de Vere, begged at last for a capitulation with the honours
+of war; Vere’s answer was, that the honours of war were halters for a
+garrison that had dared to defend such a hovel against artillery. The
+commandant was killed first, and the remaining 26 men, having been
+made to draw black and white straws, the 12 who drew the white straws
+were hanged, the thirteenth only escaping by consenting to act as
+executioner of the rest![131]
+
+It is clear, therefore, that in the wars of the past the axe and the
+halter have played as conspicuous a part as the sword or the lance;
+a fact to which its due prominence has not always been given in the
+standard histories of military antiquities. It is surprising to find
+how close to the glories of war lie the sickening vulgarities of murder.
+
+To the Duke of Somerset, the regent of England for Edward VI., appears
+to be due the credit of instituting a milder treatment of a besieged
+but surrendered garrison than had been previously customary. For De
+Thou, the historian, speaks of the admiration the Duke received for
+sparing the lives of a Scotch garrison, contrary to that ‘ancient maxim
+in war which declares that a weak garrison forfeits all claim to mercy
+on the part of the conquerors, when, with more courage than prudence,
+they obstinately persevere in defending an ill-fortified place against
+the royal army,’ or refuse reasonable conditions.
+
+But the ancient maxim lasted, in spite of this better example,
+throughout the seventeenth and till late into the eighteenth century,
+for we find Vattel even then thus protesting against it: ‘How could it
+be conceived in an enlightened age that it was lawful to punish with
+death a governor who has defended his town to the last extremity, or
+who in a weak place had the courage to hold out against a royal army?
+In the last century this notion still prevailed; it was looked upon as
+one of the laws of war, and is not even at present totally exploded.
+What an idea! to punish a brave man for having performed his duty.’[132]
+
+But not even yet is the notion definitely expunged from the unwritten
+code of martial etiquette. The original Russian project, submitted
+to the Brussels Conference, proposed to exclude, among other illicit
+means of war, ‘the threat of extermination towards a garrison that
+obstinately holds a fortress.’ The proposal was unanimously rejected,
+and that clause was carefully excluded from the published modified
+text! But as the execution of a threat is morally of the same value
+as the threat itself, it is evident that the massacre of a brave but
+conquered garrison still holds its place among the laws of Christian
+warfare!
+
+This peculiar and most sanguinary law of reprisals has always been
+defended by the common military sophism, that it shortens the horrors
+of war. The threat of capital punishment against the governor or
+defenders of a town should naturally dispose them to make a conditional
+surrender, and so spare both sides the miseries of a siege. But
+arguments in defence of atrocities, on the ground of their shortening
+a war, and coming from military quarters, must be viewed with the
+greatest suspicion, and, inasmuch as they provoke reprisals and so
+intensify passion, with the greatest distrust. It was to such an
+argument that the Germans resorted in defence of their shelling the
+town of Strasburg, in order to intimidate the inhabitants and drive
+them to force General Uhrich to a surrender. ‘The abbreviation,’ said
+a German writer, ‘of the period of actual fighting and of the war
+itself is an act of humanity towards both parties;’[133] although the
+savage act failed in its purpose and General Werder had to fall back,
+after his gratuitous destruction of life and property, on the slower
+process of a regular siege. If their tendency to shorten a war be the
+final justification of military proceedings, the ground begins to slip
+from under us against the use of aconitine or of clothes infected
+with the small-pox. Therefore such a pretext should meet with prompt
+condemnation, notwithstanding the efforts of the modern military school
+to render it popular upon the earth.
+
+In respect, therefore, to this law of reprisals, the comparison is
+not to the credit of modern times as compared with the pagan era. A
+surrender, which in Greek and Roman warfare involved as a rule personal
+security, came in Christianised Europe to involve capital punishment
+out of motives of pure vindictiveness. The chivalry so often associated
+with the battle-field as at least a redeeming feature fades on closer
+inspection into the veriest fiction of romance. Bravery under any form
+has been the constant pretext for capital reprisals. Edward I. had
+William Wallace, the brave Scotch leader, executed on Tower Hill;
+and it has been observed by one writer, as the facts already quoted
+prove, that the custom of thus killing defeated generals ‘may be traced
+through a series of years so connected and extensive that we are not
+able to point out the exact time when it ceased.’[134]
+
+A characteristic incident of this sort is connected with the famous
+pacification of Guienne by Montluc in 1562. Montluc had won Montsegur
+by storm, and its commander had been taken alive. The latter was a man
+of notorious valour, and in a previous campaign had been Montluc’s
+fellow-soldier and friend. For that reason many interceded for his
+life, but Montluc decided to hang him, and simply on account of his
+valour. ‘I well knew his courage,’ he says, ‘which made me hang him....
+I knew him to be valiant, but that made me the rather put him to
+death.’ What of your chivalry after that?
+
+But Alexander the Great, whose career has been the ideal of all
+succeeding aspirants to military fame, dealt even more severely than
+Montluc with Betis, the gallant defender of Gaza. When Gaza was at last
+taken by storm, Betis, after fighting heroically, had the misfortune to
+be taken alive and to be brought into the presence of the conqueror.
+Alexander addressed him thus: ‘You shall not die, Betis, in the manner
+you wished; but make up your mind to suffer whatever torture can be
+thought of against a prisoner;’ and when Betis for all answer returned
+him but the silence of disdain, Alexander had thongs fixed to his
+ankles, and, himself acting as charioteer, drove his yet living victim
+round the city, attached to his chariot wheels; priding himself that by
+such conduct he rivalled Achilles’ treatment of Hector.[135]
+
+A valiant resistance was with Alexander always a sufficient motive
+for the most sanguinary reprisals. Arimages, who defended a fortified
+rock in Sogdia, thought his position so strong that when summoned to
+surrender, he asked tauntingly whether Alexander could fly; and for
+this offence, when, unable to hold out any longer, Arimages and his
+relations descended to Alexander’s camp to beg for quarter, Alexander
+had them first of all flogged and then crucified at the foot of the
+rock they had so bravely defended.[136] After the long siege of Tyre,
+Alexander had 2,000 Tyrians, over and above the 6,000 who fell during
+the storming of that city, nailed to crosses along the shore,[137]
+perhaps in reprisal for a violation of the laws of war--for Quintus
+Curtius declares that the Tyrians had murdered some Macedonian
+ambassadors, and Arrian, who makes no mention of the crucifixion,
+declares that they slew some Macedonian prisoners and threw them from
+their walls--but more probably (since there were evidently different
+stories of the Tyrians’ offence) on account simply of the obstinate
+resistance they had offered to Alexander’s attack.
+
+The Macedonian conqueror regarded his whole expedition against Persia
+as an act of reprisals for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, 150
+years before his own time. When he set fire to the Persian capital
+and palace, Persepolis, he justified himself against Parmenio’s
+remonstrances on the ground that it was in revenge for the destruction
+of the temples in Greece during the Persian invasion;[138] and this
+motive was constantly present with him, in justification both of the
+war itself and of particular atrocities connected with it. In the
+course of his expedition, he came to a city of the Branchidæ, whose
+ancestors at Miletus had betrayed the treasures of a temple in their
+charge to Xerxes, and had by him been removed from Miletus to Asia.
+As Greeks they met Alexander’s army with joy, and at once surrendered
+their city to him. The next day, after reflection given to the matter,
+Alexander had every single inhabitant of the city slain, in spite of
+their powerlessness, in spite of their supplications, in spite of their
+community of language and origin. He even had the walls of the city
+dug up from their foundation, and the trees of their sacred groves
+uprooted, that not a trace of their city might remain.[139]
+
+Nor can doubt be thrown on these deeds by the fact that they are
+only mentioned by Quintus Curtius and not by Arrian. The silence of
+the one is no proof of the falsity or credulity of the other. Both
+writers lived many centuries after Alexander, and were dependent for
+their knowledge on the writings, then extant but long since lost, of
+contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the expedition to Asia. That those
+witnesses often gave conflicting accounts of the same event we have the
+assurance of either writer; but since it is impossible to determine
+the degree of discretion with which each made their selections from
+the original authorities, it is only reasonable to regard them both as
+of the same and equal validity. Seneca, who lived before Arrian and
+who therefore was equally conversant with the original authorities,
+hardly ever mentions Alexander without expressions of the strongest
+reprobation.
+
+Cruelty, in fact, is revealed to us by history as the most conspicuous
+trait in the character of Alexander, though not in his case nor in
+others inconsistent with occasional acts of magnanimity and the gleams
+of a higher nature. This cruelty, however, taken in connection with
+his undoubted bravery, calls in question the truth of a remark made by
+Philip de Commines, and supported, he affirmed, by all historians, that
+no cruel man is ever courageous. The popular theory, that inhumanity is
+more likely to be the concomitant of a timid than of a daring nature,
+ignores altogether the teaching of history and the conclusions of _à
+priori_ reasoning. For if our regard for the sufferings of others is
+proportioned to our regard for our own sufferings, inasmuch as our
+self-love is the foundation and measure of our powers of sympathy,
+a man’s disregard for the sufferings of others--in other words his
+cruelty--is likely to be the exact reflection of his disregard for
+suffering in his own person, or, in other words, of his physical
+courage. Men, moreover, like Cicero, of whom it was said by Livy that
+he was better calculated for anything than for war, by their very
+incapacity for positions where their humanity is likely to be tested,
+are rarely exposed to those temptations of cruelty in which men of a
+more daring temperament naturally find themselves placed.
+
+And accordingly we find, by reference to instances which lie on the
+surface of history, that great bravery and great cruelty have more
+often been united than separate. In French history there is the cruelty
+of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; of Montluc and Des Adretz,
+the latter of whom made 30 soldiers and their captain leap from the
+precipice of a strong place they had defended, and of both of whom
+Brantôme remarks that they were very brave but very cruel.[140] In
+Scotch history, it was David I. who, though famed for his courage and
+humanity, suffered the sick and aged to be slain in their beds, even
+infants to be killed and priests murdered at the very altars.[141] In
+English history, it was Richard Cœur-de-Lion who had 5,000 Saracen
+prisoners led out to a large plain to be massacred (1191).[142] In
+Jewish history, it was King David who, when he took Rabbah of the
+Ammonites, ‘brought forth the people that were therein and put them
+under saws and harrows of iron and under axes of iron, and made them
+pass through the brick kiln; and thus did he unto all the cities of the
+children of Ammon.’[143] It is not therefore more probable that a man
+famed for his intrepidity will not lend himself to counsels or actions
+of cruelty than that another deficient in personal courage will not be
+humane.
+
+And here one cause is deserving of attention as helping to explain the
+greater barbarity practised by the modern nations in the matter of
+reprisals, than that which was permitted by the code of honour which
+acted in restraint of them in the better periods of pagan antiquity;
+and that is the change that has occurred with regard to slavery.
+
+The abolition of slavery, which in Western Europe has been the greatest
+achievement of modern civilisation, did not unfortunately tend to
+greater mildness in the customs of war. For in ancient times the sale
+of prisoners as slaves operated to restrain that indiscriminate and
+objectless slaughter which has been, even to cases within this century,
+the marked feature of the battle-field, and more especially where
+cities or places have been taken by storm. Avarice ceased to operate,
+as it once did, in favour of humanity. In one day the population of
+Magdeburg, taken by storm, was reduced from 25,000 to 2,700; and an
+English eye-witness of that event thus described it: ‘Of 25,000, some
+said 30,000 people, there was not a soul to be seen alive, till the
+flames drove those that were hid in vaults and secret places to seek
+death in the streets rather than perish in the fire; of these miserable
+creatures some were killed too by the furious soldiers, but at last
+they saved the lives of such as came out of their cellars and holes,
+and so about 2,000 poor desperate creatures were left.’[144] ‘There
+was little shooting, the execution was all cutting of throats and
+mere house murders.... We could see the poor people in crowds driven
+down the streets, flying from the fury of the soldiers, who followed
+butchering them as fast as they could, and refused mercy to anybody;
+till, driving them down to the river’s edge, the desperate wretches
+would throw themselves into the river, where thousands of them
+perished, especially women and children.’[145]
+
+It is difficult to read this graphic description of a stormed city
+without the suspicion arising in the mind that a sheer thirst for blood
+and love of murder is a much more potent sustainer of war than it is
+usual or agreeable to believe. The narratives of most victories and
+of taken cities support this theory. At Brescia, for instance, taken
+by the French from the Venetians in 1512, it is said that 20,000 of
+the latter fell to only 50 of the former.[146] When Rome was sacked in
+1527 by the Imperialist forces, we are told that ‘the soldiery threw
+themselves upon the unhappy multitude, and, without distinction of age
+or sex, massacred all who came in their way. Strangers were spared as
+little as Romans, for the murderers fired indiscriminately at everyone,
+from a mere thirst of blood.’[147]
+
+But this thirst of blood was checked in the days of slavery by the
+counteracting thirst of money; there having been an obvious motive
+for giving quarter when a prisoner of war represented something of
+tangible value, like any other article of booty. The sack of Thebes
+by Alexander, and its demolition to the sound of the lute, was bad
+enough; but after the first rage for slaughter was over, there remained
+30,000 persons of free birth to be sold as slaves. And in Roman
+warfare the rule was to sell as slaves those who were taken prisoners
+in a stormed city; and it must be remembered that many so sold were
+slaves already.[148] All who were unarmed or who laid down their arms
+were spared from destruction, as well as from plunder;[149] and for
+exceptions to this rule, as for instance for the indiscriminate and
+cruel massacre committed at Illiturji in Spain, there was always at
+least the pretext of reprisals, or some special military motive.[150]
+
+Cicero, who lived to see the Roman arms triumphant over the world and
+the conversion of the Roman republic into a military despotism, found
+occasion to deplore at the same time the debased standard of military
+honour. He believed that in cruel vindictiveness and rapacity his
+contemporaries had degenerated from the customs of their ancestors, and
+he contrasted regretfully the utter destruction of Carthage, Numantia,
+and Corinth, with the milder treatment of their earlier enemies, the
+Sabines, Tusculans, and others. He adduced as a proof of the greater
+ferocity of the war spirit of his day the fact that the only term
+for an enemy was originally the milder term of stranger, and that it
+was only by degrees that the word meaning stranger came to have the
+connotation of hostility. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘could have been added
+to this mildness, to call him with whom you are at war by so gentle
+a name as stranger? But now the progress of time has given a harder
+signification to the word; for it has ceased to apply to a stranger,
+and has remained the proper term for an actual enemy in arms.’[151]
+
+Is a similar process taking place in modern warfare with regard to
+the law of reprisals? It is a long leap from ancient Rome to modern
+Germany; but to Germany, as the chief military Power now in existence,
+we must turn, in order to understand the law of reprisals as it is
+interpreted by the practice of a country whose power and example will
+make her actions precedents in all wars that may occur in future.
+
+The worst feature in reprisals is that they are indiscriminate and
+more often directed against the innocent than the guilty. To murder
+women and children, old men, or any one else, on the ground of their
+connection with an enemy who has committed an action calling for
+retribution, can be justified by no theory that would not equally apply
+to a similar parody of justice in civil life. It is a return to the
+theory and practices of savages, who, if they cannot revenge themselves
+on a culprit, revenge themselves complacently on some one else. For
+bodies of peasants to resist a foreign invader by forming ambuscades or
+making surprises against him, though his advance is marked by fire and
+pillage and outrage, may be contrary to the laws of war (though that
+point has never been agreed upon); but to make such attacks the pretext
+for indiscriminate murder and robbery is an extension of the law of
+reprisals that was only definitely imported into the military code of
+Europe by the German invaders of France in 1870.
+
+The following facts, offered in proof of this statement, are taken
+from a small pamphlet, published during the war by the International
+Society for Help to the Wounded, and containing only such facts as were
+attested by the evidence of official documents or of persons whose
+positions gave them an exceptional title to credit.[152] At one place,
+where twenty-five francs-tireurs had hidden in a wood and received the
+Germans with a fusillade, reprisals were carried so far that the curé,
+rushing into the streets, seized the Prussian captain by the shoulders
+and entreated mercy for the women and children. ‘No mercy’ was the
+only reply.[153] At another place twenty-six young men had joined the
+francs-tireurs; the Baden troops took and shot their fathers.[154] At
+Nemours, where a body of Uhlans had been surprised and captured by
+some mobiles, the floors and furniture of several houses were first
+saturated with petroleum and then fired with shells.[155]
+
+The new theory also was imported into the military code, that a
+village, by the mere fact of trying to defend itself, constituted
+itself a place of war which might be legitimately bombarded and, when
+taken, subjected to the rights of war which still govern the fate of
+places taken by assault.[156] Nor let it be supposed that those rights
+were not exercised as rigorously as they ever have been by victorious
+troops. At Nogent-sur-Seine, the Wurtemburg troops carried their fury
+to the slaughter of women and children and even of the wounded. And if
+the belief still lingers that the German troops of the Emperor William
+behaved otherwise towards the weaker sex than their ancestors in Rome
+and Italy under the Constable of Bourbon, let the reader refer to the
+experiences of Clermont, Andernay, or Neuville.[157]
+
+Reprisals beget, of course, reprisals; and had the French and German
+war been by any accident prolonged, it is appalling to think of the
+barbarities that would have occurred. ‘Threat for threat,’ wrote
+Colonel R. Garibaldi to the Prussian commander at Châtillon, in
+reference to the latter’s resolve to punish the inhabitants of that
+place for the acts of some francs-tireurs; ‘I give you my assurance
+that I will not spare one of the 200 Prussians whom you know to be in
+my hands.’[158] ‘We will fight,’ wrote General Chanzy to the Prussian
+commander at Vendôme, ‘without truce or mercy, because it is a question
+now not of fighting loyal enemies, but hordes of devastators.’[159]
+
+Under the theory of legitimate reprisals, the Germans resuscitated
+the custom of taking hostages. The French having (in accordance with
+the still recognised but barbarous rule of war) taken prisoners the
+captains of some German merchant vessels, the Germans retaliated
+by taking twenty persons of respectable position at Dijon, and nine
+at Vesoul, and detaining them as hostages. Nor was this an uncommon
+episode in the campaign: though the sending to Germany as prisoners
+of war of French merchants, magistrates, lawyers, and doctors, and
+the making them answerable with their lives and fortunes for actions
+of their countrymen which they could neither prevent nor repress, was
+a revival in its worst form of the theory of vicarious punishment,
+and a direction of hostilities against non-combatants, which was a
+gross violation of the proclamation of the Prussian king, made at
+the beginning of the campaign (after the common cant of the leaders
+of armies), that his forces had no war to wage with the peaceable
+inhabitants of France.
+
+Even plunder enters into the German law of reprisals. Remiremont in
+the Vosges had to pay 8,000_l._ because two German engineers and one
+soldier had been taken prisoners by the French troops. The usual forced
+military contributions which the victors exacted did not exclude a
+system of pillage and devastation that the present age fondly believed
+to belong only to a past state of warfare. On December 5, 1870, a
+German soldier wrote to the _Cologne Gazette_: ‘Since the war has
+entered upon its present stage it is a real life of brigands we lead.
+For four weeks we have passed through districts entirely ravaged; the
+last eight days we have passed through towns and villages where there
+was absolutely nothing left to take.’ Nor was this plunder only the
+work of the common military serfs or conscripts, whose miserable
+poverty might have served as an excuse, but it was conducted by
+officers of the highest rank, who, for their own benefit, robbed farms
+and stables of their sheep and horses, and sacked country houses of
+their works of art, their plate, and even of their ladies’ jewels.[160]
+
+The world, therefore, at least owes this to the Germans, that they have
+taught us to see war in its true light, by removing it from the realm
+of romance, where it was decked with bright colours and noble actions,
+to the region of sober judgment, where the soldier, the thief, and
+the murderer are seen in scarcely distinguishable colours. They have
+withdrawn the veil which blinded our ancestors to the evils of war,
+and which led dreamy humanitarians to believe in the possibility of
+_civilised warfare_; so that now the deeds of shame threaten to obscure
+the deeds of glory. In the middle ages it was the custom to declare a
+war that was intended to be waged with special fury by sending a man
+with a naked sword in one hand and a burning torch in the other, to
+signify that the war so begun was to be one of blood and fire. We have
+since learnt that there is no need to typify by any peculiar ceremony
+the character of any particular war; for that the characteristics of
+all are the same.
+
+The German general Von Moltke, in a published letter wherein he
+maintained that Perpetual Peace was a dream and not even a beautiful
+one, went on to say, in defence of war, that in it the noblest virtues
+of mankind were developed--courage, self-abnegation, faithfulness to
+duty, the spirit of sacrifice; and that without wars the world would
+soon stagnate and lose itself in materialism.[161] We have no data from
+which to judge of the probable state of a warless world, but we do
+know that the brightest samples of these virtues have been ever given
+by those who in peace and obscurity, and without looking for lands, or
+titles, or medals for their reward, have laboured not to destroy life
+but to save it, not to lower the standard of morality but to raise it,
+not to preach revenge but mercy, not to spread misery and poverty and
+crime but to increase happiness, wealth, and virtue. Is there or will
+there be no scope for courage, for self-sacrifice, for duty, where
+fever and disease are the foes to be combated, where wounds and pain
+need to be cured or soothed, or where sin and ignorance and poverty are
+the forces to be assailed? But apart from this there is another side to
+the picture of war, of which Von Moltke says not a word, but of which,
+in the preceding pages, some indication has been given. Now that we are
+no longer satisfied with the dry narratives of strategical operations,
+but are beginning to search into the details of military proceedings;
+into the fate of the captured, of the wounded, of the pursued; into
+the treatment of hostages, of women, of children; into the statistics
+of massacre and spoliation that are the penalties of defeat; into the
+character of stratagems; and into the justice of reprisals, we see war
+in another mirror, and recognise that the old one gave but a distorted
+reflection of its realities. No one ever denied but that great
+qualities are displayed in war; but the doubt is spreading fast, not
+only whether it is the worthiest field for their display, but whether
+it is not also the principal nursing-bed of the crimes that are the
+greatest disgrace to our nature.
+
+It is idle to think that our humanity will fail to take its colouring
+from our calling. Marshal Montluc, the bravest yet most cruel of
+French soldiers, was fond of protesting that the inhumanity he was
+guilty of was in corruption of his original and better nature; and at
+the close of his book and of his life, he consoled himself for the
+blood he had caused to flow like water by the consideration, that the
+sovereigns whose servant he had been were (as he told one of them)
+really responsible for the misery he had caused. But does the excuse
+avail him, or the millions who have succeeded to his trade? A king or a
+government can commission men to execute its policy or its vengeance;
+but is a free agent, who accepts a commission that he believes to be
+iniquitous, morally acquitted of his share of culpability? Is his
+responsibility no greater than that of the sword, the axe, or the
+halter with which he carries out his orders; or does the plea of
+military discipline justify him in acting with no more moral restraint
+than a slave, or than a horse that has no understanding? The Prussian
+officer who at Dijon blew out his brains rather than execute some
+iniquitous order[162] showed that he understood the dignity of human
+nature as it was understood in the days of the bygone moral grandeur
+of Rome. Such a man deserved a monument far more than most to whom
+memorial monuments are raised.
+
+Recent events lend an additional interest to the question of
+reprisals, and add emphasis to the necessity of placing them, as it
+was sought to do at Brussels, on the footing of an International
+Agreement. It is sometimes said that dynastic wars belong to the past,
+and that kings have no longer the power to make war, as they once did,
+for their own pleasure or pastime. There may be truth in this, though
+the last great war in Europe but one had its immediate cause in an
+inter-dynastic jealousy; but a far more potent agency for war than
+ever existed in monarchical power is now wielded by the Press. War in
+every country is the direct pecuniary interest of the Daily Press. ‘I
+know proprietors of newspapers,’ said Cobden during the Crimean war,
+‘who have pocketed 3,000_l._ or 4,000_l._ a year through the war as
+directly as if the money had been voted to them in the Parliamentary
+estimates.’[163] The temptation, therefore, is great, first to justify
+any given war by irrelevant issues or by stories of the enormities
+committed by the enemy, or even by positive false statements (as when
+the English Press, with the _Times_ at its head, with almost one voice
+taught us that the Afghan ruler had insulted our ambassador, and left
+us to find out our mistake when a too ready credulity had cost us a
+war of some 20,000,000_l._); and then, when war has once begun, to fan
+the flame by demanding reprisals for atrocities that have generally
+never been committed nor established by anything like proof. In this
+way the French were charged at the beginning of the last German war
+with bombarding the open town of Saarbrück, and with firing explosive
+bullets from the mitrailleuse; and the belief, thus falsely and
+purposely propagated, covered of course with the cloak of reprisals a
+good deal of all that came afterwards.
+
+In this way has arisen the modern practice of justifying every resort
+to war, not as a trial of strength or test of justice between enemies,
+but as an act of virtuous and necessary chastisement against criminals.
+Charges of violated faith, of the abuse of flags of truce, of
+dishonourable stratagems, of the ill-treatment or torture of prisoners,
+are seized upon, regardless of any inquiry into their truth, and made
+the pretext for the indefinite prolongation of hostilities. The lawful
+enemy is denounced as a rebel or a criminal, whom it would be wicked to
+treat with or trust; and only an unconditional surrender, which drives
+him to desperation, and so embitters the war, is regarded as a possible
+preliminary to peace. The time has surely come when such a demand, on
+the ground of reprisals, should cease to operate as a bar to peace.
+One of the proposals at the Brussels Conference was that no commander
+should be forced to capitulate under dishonourable conditions, that
+is to say, without the customary honours of war. It should be one of
+the demands of civilisation that an unconditional surrender, such
+as was insisted upon from Arabi in 1882 and led to the bombardment
+of Alexandria with all the subsequent troubles, should under no
+circumstances be insisted on in treating with an enemy; and that no
+victorious belligerent should demand of a defeated one what under
+reversed conditions it would consider dishonourable to grant itself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MILITARY STRATAGEMS.
+
+ _Hé! qu’il y a de tromperie au monde! et en nostre mestier plus
+ qu’en autre qui soit._--MARSHAL MONTLUC.
+
+ Grotius’ theory of fair stratagems--The teaching of international
+ law--Ancient and modern naval stratagems--Early Roman dislike
+ of such stratagems as ambuscades, feigned retreats, or night
+ attacks--The degenerate standard of Frontinus and Polyænus--The
+ conference-stratagem of modern Europe--The distinction between
+ perfidy and stratagem--The perfidy of Francis I.--Vattel’s
+ theory about spies--Frederick the Great’s military instructions
+ about spies--Lord Wolseley on spies and truth in war--The
+ custom of hanging or shooting spies--Better to keep them as
+ prisoners of war--Balloonists regarded as spies--The practice of
+ military surprises--Death formerly the penalty for capture in
+ a surprise--Stratagems of uncertain character, such as forged
+ despatches or false intelligence--The use of the telegraph in
+ deceiving the enemy--May prisoners of war be compelled to propagate
+ lies?--General character of the military code of fraud.
+
+
+One of the most interesting aspects of the state of war is that of its
+connection with fraud, deceit, and guile. If we may seek to obtain our
+ends by force, we may surely, it is argued, do so by fraud; for what is
+the moral difference between overcoming by superiority of muscle and
+the same result obtained by dint of brain? Lysander the Spartan went so
+far as to say that boys were to be cheated with dice, but an enemy with
+oaths; and if the world has professed horror at his sentiment, it has
+not altogether despised his authority.
+
+Among military stratagems the older writers used to include every kind
+of deception practised by generals in war, not only against the enemy,
+but against their own troops; as, for instance, devices for preventing
+or suppressing a mutiny, for stopping the spread of a panic, or for
+encouraging them with false news before or during an engagement.
+
+But in modern use the term stratagem has almost exclusive reference
+to artifices of deception practised against an enemy; and the greater
+interest that attaches to the latter kind of guile justifies the
+narrowed denotation of the word. No one, for instance, would now
+regard as a stratagem the clever behaviour of that Thracian general
+Cosingas, who, acting also as priest to his forces, brought them back
+to obedience by the report he artfully propagated that certain long
+ladders which he had caused to be made and fastened together were
+intended to enable him to climb to heaven, there to complain to Juno of
+their misconduct. The false pretence that is involved in a stratagem is
+addressed to the leaders of a hostile force, in order that their fear
+or confidence, unduly raised by it, may be played upon to the advantage
+of their more artful opponents. In the consideration, therefore, of
+military stratagems, or _ruses de guerre_, it is best to conform
+entirely to the more restricted sense in which they are understood in
+modern parlance.
+
+The following stratagem is a good one to start with. During the
+Franco-German War of 1870, twenty-five franc-tireurs clothed themselves
+in Prussian uniform, and by the help of that disguise killed several
+Prussians at Sennegy near Troyes; and the deed was made a subject of
+open boast in a French journal.[164] Was the boast a justifiable or a
+shameful one?
+
+Distinctly justifiable, if at least Grotius, the father of our
+international law, is of any authority. The reasoning of Grotius runs
+in this wise. There is a distinction between conventional signs that
+are established by the general consent of all the world and those
+which are only established by particular societies or by individuals;
+deception directed against the former involves the violation of a
+mutual obligation, and is therefore unlawful, whereas that against the
+latter is lawful, because it involves no such violation. Therefore,
+whilst it is wrong to deceive an enemy by words or signs which by
+general consent are universally understood in a given sense, it is not
+wrong to overcome an enemy by conduct which involves no violation of
+a generally recognised and universally binding custom. Under conduct
+of the latter type fall such acts as a simulated flight, or the use of
+an enemy’s arms, his standards, uniform, or sails. A flight is not an
+instituted sign of fear, nor have the arms or colours of a particular
+country any universally established meaning.[165]
+
+And in spite of the sound of sophistry that accompanies this reasoning,
+the teaching of international law has not substantially swerved on this
+point from the direction given to it by Grotius. In Cicero’s opinion,
+although both force and fraud were resources most unworthy of rational
+humanity, the one pertaining rather to the nature of the lion and the
+other to that of the fox, fraud was an expedient deserving of more
+hatred than the other.[166] But the teaching of later times has tended
+to overlook this distinction. Bynkershoek, that celebrated Dutch jurist
+who advocated the use of poison as one of the fair modes of employing
+force, declares it to be a matter of perfect indifference whether
+stratagem or open force be employed against an enemy, provided perfidy
+be absent from the former. And Bluntschli, who is the German publicist
+of greatest authority in our own day, expressly includes among the
+lawful stratagems of war the use of an enemy’s uniform or flag.[167]
+
+If, then, we test the received military theory by some actual
+experience, the following episodes of history must challenge rather our
+admiration than our blame, and stand justified by the most advanced
+theories of modern international law.
+
+Cimon, the Athenian admiral, having captured some Persian ships, made
+his own men step into them and dress themselves in the clothes of the
+Persians; and then, when the ships reached Cyprus, and the inhabitants
+of that island came out joyfully to welcome their friends, they were of
+course more easily defeated by their enemies.[168]
+
+Aristomachus, having taken some Cardian ships, placed his own rowers
+in them and towed his own ships behind them, as if they were being
+conducted in triumph. When the Cardians came out to greet their
+supposed victorious crews, Aristomachus and his men fell upon them and
+succeeded in committing great carnage.[169]
+
+Modern history supplies analogous cases. In September 1800 an English
+crew attacked two ships that lay at anchor at Barcelona, by forcing
+a Swedish vessel to take on board some English officers, soldiers,
+and sailors, and so obtaining a means of approach that was otherwise
+impossible.[170] And English naval historians tell with pride, rather
+than with shame, how in 1798 two English ships, the ‘Sibylle’ and the
+‘Fox,’ by sailing under false colours captured three Spanish gunboats
+in Manilla Roads. When the Spanish guard-boat was sent to inquire what
+the ships were, the pilot of the ‘Fox’ replied that they belonged to
+the French squadron, and that they wished to put into Manilla, for the
+recovery of the crews from sickness. The English Captain Cooke was
+introduced under the French name of Latour; and a conversation ensued
+in which the ceremony of wishing success to the united exertions of the
+Spaniards and French against the English was not forgotten. Two Spanish
+boats having then come to visit the vessels, their crews were quickly
+handed below; and a party of British sailors having changed clothes
+with them and got into their boat, advanced to the gunboats, which they
+captured without pulling a trigger.[171]
+
+On another occasion the same ‘Sibylle,’ which had been taken from the
+French by Romney in 1794, captured a large French vessel that lay at
+anchor, by standing in under French colours, and only hoisting her
+real ones when within a cable’s length of her prize;[172] the only
+limit to such a stratagem on the sea being the necessity for a ship to
+hoist her real flag before proceeding to actual hostilities. A state of
+war must surely play strange tricks with our minds to make it possible
+for us to approve such infamous actions as those quoted. There can be
+no greater proof of the utter demoralisation it causes than that such
+devices should have ever come to be thought honourable; and that no
+scruples should have ever intervened against the prostitution of a
+country’s flag, the symbol of her independence, her nationality, and
+her pride, to the shame of open falsehood. Antiquaries dispute the
+correctness of the statement of Polyænus that Artemisia, the Queen of
+Caria and ally of Xerxes against Greece, hoisted Persian colours when
+in pursuit of Greek ships, but a Greek flag to prevent Greek ships from
+pursuing herself, because they say that flags were not then in use; but
+undoubtedly the custom is a very old one on the seas of having a number
+of different flags on board a ship, for the purpose either of more
+easily capturing a weaker or of more easily escaping from a stronger
+vessel than herself. The French, for instance, in 1337 plundered and
+burnt Portsmouth, after having been suffered to land under the cover of
+English banners.[173] Not only the vessels of pirates and privateers,
+but the war vessels of the State, learned to sail under colours that
+belied their nationality.[174] The only limit to the stratagem of
+the false flag (to which international custom gradually came to give
+the force of law) came to be the necessity of hoisting the real flag
+before proceeding to fire, a limitation that was not of much moment
+after the successful deception had brought a defenceless merchant
+vessel within the reach of easy capture. And with regard to ships of
+war, the cannon-shot by which one vessel replied to the challenge of
+its suspected nationality by the other came to be equivalent to the
+captain’s word of honour that the flag which floated above the cannon
+he fired represented the nationality of which it professed to be the
+symbol. The flag itself might tell a lie, therefore the cannon-shot
+oath must redeem it from suspicion. Such are the extraordinary ideas of
+honour and morality that the system of universal fear, distrust, and
+hostility, by many thought to be so surpassingly glorious, has caused
+to become prevalent upon the ocean.
+
+In spite, therefore, of Grotius, the above stratagems must be
+considered as dishonourable; and that so they are beginning to be
+considered is indicated by the fact that at the Brussels Conference of
+1874 the use of an enemy’s flag or uniform was expressly rejected from
+the category of fair military stratagems. But the improvement is in
+spite of international law, not in consequence of it.
+
+There is an obvious distinction indeed between the above method of
+overcoming an enemy and such favourite devices as ambuscades, feigned
+retreats, night attacks, or the diversion of a defence to the wrong
+point. But perhaps nothing in the history of moral opinion is more
+curious than that even these modes of deceit should have been, not by
+one people or an unwarlike people, but by several people, and one among
+them the most warlike nation known to history, deliberately rejected as
+unfair and dishonourable modes of warfare. The historical evidence on
+this point appears to be quite conclusive, and is worth recalling for
+the interest that cannot but attach to one of the strangest but most
+neglected chapters in the history of human ethics.
+
+The Achæans, says Polybius, disdained even to subdue their enemies with
+the help of deceit. In their opinion a victory was neither honourable
+nor secure that was not obtained in open combat by superior courage.
+Therefore they esteemed it a kind of law among them never to use any
+concealed weapons, nor to throw darts from a distance, being persuaded
+that an open and close conflict was the only fair method of combat.
+For the same reason they not only made a declaration of war, but sent
+notice each to the other of their resolution to try the fortune of a
+battle, and of the place where they were determined to engage.[175]
+
+And in Ternate, one of the Molucca Islands, which suffered such
+untold miseries after the Europeans had discovered its spices and its
+heathenism, not only was war never begun without being first declared,
+but it was also customary to inform the enemy of the number of men and
+the amount and kind of weapons with which it was intended to conduct
+hostilities.[176]
+
+But the case of the Romans is by far the most remarkable. Polybius,
+Livy, and Ælian all agree in their testimony that for a long period
+of their history the Romans refrained from all kinds of stratagem as
+from a sort of military meanness; and their evidence is corroborated
+by Valerius Maximus, who says that the Romans, having no word in their
+language to express a military ruse, were forced to borrow the Greek
+word, from which our own word stratagem is derived.[177] Polybius, who
+lived and wrote as late as the second century before Christ, after
+complaining that artifice was then so prevalent among the Romans that
+their chief study was to deceive one another in war and in politics,
+adds that, in spite of this degeneracy, they still declared war
+solemnly beforehand, seldom formed ambuscades, and preferred to fight
+man to man in close engagement. So late as the year 172 B.C. the elder
+senators regretted the lost virtue of their ancestors, who refrained
+from such stratagems as night attacks, counterfeit flights, and sudden
+returns, and who sometimes even appointed the day of battle and fixed
+the field of combat, looking for victory not from fraud, but only from
+superiority in personal bravery.[178] Ælian, too, declares that the
+Romans never resorted to stratagems till about the end of the Second
+Punic War; and truly the great Roman general, Scipio, who took the
+name of Africanus, displayed a thorough African skill in the use he
+made of spies and surprises to bring that war to a successful issue.
+
+With regard to night attacks the Macedonians appear to have cherished
+similar feelings, since we find Alexander refusing to attack Darius
+by night on the ground that he did not wish to gain a stolen victory.
+And with regard to close combat, something of the old Roman and Achæan
+feeling was displayed in Europe when first the crossbow, and in later
+times the musket, rendered personal prowess of lesser importance.
+Before the time of Richard I., when the crossbow became the chief
+weapon in war, warriors, says the Abbé Velley, were so free and brave
+that they would only owe victory to their lance and their sword, and
+everybody detested those perfidious arms with which a coward under
+shelter was enabled to slay the bravest.[179] So said Montluc of the
+musket, which in 1523 had not yet, he says, superseded in France the
+use of the crossbow: ‘Would to God this accursed instrument had never
+been invented.... So many brave and valiant men would not have met
+their deaths at the hands very often of the greatest cowards, who
+would not so much as dare look at the man whom they knock down from
+a distance with their accursed balls.’[180] And in the same spirit
+Charles XII. of Sweden once bade his soldiers to come to close quarters
+with the enemy without shooting, on the ground that it was only for
+cowards to shoot.
+
+Such ideas are, of course, dead beyond the hope of recovery; but
+they are an odd commentary on our conceit in the improved tone of
+our military code of honour. We have long since learned to despise
+these old-world notions of honour and courage, and to make very few
+exceptions indeed to the newer doctrine of Christendom, that in war
+anything and everything is fair. But it is worth the pause of a moment
+to reflect that such moral sentiments in restraint of the use of fraud
+in war should have once had a real existence in the world; that they
+should once have swayed the minds of the most successful military
+nation that ever existed, and stood by them till they had attained that
+high degree of power which was theirs at the time of the Second Punic
+War (217-199 B.C.) In comparing the code of military honour prevalent
+in pagan antiquity with that of more recent times, it is but fair to
+remember that the pagan nations of old recognised some principles
+of action which were never dreamt of in the best days of Christian
+chivalry; and that the generals of the people who we are sometimes told
+were a mere robber community would have had as strong a feeling against
+the righteousness of a night attack, a feigned retreat, or a surprise,
+as our modern generals would have of an open violation of a truce or
+convention.
+
+The downward path in this matter is easy, and the history of Rome after
+Scipio Africanus is associated with a change of opinion concerning
+stratagems that in no degree fell short of that subtlety of the
+Greeks, Gauls, or Africans, which the Romans once regarded as perfidy.
+Frontinus, who wrote a book on stratagems in the reign of Trajan,
+and still more Polyænus, who wrote a large book on the same subject
+for the Emperors Verus and Antoninus, appear to have thought that no
+deceit was too bad to serve as a good precedent for the conduct of war.
+Polyænus not merely made a collection of some nine hundred stratagems,
+but collected them for the express purpose of their being of service to
+the Roman Emperors in the war then undertaken against Parthia. To the
+rulers of a people who had once regarded even an ambuscade as beneath
+their chivalry he brought as worthy of their recollection and study
+actions which are an eternal stain on the memory of those who committed
+them. Let us take for example the devices he records for obtaining
+possession of besieged places, remembering that from the moment the
+chamade has been beaten, or any other sign been given for a conference
+or parley between the contending forces, a truce by tacit agreement is
+held to suspend their mutual hostilities.
+
+1. Thibron persuaded the governor of a fort in Asia to come out to
+arrange terms, under an oath that he should return if they failed to
+agree. During the relaxation of guard that naturally ensued, Thibron’s
+men took the fort by assault: and Thibron, reconducting the governor
+according to his word, forthwith put him to death.[181]
+
+2. In the same way behaved Paches, the Athenian general at Notium.
+Having got Hippias, the governor, into his power under the same promise
+that Thibron made, he took the place by storm, massacred all he found
+in it, reconducted Hippias according to his oath, and had him killed
+upon the spot.[182]
+
+3. Autophrodates proposed a parley with the chiefs of the Ephesian
+army, having previously ordered his cavalry officers and other troops
+to attack the Ephesians during the conference. The result was a
+signal victory, and the capture or slaughter of a great number of
+Ephesians.[183]
+
+4. Philip of Macedon sent some envoys into a Thracian city, and whilst
+the people all met in assembly to hear the proposals of the enemy the
+King of Macedon attacked and took the city.[184]
+
+5. The Thracians, having been defeated by the Bœotians, made a truce
+with them, for a certain number of _days_, and attacked them one
+_night_, whilst the enemy were engaged in making sacrifices. And so
+dealt Cleomenes with the Argives; he made a truce with them for seven
+days, and attacked them the second night.
+
+All these things are told by Polyænus, not only without a word of
+disapproval, but apparently as good examples for the conduct of a war
+actually in progress. Such was the state of moral debasement in which
+their long career of military success ultimately landed the great Roman
+people.
+
+Nevertheless, it is not for modern history to cast stones at Paches or
+at Thibron. The Conference-stratagem attained its highest development
+in the practice of warfare in Christendom; so that Montaigne declares
+it to have become a fixed maxim among the military men of his time
+(the sixteenth century) never in time of siege to go out to a parley.
+That great French soldier Montluc, whose autobiography contained in
+his Commentaries displays so curious a mixture of bravery and cruelty,
+of loyalty and cunning, and is perhaps the best military book by a
+military man that has been written since Cæsar, tells us how once,
+whilst he was bargaining with the governor of Sarvenal about the terms
+of a capitulation, his men entered the place by a window on the other
+side and compelled the governor to surrender at discretion, and how on
+another occasion he sent his soldiers to enter Mont de Marsan and put
+all they met to the sword, whilst he himself was deluding the governor
+with a parley. ‘The moments of a parley are dangerous,’ he justly
+observes, ‘and then more than ever should the besieged be careful in
+guarding their walls, for it is the time when the besiegers, fearful
+of losing by a capitulation the booty that would be theirs if they
+took the place by storm, study to avail themselves of the relaxation
+of vigilance promoted by the truce to approach the walls with greater
+facility and success.’ And the man who wrote this as the experience of
+his time, and illustrated it by the above accounts of his own practice,
+rose to be a Marshal of France!
+
+Some other examples of the same stratagem prove how widely the custom
+entered into the warfare of the European nations. The governor of
+Terouanne, besieged by the forces of the Emperor Charles V., having
+forgotten in a negotiation for a capitulation to stipulate for a
+suspension of arms, the town was surprised during the conference,
+pillaged, and utterly destroyed.[185] And Feuquières, a French general
+of Louis XIV., and the writer of a book of military memoirs which ran
+through several editions, tells us how he surprised a place called
+Kreilsheim in 1688: ‘I could not have taken this place by force,
+surrounded as it was with a wall and a strong enough castle; but the
+colonel in command having been imbecile enough to come outside the
+place to parley with me, without exacting a promise from me to let
+him return, I retained him and compelled him to order his garrison to
+surrender itself prisoner of war.’[186] And he actually quotes this
+to show that when it is necessary to take a post, all sorts of means
+should be employed, provided they do not dishonour the general who
+resorts to them, as would the failure of his word to the colonel have
+dishonoured himself had the colonel demanded it of him.
+
+A sounder sense of military honour was displayed by the English
+general, Lord Peterborough, at the siege of Barcelona in 1705. Don
+Velasco had promised to capitulate within a certain number of days,
+in the event of no succour arriving, and he surrendered one gate as a
+proof of his sincerity. During the truce involved in this proceeding,
+the German and Catalonian allies of the English entered the town and
+began that career of plunder and outrage which is the constant reward
+and crown of such military successes. Lord Peterborough undertook to
+prevent disorder in the town, expel the allied soldiery, and return
+to his position. He was taken at his word, acted up to his word, and
+saved the honour of England. But what of that of his allies?
+
+It is a fine line that divides a stratagem from an act of perfidy.
+Valerius Maximus denounces as an act of perfidy the conduct of Cnæus
+Domitius, who, having received the King of the Arverni as a guest under
+the pretence of a colloquy, sent him by sea a prisoner to Rome;[187]
+but it is not easy to distinguish it from the actions of Montluc or
+Feuquières. Vattel lays down the following doctrine on the subject: As
+humanity compels us to prefer the gentlest means in the prosecution of
+our rights, if we can master a strong place, surprise or overcome an
+enemy by a stratagem or a feint void of perfidy, it is better to do so
+than to have resort to a bloody siege or the carnage of a battle. He
+expressly excludes perfidy; but might not Polyænus have defended it
+on precisely the same humanitarian grounds as those by which Vattel
+justifies the more ordinary stratagems? Might not an act of perfidy
+equally prevent a siege or a battle? If we are justified in contending
+for our rights by force, it is hard to say that we may not do so by
+fraud; but it is still harder to distinguish the kinds and the limits
+of such fraud, or to say where it ceases to be lawful.
+
+And to this length did Polyænus apparently go, as we see in the cases
+of downright perfidy which he includes in his collection of stratagems.
+The Locrians swore to observe a treaty with the Sicilians so long as
+they trod the earth they then walked on, or carried their heads on
+their shoulders: the next day they threw away the heads of garlic which
+they had carried under their cloaks on their shoulders, and the earth
+they had strewn in their shoes, and began a general massacre of the
+Sicilians.[188] The Campanians, having agreed to surrender half their
+arms, cut them in half, and so virtually surrendered nothing.[189]
+Paches, the Athenian, says Frontinus, having promised personal safety
+to his enemies on condition of their laying down their arms, or as he
+termed it, their _iron_, slew all those who, having laid down their
+arms, still retained the _iron_ clasps in their cloaks.[190]
+
+By these means it is undoubtedly possible to gain that advantage over
+your enemy which, according to every theory of war, it is the paramount
+object of hostilities to obtain; for it has been too often forgotten
+that a nation’s honour and character, which an enlightened patriotism
+should value higher than the mere earth on which it feeds and treads,
+are sacrificed and impaired whenever a treaty is taken by one of the
+parties to it to have been made in another sense from that which was
+clearly understood by both parties to have constituted its spirit at
+the time of making it. What a lasting stain rests, for instance, on the
+memory of Francis I., who before signing the Treaty of Madrid, by which
+he swore, in return for his liberty, to restore the Duchy of Burgundy,
+and to return a prisoner to Spain if he failed to do so, made a formal
+protest beforehand, in the presence of some friends, that the oath he
+was about to take was involuntary and therefore void, and broke it the
+moment he was free! And this was the man whose memory is associated
+with the famous saying after the battle of Pavia: ‘All is lost save
+honour.’ What he really said after that event, in a letter to his
+mother, was this: ‘All is lost save my honour and my life, which is
+safe,’ and the letter went on at length, much more in keeping with the
+character of that monarch.[191] His life indeed he saved; his honour he
+never recovered.
+
+It was agreed at the Brussels Conference that resort to every possible
+method of obtaining information about the forces or country of an
+enemy should count as a fair military stratagem; and, indeed, with the
+subject of the deceitful side of war the military theory and treatment
+of Spies occupies no inconsiderable place.
+
+Vattel is again as good an exponent as we can have of what international
+law teaches on this subject. His argument is as follows: It is not
+contrary to the law of nations to seduce one of the hostile side to
+turn spy, nor to bribe a governor to deliver a town, because such
+actions do not, like the use of poison or assassination, strike at
+the common welfare and safety of mankind. Such actions are the common
+episodes of every war. But that they are not in themselves honourable
+or compatible with a good conscience is proved by the fact that
+generals who resort to such means never boast of them; and, if they are
+at all excusable, it is only in the case of a very just war, when there
+is no other way of saving a country from ruin at the hands of lawless
+conquerors. A sovereign has no right to require the services of a spy
+from any of his subjects, but he may hold out the temptation of reward
+to mercenary souls; and if a governor is willing to sell himself and
+offer us a town for money, should we scruple to take advantage of his
+crime, and to get without danger what we have a right to get by force?
+At the same time a spy may rightly be put to death, because it is the
+only way we have of guarding against the mischief he may do us.[192]
+
+Frederick the Great of Prussia was a contemporary of Vattel, and in
+November 1760 he published some military instructions for the use
+of his generals which, in the matter of spies, was based on a wider
+practical knowledge of the matter than of course belonged to the more
+pacific publicist. He classified spies into ordinary spies, double
+spies, spies of distinction, and spies by compulsion. By double spies
+he meant spies who also pretended to be in the service of the side
+they betrayed. By spies of distinction he meant officers of hussars,
+whose services he had found useful under the peculiar circumstances of
+the Austrian campaign. When he could not procure himself spies among
+the Austrians, owing to the careful guard which their light troops
+kept round their camp, the idea occurred to him, and he acted on it
+with success, of utilising the suspension of arms that was customary
+after a skirmish between hussars to make those officers the means
+of conducting an epistolary correspondence with the officers on the
+other side. Spies by compulsion he explained in this way: ‘When you
+wish to convey false information to an enemy, you take a trustworthy
+soldier and compel him to pass to the enemy’s camp to report there
+all that you wish the enemy to believe; you also send by him letters
+to excite the troops to desertion.’ And in the event of its being
+impossible to obtain information about the enemy, this distinguished
+child of Mars prescribes the following: Choose some rich citizen,
+who has land and wife and children, and another man disguised as his
+servant or coachman, who understands the enemy’s language. Force the
+former to take the latter with him to the enemy’s camp to complain of
+injuries sustained, threatening him that if he fail to bring the man
+back with him after having stayed long enough for the desired object,
+his wife and children shall be hanged and his house burnt. ‘I was
+myself constrained,’ adds this great warrior, ‘to have recourse to this
+method, when we were encamped at ----, and it succeeded.’[193]
+
+Such were the military ethics of the great philosopher and king, whose
+character in the closer intimacy of biography proved so disagreeable a
+revelation to Carlyle. Pagan antiquity might be searched in vain for
+practice or sentiments more ignoble. Sertorius, the Roman captain,
+was one of the greatest masters of stratagem in the world, yet how
+different his language from that of the Great Frederick! ‘A man,’ he
+said, ‘who has any dignity of feeling should conquer with honour, and
+not use any base means even to save his life.’
+
+From the sentiments of Frederick the Great regarding spies, let us pass
+to those of our own time. From Lord Wolseley’s ‘Soldier’s Pocket-Book’
+may be gained some insight as to the manner in which a spy in an
+enemy’s camp may correspond with the hostile general. The best way,
+he suggests, is to send a peasant with a letter written on very thin
+paper, which may be rolled up so tightly as to be portable in a quill
+an inch and a half long, and this precious quill may be hidden in the
+hair or beard, or in a hollow made at the end of a walking-stick. It is
+also a good plan to write secret correspondence in lemon-juice across
+a newspaper or the leaves of a New Testament; it is then safe against
+discovery, and will become legible when held before a fire or near a
+red iron.
+
+‘As a nation,’ says Lord Wolseley, ‘we are bred up to feel it a
+disgrace even to succeed by falsehood; the word spy conveys something
+as repulsive as slave; we will keep hammering along with the conviction
+that honesty is the best policy, and that truth always wins in the long
+run. These pretty little sentiments do well for a child’s copy-book,
+but a man who acts upon them had better sheathe his sword for
+ever.’[194] Was there ever such a confession of the incompatibility of
+the soldier’s calling with the precepts of ordinary honour? For how not
+so, if he must so far stoop from the ordinary level of moral rectitude
+as to be ready to scorn honesty and to trifle with truth? And then the
+question is, Had not a man better sheathe his sword for ever, or rather
+not enter at all upon a trade where he will have to regard the eternal
+principles of right and wrong as so much pretty sentiment only fit for
+the copy-book?
+
+Since, therefore, we have the authority of Vattel, of Frederick the
+Great, and of Lord Wolseley that spies may or even must be employed in
+war, and that, be the trickery or bribery never so mean that procures
+their services, no discredit reflects itself upon those generals
+who use them--it is impossible not to notice it as one of the chief
+anomalies in existing military usages that, although a general has an
+unlimited right to avail himself of the services of a spy or a traitor,
+the penalty for acting in either of the latter capacities is death.
+The capital penalty is not of itself any test of the moral character
+of the action to which it is affixed, for the service of a fire-ship,
+which demanded the most desperate bravery, used to be undertaken in the
+face of capital punishment. Moreover, some of the most famous names
+in military history have not hesitated to act as spies. Sertorius
+was honoured by Marius with the usual rewards of signal valour for
+having learnt the language of the Gauls and gone as a spy amongst them
+disguised in their dress. The French general Custine entered Mayence in
+the disguise of a butcher. Catinat spied out the strength of Luxembourg
+in the costume of a coal-heaver. Montluc entered Perpignan as a cook,
+and only resolved never again to act as a spy because the narrowness
+of his escape convinced him, not that it was a service of too much
+dishonour, but a service of too much danger.
+
+The custom of killing spies is an old Roman one,[195] and, indeed,
+seems to have prevailed all the world over. Nevertheless there have
+been exceptions even to that. Scipio Africanus had some Carthaginian
+spies who were brought before him led through the camp, and then
+dismissed under escort, and with the polite inquiry whether they had
+examined everything to their satisfaction.[196]
+
+The consul Lævinus is said to have dealt in the same way with some
+spies that were taken, and so did Xerxes by some Greek detectives. At
+the famous siege of Antwerp in 1584-5, when a Brabant spy was brought
+before the Prince of Parma, the latter gave orders that he should be
+shown all the works connected with the wonderful bridge that he was
+then constructing across the Scheldt, and then sent him back to the
+besieged city with these words: ‘Go and tell those who sent you what
+you have seen. Tell them that I firmly intend either to bury myself
+beneath the ruin of this bridge or by means of it to pass into your
+city.’
+
+There is a clear middle course between both extremes. Instead of being
+hung or shot or sent away scot free, a spy might fairly be made a
+prisoner of war. Suggestions in this sense were made at the Brussels
+Conference on the Laws of War. The Spanish delegate proposed that the
+custom of hanging or shooting detected spies should be abolished, and
+the custom be substituted of interning them as prisoners of war during
+the continuance of hostilities. The Belgian delegate proposed that in
+no case should they be put to death without trial; and it was even
+sought to establish a distinction between the deserts of the really
+patriotic and the merely mercenary spy. The feeling in fact made itself
+clearly visible, that an act of which a general might fairly avail
+himself could not in common justice be regarded as criminal in the
+agent. Between a general and a spy the common-law rule of principal and
+agent plainly holds good: ‘He who acts through another acts through
+himself.’ In a case of espionage either both principal and agent are
+guilty of a criminal act, or neither is. If the spy as such violates
+the laws of war, so does the general who employs him; and either
+deserves the same punishment. Were it not so, a general who should
+hire a bravo to assassinate an enemy would incur no moral blame, nor
+could be held to act outside the boundary of lawful and honourable
+hostilities.
+
+In some other respects the Brussels Conference displayed the vagueness
+of sentiment that prevails about the use of spies in war. It was
+agreed between all the Powers that no one should be considered as a
+spy but one who secretly or under false pretences sought to obtain
+information for the enemy in occupied districts; that military men
+collecting such information within the zone of hostile operations
+should not be regarded as spies if it were possible to recognise their
+military character; and that military men, and even civilians, if
+their proceedings were open, charged with despatches, should not, if
+captured, be treated as spies; nor individuals who carried despatches
+or kept up communications between different parts of an army through
+the air in balloons. The German delegate proposed, with regard to
+balloons, that those who sailed in them might be first of all summoned
+to descend, then fired at if they refused, and if captured be treated
+as prisoners, not as spies. The rejection of his proposal implies
+that by the laws of modern war a balloonist is liable to be shot as a
+spy; so that, from the point of view of personal danger, the service
+of a balloon becomes doubly heroic. The Brussels Conference settled
+nothing, owing to the withdrawal of England from that attempt to settle
+by agreement between the nations the laws that should govern their
+relations in war-time; but from what was on that occasion agreed to or
+rejected may be gathered the prevalent practice of European warfare.
+Is it not then a little remarkable that for the dangerous service of
+espionage a different justice should be meted out to civilians and to
+military men; and that a patriot who risks his life in a balloon should
+also risk it in the same way as a spy, a deserter, or a traitor?
+
+But whatever be the fate of a spy, and in spite of distinguished
+precedents to the contrary, men of honour will always instinctively
+shrink from a service which involves falsehood from beginning to
+end. The sentiment is doubtless praiseworthy: but what is the moral
+difference between entering a town as a spy and the military service
+of winning it by surprise? What, for instance, shall we think of
+the Spanish officers and soldiers who, dressed as peasants and with
+baskets of nuts and apples on their arms, gained possession of Amiens
+in 1597 by spilling the contents of their baskets and then slaying the
+sentinels as they scrambled to pick them up?[197] What of the officers
+who, in the disguise of peasants and women, and concealing daggers and
+pistols, got possession of Ulm for the Elector of Bavaria? What of
+the French who, in Dutch costume, and by supplications in Dutch to be
+granted a refuge from a pursuing enemy, surprised a fort in Holland in
+1672?[198] What of Prince Eugene, who took the fortress of Breysach by
+sending in a large force concealed in hay-carts under the conduct of
+two hundred officers disguised as peasants?[199] What of the Chevalier
+Bayard, that favourite of legendary chivalry, who, having learnt from a
+spy the whereabouts of a detachment of Venetian infantry, went by night
+to the village where they slept, and with his men slew all but three
+out of some three hundred men as they ran out of their houses?[200]
+What of Callicratidas the Cyrenæan, who begged the commander of a fort
+to receive four sick soldiers, and sent them in on their beds with
+an escort of sixteen soldiers, so that they easily overpowered the
+guards and won the place for their general?[201] What of Phalaris, who,
+having petitioned for the hand of a commandant’s daughter, overcame
+the garrison by sending in soldiers dressed as women servants, and
+purporting to bear presents to his betrothed?[202] What of Feuquières,
+who, whilst pretending to lead a German force and praying for shelter
+from a snowstorm, affixed his pétards to the gates of Neuborg, and,
+having taken the town, put the whole of the garrison of 650 men to the
+sword?[203]
+
+In what respect do such actions which are the everyday stratagems of a
+campaign, and count as perfectly fair, differ from the false pretences
+which constitute the iniquity of the spy? In this respect only--that
+whilst he bears his danger alone, in the case of a surprise the danger
+is distributed among numbers.
+
+And, in point of fact, there was a time when the service of a surprise
+and that of espionage were so far regarded as the same that by the laws
+of war death was not only the allotted portion of the captured spy but
+of all who were caught in an endeavour to take a place by surprise.
+The rule, according to Vattel, was not changed, nor the soldiers who
+were captured in a surprise regarded or treated as prisoners of war,
+till the year 1597, when, Prince Maurice having failed in an attempt to
+take Venloo by surprise, and having lost some of his men, who were put
+to death for that offence, the new rule that has since prevailed was
+agreed upon by both sides for the sake of their future mutual immunity
+from that peril.
+
+The usual rule laid down to distinguish a bad from a good stratagem is
+that in the latter there is no violation of an expressly or tacitly
+pledged faith. The violation of a conference, a truce, or a treaty
+has always therefore been reprobated, however commonly practised. But
+certain occurrences of history suggest the feasibility of corresponding
+stratagems which cannot be judged by so simple a formula and which
+therefore are of still uncertain right.
+
+The first stratagem of this kind that suggests itself is that of
+forgery. Hannibal, having defeated and slain the Roman general
+Marcellus, and thereby become possessed of his seal, the Romans found
+it necessary to despatch messages to all their garrison towns that
+no more attention should be paid to orders purporting to come from
+Marcellus. The precedent suggests the use of forged despatches as a
+weapon of war. To obtain in time of peace, for use in time of war, the
+signatures of men likely to be hostile commanders, would obviously
+be of immense military service for purposes either of defence or
+aggression. The stratagem would be dishonourable in the highest degree;
+but, unfortunately, the standard of measurement in such cases is rather
+their effectiveness than their abstract morality.
+
+The second stratagem of the sort is the stratagem of false intelligence.
+To what extent is it lawful to deceive an enemy by downright falsehood?
+The Chevalier Bayard, ‘without fear or reproach,’ when besieged by
+the Imperialists in Mézières, contrived to make the enemy raise the
+siege by sending a messenger with letters containing false information
+destined to fall into the hands of the enemy. The invention of the
+telegraph has increased the means of deceiving the enemy by false
+intelligence, and was freely so used in the Civil War of the United
+States. It is said to be better to secure the services of a few
+telegraph operators in a hostile country than to have dozens of
+ordinary spies; and for this reason, according to the eminent author of
+the ‘Soldier’s Pocket-Book’: ‘Before or during an action an enemy may
+be deceived to any extent by means of such men; messages can be sent
+ordering him to concentrate upon wrong points, or, by giving him false
+information, you may induce him to move as you wish.’
+
+Another stratagem is suggested by the conduct of the Prince of Orange,
+who, having detected in one of his own secretaries a spy in the
+service of the Prince of Luxembourg, forced him to write a letter to
+the latter containing such information as enabled himself to effect a
+march he wished to conceal. Might not, then, prisoners of war be used
+for the same compulsory service? For a spy just as much as a soldier
+is a recognised and accredited military agent, and, if the former
+may be made the channel of falsehood, why not the prisoner of war?
+The Romans made use of the latter to acquire information about their
+enemy’s plans, if in no other way, by torture or the threat of it;
+the Germans forced some of their French prisoners to perform certain
+military services connected with carrying on their campaign--would it
+be therefore unfair to make use of them as the Prince of Orange made
+use of his secretary?
+
+To such questions there is no answer from the international law
+writers. Still less is there any authoritative military doctrine
+concerning them, and, if the stratagems in debate are excluded from
+‘good’ war by the military honour of to-day, the above study of warlike
+artifices has been made to little purpose if it has not taught us how
+changeable and capricious that standard is, and of what marvellous
+adjustment it is capable.
+
+It were a treat at which the gods themselves might smile to see and
+hear a moral philosopher and a military officer brought into conference
+together concerning the stratagems permissible in war. Let the reader
+imagine them trying to distribute in just and equal parts the due share
+of blame attaching severally to the following agents--to the man who
+betrays his country or his cause for gold, and the general who tempts
+him to his crime or accepts it gladly; to the man who serves as a spy,
+to the general who on the one side sends or employs him as a spy, and
+to the general who on the other side hangs him as a spy; to the man
+who discovers the strength of a town in the disguise of a butcher, and
+to his fellow-soldiers who enter it disguised as peasants or under the
+plea of shelter from sickness or a snowstorm; to the man who gains an
+advantage by propagating false intelligence, and the man who does so
+by the use of forged despatches; the man who, like Scipio, plays at
+negotiations for peace in order the better to spy out and avail himself
+of an enemy’s weakness, and the man who makes offers of treason to
+an enemy in order the more easily to take him at a disadvantage--and
+the conclusion will be not unlikely to occur to him, when he shudders
+at the possible length and futility of that imaginary disputation,
+that, whatever havoc is caused by a state of war to life, to property,
+to wealth, to family affections, to domestic honour, it is a havoc
+absolutely incomparable to that which it produces among the received
+moral principles of mankind. The military code regarding the fair and
+legitimate use of fraud and deception has nothing whatever in common
+with the ordinary moral code of civil life, the principles openly
+professed in it being so totally foreign to our simplest rules of
+upright and worthy conduct that in any other than the fighting classes
+of our civilised societies they would not be advocated for very shame,
+nor listened to for a moment without resentment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+BARBARIAN WARFARE.
+
+ _Non avaritia, non crudelitas modum novit.... Quæ clam commissa
+ capite luerentur, quia paludati fecere laudamus._--SENECA.
+
+ Variable notions of honour--Primitive ideas of a military
+ life--What is civilised warfare--Advanced laws of war among
+ several savage tribes--Symbols of peace among savages--The Samoan
+ form of surrender--Treaties of peace among savages--Abeyance of
+ laws of war in hostilities with savages--Zulus blown up in caves
+ with gun-cotton--Women and men kidnapped for transport service
+ on the Gold Coast--Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the
+ New World contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions--Wars
+ with natives of English and French in America--High rewards
+ offered for scalps--The use of bloodhounds in war--The use of
+ poison and infected clothes--Penn’s treaty with the Indians--How
+ Missionaries come to be a cause of war--Explanation of the failure
+ of modern Missions--The Mission Stations as centres of hostile
+ intrigue--Plea for the State-regulation of Missions--Depopulation
+ under Protestant influences--The prevention of false rumours,
+ _Tendenzlügen_--Civilised and barbarian warfare--No real
+ distinction between them.
+
+
+A missionary, seeing once a negro furrowing his face with scars, asked
+him why he put himself to such needless pain, and the reply was: ‘For
+honour, and that people on seeing me may say, There goes a man of
+heart.’
+
+Ridiculous as this negro’s idea of honour must appear to us, it bears
+a sufficient resemblance to other notions of the same kind that have
+passed current in the world at different times to satisfy us of the
+extreme variability of the sentiment in question. Cæsar built with
+difficulty a bridge across the Rhine, chiefly because he held it
+beneath his own dignity, or the Roman people’s, for his army to cross
+it in boats. The Celts of old thought it as ignominious to fly from an
+inundation, or from a burning or falling house, as to retreat from an
+enemy. The Spartans considered it inglorious to pursue a flying foe, or
+to be killed in storming a besieged city. The same Gauls who gloried
+in broadsword-wounds would almost go mad with shame if wounded by an
+arrow or other missile that only left an imperceptible mark. The use
+of letters was once thought dishonourable by all the European nations.
+Marshal Montluc, in the sixteenth century, considered it a sign of
+abnormal overbookishness for a man to prefer to spend a night in his
+study than to spend it in the trenches, though, now, a contrary taste
+would be thought by most men the mark of a fool.
+
+Such are some of the curious ideas of honour that have prevailed at
+different times. Wherein we seem to recognise not merely change but
+advance; one chief difference between the savage and civilised state
+lying in the different estimates entertained in either of martial
+prowess and of military honour. We laugh nowadays at the ancient
+Britons who believed that the souls of all who had followed any other
+pursuit than that of arms, after a despised life and an unlamented
+death, hovered perforce over fens and marshes, unfit to mingle with
+those of warriors in the higher and brighter regions; or at the
+horsemen who used before death to wound themselves with their spears,
+in order to obtain that admission to Walhalla which was denied to all
+who failed to die upon a battle-field; or at the Spaniards, who, when
+Cato disarmed them, preferred a voluntary death to a life destined to
+be spent without arms.[204] No civilised warrior would pride himself,
+as Fijian warriors did, on being generally known as the ‘Waster’ or
+‘Devastator’ of such-and-such a district; the most he would look for
+would be a title and perhaps a perpetual pension for his descendants.
+We have nothing like the custom of the North American tribes, among
+whom different marks on a warrior’s robe told at a glance whether his
+fame rested on the slaughter of a man or a woman, or only on that of a
+boy or a girl. We are inferior in this respect to the Dacota tribes,
+among whom an eagle’s feather with a red spot on it denoted simply
+the slaughter of an enemy, the same feather with a notch and the
+sides painted red, that the said enemy had had his throat cut, whilst
+according as the notches were on one side or on both, or the feather
+partly denuded, anyone could tell after how many others the hero had
+succeeded in touching the dead body of a fallen foe. The stride is
+clearly a great one from Pyrrhus, the Epirot king, who, when asked
+which of two musicians he thought the better, only deigned to reply
+that Polysperchon was the general, to Napoleon, the French emperor, who
+conferred the cross of the Legion of Honour on Crescentini the singer.
+
+And as the pursuit of arms comes with advancing civilisation to occupy
+a lower level as compared with the arts of peace, so the belief is the
+mark of a more polished people that the rapacity and cruelty which
+belong to the war customs of a more backward nation, or of an earlier
+time, are absent from their own. They invent the expression _civilised
+warfare_ to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent
+in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of
+killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How
+few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man
+with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet? And why
+should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have
+no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? We are
+shocked at the mention of barbarian tribes who poison their arrows,
+or barb their darts, yet ourselves think nothing of the frightful
+gangrenes caused by the copper cap in the Minié rifle-ball, and reject,
+on the score of the expense of the change, the proposal that bullets of
+soft lead, which cause needless pain, should no longer be used among
+the civilised Powers for small-arm ammunition.[205]
+
+But whilst the difference in these respects between barbarism and
+civilisation is thus one that rather touches the surface than the
+substance of war, the result is inevitably in either state a different
+code of military etiquette and sentiment, though the difference is
+far less than in any other points of comparison between them. When
+the nations of Christendom therefore came in contact with unknown
+and savage races, whose customs seemed different from their own and
+little worthy of attention, they assumed that the latter recognised
+no laws of war, much as some of the earlier travellers denied the
+possession or faculty of speech to people whose language they could not
+interpret. From which assumption the practical inference followed, that
+the restraints which were held sacred between enemies who inherited
+the same traditions of military honour had no need to be observed in
+hostilities with the heathen world. It is worth while, therefore, to
+show how baseless was the primary assumption, and how laws of war, in
+no way dissimilar to those of Europe, may be detected in the military
+usages of barbarism.
+
+To spare the weak and helpless was and is a common rule in the warfare
+of the less civilised races. The Guanches of the Canary Islands, says
+an old Spanish writer, ‘held it as base and mean to molest or injure
+the women and children of the enemy, considering them as weak and
+helpless, therefore improper objects of their resentment; neither
+did they throw down or damage houses of worship.’[206] The Samoans
+considered it cowardly to kill a woman:[207] and in America the Sioux
+Indians and Winnebagoes, though barbarous enough in other respects, are
+said to have shown the conventional respect to the weaker sex.[208]
+The Basutos of South Africa, whatever may be their customs now, are
+declared by Casalis, one of the first French Protestant missionaries
+to their country, to have respected in their wars the persons of
+women, children, and travellers, and to have spared all prisoners who
+surrendered, granting them their liberty on the payment of ransom.[209]
+
+Few savage races were of a wilder type than the Abipones of South
+America; yet Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, assures us not only
+that they thought it unworthy of them to mangle the bodies of dead
+Spaniards, as other savages did, but that they generally spared the
+unwarlike, and carried away boys and girls uninjured. The Spaniards,
+Indians, negroes, or mulattoes whom they took in war they did not
+treat like captives, but with kindness and indulgence like children.
+Dobritzhoffer never saw a prisoner punished by so much as a word or a
+blow, but he bears testimony to the compassion and confidence often
+displayed to captives by their conquerors. It is common to read of the
+cruelty of the Red Indians to their captives; but Loskiel, another
+missionary, declares that prisoners were often adopted by the victors
+to supply the place of the slain, and that even Europeans, when it came
+to an exchange of prisoners, sometimes refused to return to their own
+countrymen. In Virginia notice was sent before war to the enemy, that
+in the event of their defeat, the lives of all should be spared who
+should submit within two days’ time.
+
+Loskiel gives some other rather curious testimony about the Red
+Indians. ‘When war was in contemplation they used to admonish each
+other to hearken to the good and not to the evil spirits, the former
+always recommending peace. They seem,’ he adds with surprise, ‘to
+have had no idea of the devil as the prince of darkness before the
+Europeans came into the country.’ The symbol of peace was the burial
+of the hatchet or war-club in the ground; and when the tribes renewed
+their covenants of peace, they exchanged certain belts of friendship
+which were singularly expressive. The principal belt was white, with
+black streaks down each side and a black spot at each end: the black
+spots represented the two people, and the white streak between them
+signified, that the road between them was now clear of all trees,
+brambles, and stones, and that every hindrance was therefore removed
+from the way of perfect harmony.
+
+The Athenians used the same language of symbolism when they declared
+war by letting a lamb loose into the enemy’s country: this being
+equivalent to saying, that a district full of the habitations of men
+should shortly be turned into a pasture for sheep.[210]
+
+The Fijians used to spare their enemy’s fruit trees; the Tongan
+islanders held it as sacrilege to fight within the precincts of the
+burial place of a chief, where the greatest enemies were obliged to
+meet as friends.
+
+Most of the lower races recognise the inviolability of ambassadors and
+heralds, and have well-established emblems of a truce or armistice.
+The wish for peace which the Zulu king in vain sought from his English
+invaders by the symbol of an elephant’s tusk (1879), was conveyed
+in the Fiji Islands by a whale’s tooth, in the Sandwich by a young
+plantain tree or green branch of the ti plant, and among most North
+American tribes by a white flag of skin or bark. The Samoan symbol
+for an act of submission in deprecation of further hostilities conveys
+some indication of the possible origin of these pacific symbols. The
+conquered Samoan would carry to his victor some bamboo sticks, some
+firewood, and some small stones; for as a piece of split bamboo was
+the original Samoan knife, and small stones and firewood were used for
+the purpose of roasting pigs, this symbol of submission was equivalent
+to saying: ‘Here we are, your pigs, to be cooked if you please, and
+here are the materials wherewith to do it.’[211] In the same way the
+elephant’s tusk or the whale’s tooth may be a short way of saying to
+the victor: ‘Yours is the strength of the elephant or the whale; we
+recognise the uselessness of fighting with you.’
+
+In the same way many savage tribes take the greatest pains to impress
+the terms of treaties as vividly as possible on the memory of the
+contracting parties by striking and intelligible ceremonies. In the
+Sandwich Islands a wreath woven conjointly by the leaders of either
+side and placed in a temple was the chief symbol of peace. On the Fiji
+Islands, the combatant forces would meet and throw down their weapons
+at one another’s feet. The Tahitians wove a wreath of green boughs,
+furnished by each side; exchanged two young dogs; and having also
+made a band of cloth together, deposited the wreath and the band in
+the temple, with imprecations on the side which should first violate
+so solemn a treaty of peace.[212] On the Hervey Islands, the token of
+the cessation of war was the breaking of a number of spears against
+a large chestnut tree; the almost imperishable coral tree was planted
+in the valleys to signify the hope that the peace might last as long
+as the tree; and after the drum of peace had been solemnly beaten
+round the island, it was unlawful for any man to carry a weapon, or
+to cut down any iron-wood, which he might turn into an implement of
+destruction.
+
+Even our custom of proclaiming that a war is not undertaken against
+a people but against its rulers is not unknown in savage life. The
+Ashantee army used to strew leaves on their march, to signify that
+their hostility was not with the country they passed through but only
+with the instigators of the war; they told the Fantees that they had
+no war with them collectively, but only with some of them.[213] How
+common a military custom this appeal to the treason of an enemy is,
+notwithstanding the rarity of its success, everybody knows. When,
+for instance, the Anglo-Zulu war began, it was solemnly proclaimed
+that the British Government had no quarrel with the Zulu people; it
+was a war against the Zulu king, not against the Zulu nation. (Jan.
+11, 1879.) So were the Ashantees told by the English invading force;
+so were the Afghans; so were the Egyptians; and so were the French
+by the Emperor William before his merciless hordes laid waste and
+desolate some of the fairest provinces of France; so, no doubt, will
+be told the Soudan Arabs. And yet this appeal to treason, this premium
+on a people’s disloyalty, is the regular precursor of wars, wherein
+destruction for its own sake, the burning of grain and villages for
+the mere pleasure of the flames, forms almost invariably the most
+prominent feature. The military view always prevails over the civil,
+of the meaning of hostilities that have no reference to a population
+but only to its government. In the Zulu war, for instance, in spite
+of the above proclamation, the lieutenant-general ordered raids to be
+made into Zululand for the express purpose of burning empty kraals or
+villages; defending such procedure by the usual military logic, that
+the more the natives at large felt the strain of the war, the more
+anxious they would be to see it concluded; and it was quite in vain for
+the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to argue that the burning of empty
+kraals would neither do much harm to the Zulus nor good to the English;
+and that whereas the war had been begun on the ground that it was waged
+against the Zulu king and not against his nation, such conduct was
+calculated to alienate from the invaders the whole of the Zulu people,
+including those who were well disposed to them. Such arguments hardly
+ever prevail over that passion for wanton destruction and for often
+quite unnecessary slaughter, which finds a ready and comprehensive
+shelter under the wing of military exigencies.
+
+The assumption, therefore, that savage races are ignorant of all laws
+of war, or incapable of learning them, would seem to be based rather on
+our indifference about their customs than on the realities of the case,
+seeing that the preceding evidence to the contrary results from the
+most cursory inquiry. But whatever value there may be in our own laws
+of war, as helping to constitute a real difference between savage and
+civilised warfare, the best way to spread the blessing of a knowledge
+of them would clearly be for the more civilised races to adhere to
+them strictly in all wars waged with their less advanced neighbours.
+An English commander, for instance, should no more set fire to the
+capital of Ashantee or Zululand for so paltry a pretext as the display
+of British power than he would set fire to Paris or Berlin; he should
+no more have villages or granaries burnt in Africa or Afghanistan
+than he would in Normandy; and he should no more keep a Zulu envoy or
+truce-bearer in chains[214] than he would so deal with the bearer of a
+white flag from a Russian or Italian enemy.
+
+The reverse principle, which is yet in vogue, that with barbarians
+you must or may be barbarous, leads to some curious illustrations of
+civilised warfare when it comes in conflict with the less civilised
+races. In one of the Franco-Italian wars of the sixteenth century,
+more than 2,000 women and children took refuge in a large mountain
+cavern, and were there suffocated by a party of French soldiers, who
+set fire to a quantity of wood, straw, and hay, which they stacked
+at the mouth of the cave; but it was considered so shameful an act,
+that the Chevalier Bayard had two of the ringleaders hung at the
+cavern’s mouth.[215] Yet when the French General Pélissier in this
+century suffocated the unresisting Algerians in their caves, it was
+even defended as no worse than the shelling of a fortress; and there
+is evidence that gun-cotton was not unfrequently used to blast the
+entrance to caves in Zululand in which men, women, and children had
+hoped to find shelter against an army which professed only to be
+warring with their king.[216]
+
+The following description of the way in which, in the Ashantee war, the
+English forces obtained native carriers for their transport service is
+not without its instruction in this respect:--
+
+‘We took to kidnapping upon a grand scale. Raids were made on all
+the Assin villages within reach of the line of march, and the men,
+and sometimes the women, carried off and sent up the country under
+guard, with cases of provisions. Lieutenant Bolton, of the 1st West
+India Regiment, rendered immense service in this way. Having been
+for some time commandant of Accra, he knew the coast and many of the
+chiefs; and having a man-of-war placed at his disposal, he went up and
+down the coast, landing continually, having interviews with chiefs,
+and obtaining from them large numbers of men and women; or when
+this failed, landing at night with a party of soldiers, surrounding
+villages, and sweeping off the adult population, leaving only a few
+women to look after the children. In this way, in the course of a
+month, he obtained several thousands of carriers.’[217]
+
+And then a certain school of writers talks of the love and respect for
+the British Empire which these exhibitions of our might are calculated
+to win from the inferior races! The Ashantees are disgraced by the
+practice of human sacrifices, and the Zulus have many a barbarous
+usage; but no amount of righteous indignation on that account justifies
+such dealings with them as those above described. If it does, we can
+no longer condemn the proceedings of the Spaniards in the New World.
+For we have to remember that it was not only the Christianity of the
+Inquisition, or Spanish commerce that they wished to spread; not mere
+gold nor new lands that they coveted, but that they also strove for
+such humanitarian objects as the abolition of barbarous customs like
+the Mexican human sacrifices. ‘The Spaniards that saw these cruel
+sacrifices,’ wrote a contemporary, the Jesuit Acosta, ‘resolved with
+all their power to abolish so detestable and cursed a butchery of
+men.’ The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were in intention or
+expression every whit as humane as we English of the nineteenth. Yet
+their actions have been a reproach to their name ever since. Cortes
+subjected Guatamozin, king of Mexico, to torture. Pizarro had the Inca
+of Peru strangled at the stake. Alvarado invited a number of Mexicans
+to a festival, and made it an opportunity to massacre them. Sandoval
+had 60 caziques and 400 nobles burnt at one time, and compelled their
+relations and children to witness their punishment. The Pope Paul had
+very soon (1537) to issue a bull, to the effect that the Indians were
+really men and not brutes, as the Spaniards soon affected to regard
+them.
+
+The whole question was, moreover, argued out at that time between
+Las Casas and Sepulveda, historiographer to the Emperor Charles V.
+Sepulveda contended that more could be effected against barbarism by a
+month of war than by 100 years of preaching; and in his famous dispute
+with Las Casas at Valladolid in 1550, defended the justice of all wars
+undertaken against the natives of the New World, either on the ground
+of the latter’s sin and wickedness, or on the plea of protecting them
+from the cruelties of their own fellow-countrymen; the latter plea
+being one to which in recent English wars a prominent place has been
+always given. Las Casas replied--and his reply is unanswerable--that
+even human sacrifices are a smaller evil than indiscriminate warfare.
+He might have added that military contact between people unequally
+civilised does more to barbarise the civilised than to civilise the
+barbarous population. It is well worthy of notice and reflection
+that the European battle-fields became distinctly more barbarous
+after habits of greater ferocity had been acquired in wars beyond the
+Atlantic, in which the customary restraints were forgotten, and the
+ties of a common human nature dissolved by the differences of religion
+and race.
+
+The same effect resulted in Roman history, when the extended dominion
+of the Republic brought its armies into contact with foes beyond the
+sea. The Roman annalists bear witness to the deterioration that ensued
+both in their modes of waging war and in the national character.[218]
+It is in an Asiatic war that we first hear of a Roman general poisoning
+the springs;[219] in a war for the possession of Crete that the
+Cretan captives preferred to poison themselves rather than suffer the
+cruelties inflicted on them by Metellus;[220] in the Thracian war
+that the Romans cut off their prisoners’ hands, as Cæsar afterwards
+did those of the Gauls.[221] And we should remember that a practical
+English statesman like Cobden foresaw, as a possible evil result of the
+closer relations between England and the East, a similar deterioration
+in the national character of his countrymen. ‘With another war or
+two,’ he wrote, ‘in India and China, the English people would have an
+appetite for bull-fights if not for gladiators.’[222]
+
+Nor is there often any compensation for such results in the improved
+condition of the tribes whom it is sought to civilise after the method
+recommended by Sepulveda. The happiest fate of the populations he
+wished to see civilised by the sword was where they anticipated their
+extermination or slavery by a sort of voluntary suicide. In Cuba, we
+are told that ‘they put themselves to death, whole families doing
+so together, and villages inviting other villages to join them in a
+departure from a world that was no longer tolerable.’[223] And so it
+was in the other hemisphere; the Ladrone islanders, reduced by the
+sword and the diseases of the Spaniards, took measures intentionally to
+diminish their numbers and to check population, preferring voluntary
+extinction to the foul mercies of the Jesuits: till now a lepers’
+hospital is the only building left on what was once one of the most
+populous of their islands.
+
+It must, however, be admitted in justice to the Spaniards, that the
+principles which governed their dealings with heathen races infected
+more or less the conduct of colonists of all nationalities. A real
+or more often a pretended zeal for the welfare of native tribes came
+among all Christian nations to co-exist with the doctrine, that in
+case of conflict with them the common restraints of war might be put
+in abeyance. What, for instance, can be worse than this, told of the
+early English settlers in America by one of themselves? ‘The Plymouth
+men came in the mean time to Weymouth, and there pretended to feast
+the savages of those parts, bringing with them forks and things for
+the purpose, which they set before the savages. They ate thereof
+without any suspicion of any mischief, who were taken upon a watchword
+given, and with their own knives hanging about their necks were by the
+Plymouth planters stabbed and slain.’[224]
+
+Among the early English settlers it soon came to be thought, says
+Mather, a religious act to kill an Indian. In the latter half of the
+seventeenth century both the French and English authorities adopted
+the custom of scalping and of offering rewards for the scalps of their
+Indian enemies. In 1690 the most healthy and vigorous Indians taken
+by the French ‘were sold in Canada, the weaker were sacrificed and
+scalped, and for every scalp they had a premium.’[225] Caleb Lyman, who
+afterwards became an elder of a church at Boston, left an account of
+the way in which he himself and five Indians surprised a wigwam, and
+scalped six of the seven persons inside, so that each might receive
+the promised reward. On their petition to the great and general court
+they received 30_l._ each, and Penhallow says not only that they
+probably expected eight times as much, but that at the time of writing
+the province would have readily paid a sum of 800_l._ for a similar
+service.[226] Captain Lovewell, says the same contemporary eulogist of
+the war that lasted from July 1722 to December 1725, ‘from Dunstable
+with thirty volunteers went northward, who marching several miles up
+country came on a wigwam where were two Indians, one of whom they
+killed and the other took, for which they received the promised bounty
+of 100_l._ a scalp, and two shillings and sixpence a day besides.’
+(December 19, 1724.)[227] At the surprise of Norridjwock ‘the number of
+dead which we scalped were 26, besides Mr. Rasle the Jesuit, who was a
+bloody incendiary.’[228] It is evident that these very liberal rewards
+must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the
+colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites
+sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians,
+in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry
+against them.[229]
+
+Since the Spaniards first trained bloodhounds in Cuba to hunt the
+Indians, the alliance between soldiers and dogs has been a favourite
+one in barbarian warfare. The Portuguese used them in Brazil when
+they hunted the natives for slaves.[230] And an English officer in
+a treatise he wrote in the last century as a sort of military guide
+to Indian warfare suggested coolly: ‘Every light horseman ought to
+be provided with a bloodhound, which would be useful to find out the
+enemy’s ambushes and to follow their tracks. They would seize the
+naked savages, and at least give time to the horsemen to come up with
+them.’[231] In the Molucca Islands the use of two bloodhounds against
+a native chief was the cause of a great confederacy between all the
+islands to shake off the Spanish and Portuguese yoke.[232] And even
+in the war waged by the United States in Florida from 1838 to 1840,
+General Taylor was authorised to send to Cuba for bloodhounds to scent
+out the Indians; nor, according to one account, was their aid resorted
+to in vain.[233]
+
+Poison too has been called in aid. Speaking of the Yuta Indians, a
+traveller assures us that ‘as in Australia, arsenic and corrosive
+sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.’[234]
+And in the same way ‘poisoned rum helped to exterminate the
+Tasmanians.’[235]
+
+But there is worse yet in this direction. The Portuguese in Brazil,
+when the importation of slaves from Africa rendered the capture of the
+natives less desirable than their extermination, left the clothes
+of persons who had died of small-pox or scarlet fever to be found by
+them in the woods.[236] And the caravan traders from the Missouri to
+Santa Fé are said by the same method or in presents of tobacco to have
+communicated the small-pox to the Indian tribes of that district in
+1831.[237] The enormous depopulation of most tribes by the small-pox
+since their acquaintance with the whites is one of the most remarkable
+results in the history of their mutual connection; nor is it likely
+ever to be known to what extent the coincidence was accidental.
+
+It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory
+that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes
+to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not
+only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English
+history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the
+suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to
+be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682
+(of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never
+ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were
+of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept
+at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless
+fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an
+adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red
+men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms;
+he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message
+but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an
+Indian’[238] For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the
+French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers
+had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history
+of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of
+murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so
+that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and
+forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a
+success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult
+to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.
+
+It may also be said against Sepulveda’s doctrine, that the habits of
+a higher civilisation, where they are really worth spreading, spread
+more easily and with more permanent effect among barbarous neighbours
+by the mere contagion of a better example than by the teaching of
+fire and sword. Some of the Dyak tribes in Borneo are said to have
+given up human sacrifices from the better influences of the Malays
+on the coast district.[239] The Peruvians, according to Prescott,
+spread their civilisation among their ruder neighbours more by
+example than by force. ‘Far from provoking hostilities, they allowed
+time for the salutary example of their own institutions to work its
+effect, trusting that their less civilised neighbours would submit to
+their sceptre from a conviction of the blessings it would secure to
+them.’ They exhorted them to lay aside their cannibalism, their human
+sacrifices, and their other barbarities; they employed negotiation,
+conciliatory treatment, and presents to leading men among the tribes;
+and only if all these means failed did they resort to war, but to war
+which at every stage was readily open to propositions of peace, and in
+which any unnecessary outrage on the persons or property of their enemy
+was punished with death.
+
+Something will have been done for the cause of this better method
+of civilising the lower races, if we forewarn and forearm ourselves
+against the symptoms of hostilities with them by a thorough
+understanding of the conditions which render such hostilities probable.
+For as an outbreak of fever is to some extent preventable by a
+knowledge of the conditions which make for fevers, so may the outbreak
+of war be averted by a knowledge of the laws which govern their
+appearance. The experience which we owe to history in this respect
+is amply sufficient to enable us to generalise with some degree of
+confidence and certainty as to the causes or steps which produce wars
+or precede them; and from the remembrance of our dealings with the
+savage races of South Africa we may forecast with some misgivings the
+probable course of our connection with a country like New Guinea.
+
+A colony of Europeans in proximity with barbarian neighbours naturally
+desires before long an increase of territory at the expense of
+the latter. The first sign of such a desire is the expedition of
+missionaries into the country, who not only serve to spy it out for
+the benefit of the colony, but invariably weaken the native political
+force by the creation of a division of feeling, and of an opposition
+between the love of old traditions and the temptation of novel customs
+and ideas. The innovating party, being at first the smaller, consisting
+of the feeblest and poorest members of the community, and of those who
+gladly flock to the mission-stations for refuge from their offences
+against tribal law, the missionaries soon perceive the impossibility of
+further success without the help of some external aid. The help of a
+friendly force can alone turn the balance of influence in their favour,
+and they soon learn to contemplate with complacency the advantages of
+a military conquest of the natives by the colony or mother-country.
+The evils of war are cancelled, in their eyes, by the delusive visions
+of ultimate benefit, and, in accordance with a not uncommon perversion
+of the moral sense, an end that is assumed to be religious is made to
+justify measures that are the reverse.
+
+When the views and interests of the colonial settlers and of the
+missionaries have thus, inevitably but without design, fallen into
+harmony, a war is certain to be not far distant. Apparently accidental,
+it is in reality as certain as the production of green from a mixture
+of blue and yellow. Some dispute about boundaries, some passing act of
+violence, will serve for a reason of quarrel, which will presently be
+supported by a fixed array of collateral pretexts. The Press readily
+lends its aid; and in a week the colony trembles or affects to tremble
+from a panic of invasion, and vials of virtue are expended on the vices
+of the barbarians which have been for years tolerated with equanimity
+or indifference. Their customs are painted in the blackest colours; the
+details of savage usages are raked up from old books of travel; rumours
+of massacres and injuries are sedulously propagated; and the whole
+country is represented as in such a state of anarchy, that the majority
+of the population, in their longing for deliverance from their own
+rulers, would gladly welcome even a foreign conqueror. In short, a war
+against them comes speedily to be regarded as a war in their behalf,
+as the last word of philanthropy and beneficence; and the atrocities
+that subsequently ensue are professedly undertaken, not against the
+unfortunate people who endure them, but to liberate them from the ruler
+of their choice or sufferance, in whose behalf however they fight to
+the death.
+
+To every country, therefore, which would fain be spared from these
+discreditable wars with barbarian tribes on the borders of its
+colonies, it is clear that the greatest caution is necessary against
+the abuses of missionary propagandism. The almost absolute failure of
+missions in recent centuries, and more especially in the nineteenth,
+is intimately associated with the greater political importance which
+the improved facilities of travel and intercourse have conferred upon
+them. Everyone has heard how Catholicism was persecuted in Japan, till
+at last the very profession of Christianity was made a capital crime in
+that part of the world. But a traveller, who knew the East intimately
+at the time, explains how it was that the Jesuits’ labours resulted
+so disastrously. On the outbreak of civil dissensions in Japan, ‘the
+Christian priests thought it a proper time for them to settle their
+religion on the same foundation that Mahomet did his, by establishing
+it in blood. Their thoughts ran on nothing less than extirpating the
+heathen out of the land, and they framed a conspiracy of raising an
+army of 50,000 Christians to murder their countrymen, that so the whole
+island might be illuminated by Christianity such as it was then.’[240]
+And in the same way, a modern writer, speaking of the very limited
+success of missions in India, has asserted frankly that ‘in despair
+many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one, or
+some way, may arise for converting the Indians by the sword.’[241]
+
+Nor are the heathen themselves blind to the political dangers which
+are involved in the presence of missionaries among them. All over the
+world conversion is from the native point of view the same thing as
+disaffection, and war is dreaded as the certain consequence of the
+adoption of Christianity. The French bishop, Lefebvre, when asked by
+the mandarins of Cochin China, in 1847, the purpose of his visit, said
+that he read in their faces that they suspected him ‘of having come
+to excite some outbreak among the neophytes, and perhaps prepare the
+way for an European army;’ and the king was ‘afraid to see Christians
+multiply in his kingdom, and in case of war with European Powers,
+combine with his enemies.’[242] How right events have proved him to
+have been!
+
+The story is the same in Africa. ‘Not long after I entered the
+country,’ said the missionary, Mr. Calderwood, of Caffraria, ‘a leading
+chief once said to me, “When my people become Christians, they cease to
+be my people.”’[243] The Norwegian missionaries were for twenty years
+in Zululand without making any converts but a few destitute children,
+many of whom had been given to them out of pity by the chiefs,[244]
+and their failure was actually ascribed by the Zulu king to their
+having taught the incompatibility of Christianity with allegiance
+to a heathen ruler.[245] In 1877, a Zulu of authority expressed the
+prevalent native reasoning on this point in language which supplies
+the key to disappointments that extend much further than Zululand: ‘We
+will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians. It is not the
+king says so, but every man in Zululand. If a Zulu does anything wrong,
+he at once goes to a mission-station, and says he wants to become a
+Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian;
+if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes,
+and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati (evil-doer), he becomes a
+Christian.’[246]
+
+It is on this account that in wars with savage nations the destruction
+of mission-stations has always been so constant an episode. Nor can
+we wonder at this when we recollect that in the Caffre war of 1851,
+for instance, it was a subject of boast with the missionaries that
+it was Caffres trained on the mission-stations who had preserved the
+English posts along the frontiers, carried the English despatches, and
+fought against their own countrymen for the preservation and defence
+of the colony.[247] It is rather a poor result of all the money and
+labour that has been spent in the attempt to Christianise South Africa,
+that the Wesleyan mission-station at Edendale should have contributed
+an efficient force of cavalry to fight against their countrymen in
+the Zulu campaign; and we may hesitate whether most to despise the
+missionaries who count such a result as a triumph of their efforts, or
+the converts whom they reward with tea and cake for military service
+with the enemies of their countrymen.[248]
+
+It needs no great strain of intelligence to perceive that this use of
+mission-stations as military training-schools scarcely tends to enhance
+the advantages of conversion in the minds of the heathen among whom
+they are planted.
+
+For these reasons, and because it is becoming daily more apparent that
+wars are less a necessary evil than an optional misery of human life,
+the principal measure for a country which would fain improve, and
+live at peace with, the less civilised races which touch the numerous
+borders of its empire, would be the legal restraint or prevention
+of missionary enterprise: a proposal that will appear less startling
+if we reflect that in no quarter of the globe can that method of
+civilising barbarism point to more than local or ephemeral success.
+The Protestant missions of this century are in process of failure,
+as fatal and decided as that which befel the Catholic missions of
+the French, Portuguese, or Spanish, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries, and very much from the same causes. The English wars in
+South Africa, with which the Protestant missionaries have been so
+closely connected, have frustrated all attempts to Christianise that
+region, just as ‘the fearful wars occasioned directly or indirectly by
+the missionaries’ sent by the Portuguese to the kingdoms of Congo and
+Angola in the sixteenth century rendered futile similar attempts on the
+West Coast.[249]
+
+The same process of depopulation under Protestant influences may now
+be observed in the Sandwich Islands or New Zealand that reduced the
+population of Hispaniola, under Spanish Christianity, from a million to
+14,000 in a quarter of a century.[250] No Protestant missionary ever
+laboured with more zeal than Eliot did in America in the seventeenth
+century, but the tribes he taught have long since been extinct:
+‘like one of their own forest trees, they have withered from core to
+bark;’[251] and, in short, the history of both Catholic and Protestant
+missions alike may be summed up in this one general statement: either
+they have failed altogether of results on a sufficient scale to be
+worthy of notice, or the impartial page of history unfolds to us one
+uniform tale of civil war, persecution, conquest, and extirpation in
+whatever regions they can boast of more at least of the semblance of
+success.
+
+Another measure in the interests of peace would be the organisation of
+a class of well-paid officials whose duty it should be to examine on
+the spot into the truth of all rumours of outrages or atrocities which
+are circulated from time to time, in order to set the tide of public
+opinion in favour of hostile measures. Such rumours may, of course,
+have some foundation, but in nine cases out of ten they are false. So
+lately as the year 1882, the _Times_ and other English papers were
+so far deceived as to give their readers a horrible account of the
+sacrifice of 200 young girls to the spirits of the dead in Ashantee;
+and people were beginning to ask themselves whether such things could
+be suffered within reach of an English army, when it was happily
+discovered that the whole story was fictitious. Stories of this sort
+are what the Germans call _Tendenzlügen_, or lies invented to produce a
+certain effect. Their effect in rousing the war-spirit is undeniable;
+and, although the healthy scepticism which has of recent years been
+born of experience affords us some protection, no expenditure could be
+more economical than one which should aim at rendering them powerless
+by neutralising them at the fountain-head.
+
+In the preceding historical survey of the relations in war between
+communities standing on different levels of civilisation, the
+allusion, among some of the rudest tribes, to laws of war very similar
+to those supposed to be binding between more polished nations tends to
+discredit the distinction between civilised and barbarian warfare. The
+progress of knowledge threatens the overthrow of the distinction, just
+as it has already reduced that between organic and inorganic matter,
+or between animal and vegetable life, to a distinction founded rather
+on human thought than on the nature of things. And it is probable that
+the more the military side of savage life is studied, the fewer will be
+found to be the lines of demarcation which are thought to establish a
+difference in kind in the conduct of war by belligerents in different
+stages of progress. The difference in this respect is chiefly one of
+weapons, of strategy, and of tactics; and it would seem that whatever
+superiority the more civilised community may claim in its rules of
+war is more than compensated in savage life both by the less frequent
+occurrence of wars and by their far less fatal character.
+
+But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by
+barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has
+been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than
+in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and
+savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears.
+In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so
+wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds
+incredible; but in war, and the thoughts which relate to it, the points
+of analogy cannot fail to strike the most indifferent. We see still
+in either condition, the same notions of the glory of fighting, the
+same belief in war as the only source of strength and honour, the same
+hope from it of personal advancement, the same readiness to seize any
+pretext for resorting to it, the same foolish sentiment that it is mean
+to live without it.
+
+Then only will the distinction between the two be final, complete,
+and real, when all fighting is relegated to barbarism, and regarded
+as unworthy of civilised humanity; when the enlightenment of
+opinion, which has freed us already from such curses as slavery, the
+torture-chamber, or duelling, shall demand instinctively the settlement
+of all causes of quarrel by peaceful arbitration, and leave to the
+lower races and the lower creation the old-fashioned resort to a trial
+of violence and might, to competition in fraud and ferocity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+WAR AND CHRISTIANITY.
+
+ _Etsi adierant milites ad Joannem et formam observationis
+ acceperant, si etiam centurio crediderat, omnem postea militem
+ Dominus in Petro exarmando discinxit._--TERTULLIAN.
+
+ The war question at the time of the Reformation--The remonstrances
+ of Erasmus against the custom--Influence of Grotius on the side of
+ war--The war question in the early Church--The Fathers against the
+ lawfulness of war--Causes of the changed views of the Church--The
+ clergy as active combatants for over one thousand years--Fighting
+ Bishops--Bravery in war and ecclesiastical preferment--Pope Julius
+ II. at the siege of Mirandola--The last fighting Bishop--Origin
+ and meaning of the declaration of war--Superstition in the naming
+ of weapons, ships, &c.--The custom of kissing the earth before a
+ charge--Connection between religious and military ideas--The Church
+ as a pacific agency--Her efforts to set limits to reprisals--The
+ altered attitude of the modern Church--Early reformers only
+ sanctioned just wars--Voltaire’s reproach against the Church--Canon
+ Mozley’s sermon on war--The answer to his apology.
+
+
+Whether military service was lawful for a Christian at all was at the
+time of the Reformation one of the most keenly debated questions;
+and considering the force of opinion arrayed on the negative side,
+its ultimate decision in the affirmative is a matter of more wonder
+than is generally given to it. Sir Thomas More charges Luther and his
+disciples with carrying the doctrines of peace to the extreme limits
+of non-resistance; and the views on this subject of the Mennonites
+and Quakers were but what at one time seemed not unlikely to have been
+those of the Reformed Church generally.
+
+By far the foremost champion on the negative side was Erasmus, who
+being at Rome at the time when the League of Cambray, under the
+auspices of Julius II., was meditating war against the Republic of
+Venice, wrote a book to the Pope, entitled ‘Antipolemus,’ which, though
+never completed, probably exists in part in his tract known under the
+title of ‘Dulce Bellum inexpertis,’ and printed among his ‘Adagia.’
+In it he complained, as one might complain still, that the custom of
+war was so recognised as an incident of life that men wondered there
+should be any to whom it was displeasing; and likewise so approved of
+generally, that to find any fault with it savoured not only of impiety,
+but of actual heresy. To speak of it, therefore, as he did in the
+following passage, required some courage: ‘If there be anything in the
+affairs of mortals which it is the interest of men not only to attack,
+but which ought by every possible means to be avoided, condemned, and
+abolished, it is of all things war, than which nothing is more impious,
+more calamitous, more widely pernicious, more inveterate, more base,
+or in sum more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.’ In a
+letter to Francis I. on the same subject, he noticed as an astonishing
+fact, that out of such a multitude of abbots, bishops, archbishops, and
+cardinals as existed in the world, not one of them should step forward
+to do what he could, even at the risk of his life, to put an end to so
+deplorable a practice.
+
+The failure of this view of the custom of war, which is in its essence
+more opposed to Christianity than the custom of selling men for slaves
+or sacrificing them to idols, to take any root in men’s minds, is a
+misfortune on which the whole history of Europe since Erasmus forms
+a sufficient commentary. That failure is partly due to the unlucky
+accident which led Grotius in this matter to throw all his weight into
+the opposite scale. For this famous jurist, entering at much length
+into the question of the compatibility of war with the profession of
+Christianity (thereby proving the importance which in his day still
+attached to it), came to conclusions in favour of the received opinion,
+which are curiously characteristic both of the writer and his time.
+His general argument was, that if a sovereign was justified in putting
+his own subjects to death for crimes, much more was he justified in
+using the sword against people who were not his subjects, but strangers
+to him. And this absurd argument was enforced by considerations as
+feeble as the following: that laws of war were laid down in the Book
+of Deuteronomy; that John the Baptist did not bid the soldiers, who
+consulted him, to forsake their calling, but to abstain from extortion
+and be content with their wages; that Cornelius the centurion, whom St.
+Peter baptized, neither gave up his military life, nor was exhorted by
+the apostle to do so; that the Emperor Constantine had many Christians
+in his armies, and the name of Christ inscribed upon his banners; and
+that the military oath after his time was taken in the name of the
+Three Persons of the Trinity.
+
+One single reflection will suffice to display the utter shallowness of
+this reasoning, which was after all only borrowed from St. Augustine.
+For if Biblical texts are a justification of war, they are clearly a
+justification of slavery; whilst, on the other hand, the general spirit
+of the Christian religion, to say nothing of several positive passages,
+is at least equally opposed to one custom as to the other. If then the
+abolition of slavery is one of the services for which Christianity as
+an influence in history claims a large share of the credit, its failure
+to abolish the other custom must in fairness be set against it; for
+it were easier to defend slave-holding out of the language of the New
+Testament than to defend military service, far more being actually said
+there to inculcate the duty of peace than to inculcate the principles
+of social equality: and the same may be said of the writings of the
+Fathers.
+
+The different attitude of the Church towards these two customs in
+modern times, her vehement condemnation of the one, and her tolerance
+or encouragement of the other, appears all the more surprising when
+we remember that in the early centuries of our era her attitude was
+exactly the reverse, and that, whilst slavery was permitted, the
+unlawfulness of war was denounced with no uncertain or wavering voice.
+
+When Tertullian wrote his treatise ‘De Corona’ (201) concerning the
+right of Christian soldiers to wear laurel crowns, he used words on
+this subject which, even if at variance with some of his statements
+made in his ‘Apology’ thirty years earlier, may be taken to express his
+maturer judgment. ‘Shall the son of peace’ (that is, a Christian),
+he asks, ‘act in battle when it will not befit him even to go to
+law? Shall he administer bonds and imprisonments and tortures and
+punishments who may not avenge even his own injuries?... The very
+transference of his enrolment from the army of light to that of
+darkness is sin.’ And again: ‘What if the soldiers did go to John
+and receive the rule of their service, and what if the Centurion did
+believe; the Lord by his disarming of Peter disarmed every soldier
+from that time forward.’ Tertullian made an exception in favour of
+soldiers whose conversion was subsequent to their enrolment (as was
+implied in discussing their duty with regard to the laurel-wreath),
+though insisting even in their case that they ought either to leave the
+service, as many did, or to refuse participation in its acts, which
+were inconsistent with their Christian profession. So that at that time
+Christian opinion was clearly not only averse to a military life being
+entered upon after baptism (of which there are no instances on record),
+but in favour of its being forsaken, if the enrolment preceded the
+baptism. The Christians who served in the armies of Rome were not men
+who were converts or Christians at the time of enrolling, but men who
+remained with the colours after their conversion. If it is certain that
+some Christians _remained_ in the army, it appears equally certain that
+no Christian at that time thought of _entering_ it.
+
+This seems the best solution of the much-debated question, to what
+extent Christians served at all in the early centuries. Irenæus
+speaks of the Christians in the second century as not knowing how
+to fight, and Justin Martyr, his contemporary, considered Isaiah’s
+prophecy about the swords being turned into ploughshares as in part
+fulfilled, because his co-religionists, who in times past had killed
+one another, did not then know how to fight even with their enemies.
+The charge made by Celsus against the Christians, that they refused
+to bear arms even in case of necessity, was admitted by Origen, but
+justified on the ground of the unlawfulness of war. ‘We indeed,’ he
+says, ‘fight in a special way on the king’s behalf, but we do not go
+on campaigns with him, even should he press us to do so; we do battle
+on his behalf as a peculiar army of piety, prevailing by our prayers
+to God for him.’ And again: ‘We no longer take up the sword against
+people, nor learn to make war any more, having become through Jesus,
+who is our general, sons of peace.’ Nothing could be clearer nor more
+conclusive than this language; and the same attitude towards war was
+expressed or implied by the following Fathers in chronological order:
+Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian,
+Lactantius, Archelaus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Cyril. Eusebius
+says that many Christians in the third century laid aside the military
+life rather than abjure their religion. Of 10,050 pagan inscriptions
+that have been collected, 545 were found to belong to pagan soldiers,
+while of 4,734 Christian inscriptions of the same period, only 27 were
+those of soldiers; from which it seems rather absurd to infer, as a
+French writer has inferred, not that there was a great disproportion
+of Christian to pagan soldiers in the imperial armies, but that most
+Christian soldiers being soldiers of Christ did not like to have it
+recorded on their epitaphs that they had been in the service of any
+_man_.[252]
+
+On the other hand, there were certainly always some Christians who
+remained in the ranks after their conversion, in spite of the military
+oath in the names of the pagan deities and the quasi-worship of the
+standards which constituted some part of the early Christian antipathy
+to war. This is implied in the remarks of Tertullian, and stands in
+no need of the support of such legends as the Thundering Legion of
+Christians, whose prayers obtained rain, or of the Theban legion of
+6,000 Christians martyred under Maximian. It was left as a matter of
+individual conscience. In the story of the martyr Maximilian, when Dion
+the proconsul reminded him that there were Christian soldiers among the
+life-guards of the Emperors, the former replied, ‘They know what is
+best for them to do; but I am a Christian and cannot fight.’ Marcellus,
+the converted centurion, threw down his belt at the head of his legion,
+and suffered death rather than continue in the service; and the annals
+of the early Church abound in similar martyrdoms. Nor can there be
+much doubt but that a love of peace and dislike of bloodshed were the
+principal causes of this early Christian attitude towards the military
+profession, and that the idolatry and other pagan rites connected with
+it only acted as minor and secondary deterrents. Thus, in the Greek
+Church St. Basil would have excluded from communion for three years
+any one who had shed an enemy’s blood; and a similar feeling explains
+Theodosius’ refusal to partake of the Eucharist after his great victory
+over Eugenius. The canons of the Church excluded from ordination all
+who had served in an army after baptism; and in the fifth century
+Innocent I. blamed the Spanish churches for their laxity in admitting
+such persons into holy orders.[253]
+
+The anti-military tendency of opinion in the early period of
+Christianity appears therefore indisputable, and Tertullian would
+probably have smiled at the prophet who should have predicted that
+Christians would have ceased to keep slaves long before they should
+have ceased to commit murder and robbery under the fiction of
+hostilities. But it proves the strength of the original impetus, that
+Ulphilas, the first apostle to the Goths, should purposely, in his
+translation of the Scriptures, have omitted the Books of Kings, as too
+stimulative of a love of war.
+
+How utterly in this matter Christianity came to forsake its earlier
+ideal is known to all. This resulted partly from the frequent use of
+the sword for the purpose of conversion, and partly from the rise of
+the Mahometan power, which made wars with the infidel appear in the
+light of acts of faith, and changed the whole of Christendom into a
+kind of vast standing military order. But it resulted still more from
+that compromise effected in the fourth century between paganism and
+the new religion, in which the former retained more than it lost, and
+the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid
+priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were
+exempt from military service,[254] and often, according to Strabo, had
+such influence as to part combatants on the point of an engagement,
+nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which the Christian
+clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and fight in battle,
+in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a time when that
+Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider, than it has ever
+been since. Historians have scarcely given due prominence to this
+fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand years; for Gregory
+of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth century who had killed
+many enemies with their own hands, whilst Erasmus, in the sixteenth,
+complains of bishops taking more pride in leading three or four hundred
+dragoons, with swords and guns, than in a following of deacons and
+divinity students, and asks, with just sarcasm, why the trumpet and
+fife should sound sweeter in their ears than the singing of psalms or
+the words of the Bible.
+
+In the fourteenth century, when war and chivalry were at their
+height, occurred a remarkable protest against this state of things
+from Wycliffe, who, in this, as in other respects, anticipated the
+Reformation: ‘Friars now say that bishops can fight best of all men,
+and that it falleth most properly to them, since they are lords of
+all this world. They say, Christ bade his disciples sell their coats,
+and buy them swords; but whereto, if not to fight? Thus friars make
+a great array, and stir up men to fight. But Christ taught not his
+apostles to fight with a sword of iron, but with the sword of God’s
+word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of man’s
+tongue.... If manslaying in others be odious to God, much more in
+priests who should be vicars of Christ.’ And Wycliffe proceeds not only
+to protest against this, but to advocate the general cause of peace on
+earth, on grounds which he is aware that men of the world will scorn
+and reject as fatal to the existence of kingdoms.[255]
+
+It was no occasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently,
+common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it
+some justification by the connection of military service with the
+enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that--as
+a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately render
+a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop--it is
+worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a custom.
+‘The bishops themselves--not all, but many’--says a writer of King
+Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished with arms,
+were accustomed to mount war-horses with the perverters of their
+country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture the knights whom
+they took in the chance of war, or whom they met full of money.’[256]
+It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the famous Bishop of
+Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword, out of respect for
+the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic to shed blood.
+Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the said bishop
+prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as being his own
+son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the episcopal coat
+of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as that of his son
+or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the wit to reply that
+he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257] The story also
+bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing the command of a
+division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of Durham, cried out
+to his slower colleague, before closing with the Scots, ‘It is not for
+you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and therewith rushed with
+his followers into the fray (1298).[258]
+
+It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange
+may be credited, became more common during the devastation of France
+by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid that was
+available became a matter of national existence. That event rendered
+Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that monarch had
+forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy, save two or
+three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the combatants, and a few
+priests to give absolution and celebrate the Mass.[259] It appears that
+this law was made in response to an exhortation by Pope Adrian II.,
+similar to one addressed in the previous century by Pope Zachary to
+Charlemagne’s ancestor, King Pepin. But though military service and the
+tenure of ecclesiastical benefices became more common from the time of
+the Danish irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops
+who chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in
+active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to have
+rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding as a duty
+that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but which the
+Church herself condemned.
+
+It is a signal mark of the degree to which religion became enveloped
+in the military spirit of those miserable days of chivalry, that
+ecclesiastical preferment was sometimes the reward of bravery on the
+field, as in the case of that chaplain to the Earl of Douglas who, for
+his courage displayed at the battle of Otterbourne, was, Froissart
+tells us, promoted the same year to a canonry and archdeaconry at
+Aberdeen.
+
+Vasari, in his ‘Life of Michael Angelo,’ has a good story which is
+not only highly typical of this martial Christianity, but may be also
+taken to mark the furthest point of divergence reached by the Church in
+this respect from the standpoint of her earlier teaching. Pope Julius
+II. went one day to see a statue of himself which Michael Angelo was
+executing. The right hand of the statue was raised in a dignified
+attitude, and the artist consulted the Pope as to whether he should
+place a book in the left. ‘Put a sword into it,’ quoth Julius, ‘for of
+letters I know but little.’ This was the Pope of whom Bayle says that
+never man had a more warlike soul, and of whom, with some doubt, he
+repeats the anecdote of his having thrown into the Tiber the keys of
+St. Peter, with the declaration that he would thenceforth use the sword
+of St. Paul. However this may be, he went in person to hasten the siege
+of Mirandola, in opposition to the protests of the cardinals and to
+the scandal of Christendom (1510). There it was that to encourage the
+soldiers he promised them, that if they exerted themselves valiantly
+he would make no terms with the town, but would suffer them to sack
+it;[260] and though this did not occur, and the town ultimately
+surrendered on terms, the head of the Christian Church had himself
+conveyed into it by the breach.
+
+The scandal of this proceeding contributed its share to the discontent
+which produced the Reformation; and that movement continued still
+further the disfavour with which many already viewed the connection of
+the clergy with actual warfare. It has, however, happened occasionally
+since that epoch that priests of martial tastes have been enabled
+to gratify them, the custom having become more and more rare as
+public opinion grew stronger against it. The last recorded instance
+of a fighting divine was, it would seem, the Bishop of Derry, who,
+having been raised to that see by William III. in gratitude for the
+distinguished bravery with which, though a clergyman, he had conducted
+the defence of Londonderry against the forces of James II., and for
+which the University of Oxford rewarded him with the title of Doctor
+of Divinity, was shot dead at the battle of the Boyne. He had, says
+Macaulay, ‘during the siege in which he had so highly distinguished
+himself, contracted a passion for war,’ but his zeal to gratify it on
+that second occasion cost him the favour of the king. It is, however,
+somewhat remarkable that history should have called no special
+attention to the last instance of a bishop who fought and died upon a
+battle-field, nor have sufficiently emphasised the great revolution of
+thought which first changed a common occurrence into something unusual,
+and finally into a memory that seems ridiculous. No historical fact
+affords a greater justification than this for the hope that, absurd as
+is the idea of a fighting bishop to our own age, that of a fighting
+Christian may be to our posterity.
+
+As bishops were in the middle ages warriors, so they were also the
+common bearers of declarations of war. The Bishop of Lincoln bore, for
+instance, the challenge of Edward III. and his allies to Charles V.
+at Paris; and greatly offended was the English king and his council
+when Charles returned the challenge by a common valet--they declared
+it indecent for a war between two such great lords to be declared by a
+mere servant, and not by a prelate or a knight of valour.
+
+The declaration of war in those times appears to have meant simply a
+challenge or defiance like that then and afterwards customary in a
+duel. It appears to have originated out of habits that governed the
+relations between the feudal barons. We learn from Froissart that when
+Edward was made Vicar of the German Empire an old statute was renewed
+which had before been made at the emperor’s court, to the effect that
+no one, intending to injure his neighbour, might do so without sending
+him a defiance three days beforehand. The following extract from the
+challenge of war sent by the Duke of Orleans, the brother of the King
+of France, to Henry IV. of England, testifies to the close resemblance
+between a declaration of war and a challenge to a deed of arms, and to
+the levity which often gave rise to either: ‘I, Louis, write and make
+known to you, that with the aid of God and the blessed Trinity, in the
+desire which I have to gain renown, and which you likewise should feel,
+considering idleness as the bane of lords of high birth who do not
+employ themselves in arms, and thinking I can no way better seek renown
+than by proposing to you to meet me at an appointed place, each of us
+accompanied with 100 knights and esquires, of name and arms without
+reproach, there to combat till one of the parties shall surrender; and
+he to whom God shall grant the victory shall do with his prisoners as
+he pleases. We will not employ any incantations that are forbidden by
+the Church, but make use of the bodily strength given us by God, with
+armour as may be most agreeable to everyone for the security of his
+person, and with the usual arms, that is lance, battle-axe, sword, and
+dagger ... without aiding himself by any bodkins, hooks, bearded darts,
+poisoned needles or razors, as may be done by persons unless they are
+positively ordered to the contrary....’[261] Henry IV. answered the
+challenge with some contempt, but expressed his readiness to meet
+the duke in single combat, whenever he should visit his possessions
+in France, in order to prevent any greater effusion of Christian
+blood, since a good shepherd, he said, should expose his own life for
+his flock. It even seemed at one time as if wars might have resolved
+themselves into this more rational mode of settlement. The Emperor
+Henry IV. challenged the Duke of Swabia to single combat. Philip
+Augustus of France is said to have proposed to Richard I. to settle
+their differences by a combat of five on each side; and when Edward
+III. challenged the realm of France, he offered to settle the question
+by a duel or a combat of 100 men on each side, with which the French
+king would, it appears, have complied, had Edward consented to stake
+the kingdom of England against that of France.
+
+In the custom of naming the implements of war after the most revered
+names of the Christian hagiology may be observed another trace of
+the close alliance that resulted between the military and spiritual
+sides of human life, somewhat like that which prevailed in the sort of
+worship paid to their lances, pikes, and battle-axes by the ancient
+Scandinavians.[262] Thus the two first forts which the Spaniards built
+in the Ladrone Islands they called respectively after St. Francis
+Xavier and the Virgin Mary. Twelve ships in the Armada were called
+after the Twelve Apostles, and so were twelve of his cannons by Henry
+VIII., one of which, St. John by name, was captured by the French in
+1513.[263] It is probable that mere irreverence had less to do with
+this custom than the hope thereby of obtaining favour in war, such as
+may also be traced in the ceremony of consecrating military banners,
+which has descended to our own times.[264]
+
+To the same order of superstition belongs the old custom of falling
+down and kissing the earth before starting on a charge or assault
+of battle. The practice is alluded to several times in Montluc’s
+Commentaries, but so little was it understood by a modern French editor
+that in one place he suggests the reading _baissèrent la tête_ (they
+lowered their heads) for _baisèrent la terre_ (they kissed the earth).
+But the latter reading is confirmed by passages elsewhere; as, for
+instance, in the ‘Memoirs of Fleurange,’ where it is stated that Gaston
+de Foix and his soldiers kissed the earth, according to custom, before
+proceeding to march against the enemy;[265] and, again, in the ‘Life
+of Bayard,’ by his secretary, who records it among the virtues of that
+knight that he would rise from his bed every night to prostrate himself
+at full length on the floor and kiss the earth.[266] This kissing of
+the earth was an abbreviated form of taking a particle of it in the
+mouth, as both Elmham and Livius mention to have been done by the
+English at Agincourt before attacking the French; and this again was an
+abbreviated form of receiving the sacrament, for Villani says of the
+Flemish at Cambray (1302) that they made a priest go all over the field
+with the sacred elements, and that, instead of communicating, each man
+took a little earth and put it into his mouth.[267] This seems a more
+likely explanation than that the custom was intended as a reminder to
+the soldier of his mortality, as if in a trade like his there could be
+any lack of testimony of that sort.
+
+It is curious to observe how war in every stage of civilisation has
+been the central interest of public religious supplication; and how,
+from the pagans of old to modern savages, the pettiest quarrels and
+conflicts have been deemed a matter of interest to the immortals. The
+Sandwich islanders and Tahitians sought the aid of their gods in war
+by human sacrifices. The Fijians before war were wont to present their
+gods with costly offerings and temples, and offer with their prayers
+the best they could of land crabs or whales’ teeth; being so convinced
+that they thereby ensured to themselves the victory, that once, when
+a missionary called the attention of a war party to the scantiness of
+their numbers, they only replied, with disdainful confidence, ‘Our
+allies are the gods.’ The prayer which the Roman pontifex addressed
+to Jupiter on behalf of the Republic at the opening of the war with
+Antiochus, king of Syria, is extremely curious: ‘If the war which the
+people has ordered to be waged with King Antiochus shall be finished
+after the wish of the Roman senate and people, then to thee, O Jupiter,
+will the Roman people exhibit the great games for ten successive days,
+and offerings shall be presented at all the shrines of such value as
+the senate shall decree.’[268] This rude state of theology, wherein
+a victory from the gods may be obtained for a fair consideration in
+exchange, tends to keep alive, if it did not originate, that sense of
+dependence on invisible powers which constitutes the most rudimentary
+form of religion; for it is a remarkable fact that the faintest
+notions of supernatural agencies are found precisely among tribes
+whose military organisation or love for war is the lowest and least
+developed. In proportion as the war-spirit is cultivated does the
+worship of war-presiding deities prevail; and since these are formed
+from the memories of warriors who have died or been slain, their
+attributes and wishes remain those of the former earthly potentate, who
+though no longer visible, may still be gratified by presents of fruit,
+or by slaughtered oxen or slaves.
+
+The Khonds of Orissa, in India, afford an instance of this close and
+pernicious association between religious and military ideas, which may
+be traced through the history of many far more advanced communities.
+For though they regard the joy of the peace dance as the very highest
+attainable upon earth, they attribute, not to their own will, but
+to that of their war god, Loha Pennu, the source of all their wars.
+The devastation of a fever or tiger is accepted as a hint from that
+divinity that his service has been too long neglected, and they acquit
+themselves of all blame for a war begun for no better reason, by the
+following philosophy of its origin: ‘Loha Pennu said to himself, Let
+there be war, and he forthwith entered into all weapons, so that from
+instruments of peace they became weapons of war; he gave edge to the
+axe and point to the arrow; he entered into all kinds of food and
+drink, so that men in eating and drinking were filled with rage, and
+women became instruments of discord instead of soothers of anger.’ And
+they address this prayer to Loha Pennu for aid against their enemies:
+‘Let our axes crush cloth and bones as the jaws of the hyæna crush
+its prey. Make the wounds we give to gape.... When the wounds of our
+enemies heal, let lameness remain. Let their stones and arrows fall
+on us as the flowers of the mowa-tree fall in the wind.... Make their
+weapons brittle as the long pods of the karta-tree.’
+
+In their belief that wars were of external causation to themselves,
+and in their endeavour to win by prayer a favourable issue to their
+appeal to arms, it could scarcely be maintained that the nations
+of Christendom have at all times shown any marked superiority over
+the modern Khonds. But in spite of this, and of the fierce military
+character that Christianity ultimately assumed, the Church always kept
+alive some of her earlier traditions about peace, and even in the
+darkest ages set some barriers to the common fury of the soldier. When
+the Roman Empire was overthrown, her influence in this direction was
+in marked contrast with what it has been ever since. Even Alaric when
+he sacked Rome (410) was so far affected by Christianity as to spare
+the churches and the Christians who fled to them. Leo the Great, Bishop
+of Rome, inspired even Attila with respect for his priestly authority,
+and averted his career of conquest from Rome; and the same bishop,
+three years later (455), pleaded with the victorious Genseric that
+his Vandals should spare the unresisting multitude and the buildings
+of Rome, nor allow torture to be inflicted on their prisoners. At the
+instance of Gregory II., Luitprand, the Lombard king, withdrew his
+troops from the same city, resigned his conquests, and offered his
+sword and dagger on the tomb of St. Peter (730).
+
+Yet more praiseworthy and perhaps more effective were the efforts of
+the Church from the tenth century onwards to check that system of
+private war which was then the bane of Europe, as the system of public
+and international wars has been since. In the south of France several
+bishops met and agreed to exclude from the privileges of a Christian
+in life and after death all who violated their ordinances directed
+against that custom (990). Only four years later the Council of Limoges
+exhorted men to swear by the bodies of the saints that they would cease
+to violate the public peace. Lent appears to have been to some extent
+a season of abstinence from fighting as from other pleasures, for one
+of the charges against Louis le Débonnaire was that he summoned an
+expedition for that time of the year.
+
+In 1032 a Bishop of Aquitaine declared himself the recipient of a
+message from heaven, ordering men to cease from fighting; and, not
+only did a peace, called the Truce of God, result for seven years,
+but it was resolved that such peace should always prevail during
+the great festivals of the Church, and from every Thursday evening
+to Monday morning. And the regulation for one kingdom was speedily
+extended over Christendom, confirmed by several Popes, and enforced by
+excommunication.[269] If such efforts were not altogether successful,
+and the wars of the barons continued till the royal power in every
+country was strong enough to suppress them, it must none the less be
+recognised that the Church fought, if she fought in vain, against the
+barbarism of a military society, and with an ardour that is in striking
+contrast with her apathy in more recent history.
+
+It must also be granted that the idea of what the Papacy might do
+for the peace of the world, as the supreme arbiter of disputes and
+mediator between contending Powers, gained possession of men’s minds,
+and entered into the definite policy of the Church about the twelfth
+century, in a manner that might suggest reflection for the nineteenth.
+The name of Gerohus de Reigersperg is connected with a plan for the
+pacification of the world, by which the Pope was to forbid war to
+all Christian princes, to settle all disputes between them, and to
+enforce his decisions by the greatest powers that have ever yet been
+devised for human authority--namely, by excommunication and deposition.
+And the Popes attempted something of this sort. When, for instance,
+Innocent III. bade the King of France to make peace with Richard I.,
+and was told that the dispute concerned a matter of feudal relationship
+with which the Pope had no right of interference, he replied that he
+interfered by right of his power to censure what he thought sin, and
+quite irrespective of feudal rights. He also refused to consider the
+destruction of places and the slaughter of Christians as a matter of no
+concern to him; and Honorius III. forbade an attack upon Denmark, on
+the ground that that kingdom lay under the special protection of the
+Papacy.[270]
+
+The clergy, moreover, were even in the most warlike times of history
+the chief agents in negotiations for peace, and in the attempt to
+set limits to military reprisals. When, for instance, the French and
+English were about to engage at Poitiers, the Cardinal of Perigord
+spent the whole of the Sunday that preceded the day of battle in
+laudable but ineffectual attempts to bring the two sides to an
+agreement without a battle. And when the Duke of Anjou was about to
+put 600 of the defenders of Montpellier to death by the sword, by the
+halter, and by fire, it was the Cardinal of Albany and a Dominican monk
+who saved him from the infamy of such a deed by reminding him of the
+duty of Christian forgiveness.
+
+In these respects it must be plain to every one that the attitude
+and power of the Church has entirely changed. She has stood apart
+more and more as time has gone on from her great opportunities as a
+promoter of peace. Her influence, it is notorious, no longer counts for
+anything, where it was once so powerful, in the field of negotiation
+and reconcilement. She lifts no voice to denounce the evils of war, nor
+to plead for greater restraint in the exercise of reprisals and the
+abuse of victory. She lends no aid to teach the duty of forbearance
+and friendship between nations, to diminish their idle jealousies, nor
+to explain the real identity of their interests. It may even be said
+without risk of contradiction, that whatever attempt has been made to
+further the cause of peace upon earth or to diminish the horror of the
+customs of war, has come, not from the Church, but from the school of
+thought to which she has been most opposed, and which she has studied
+most persistently to revile.
+
+In respect, too, of the justice of the cause of war, the Church within
+recent centuries has entirely vacated her position. It is noticeable
+that in the 37th article of the English Church, which is to the effect
+that a Christian at the command of the magistrate may wear weapons
+and serve in the wars, the word _justa_, which in the Latin form
+preceded the word _bella_ or wars, has been omitted.[271] The leaders
+of the Reformation decided on the whole in favour of the lawfulness of
+military service for a Christian, but with the distinct reservation
+that the cause of war should be just. Bullinger, who was Zwingli’s
+successor in the Reformed Church at Zurich, decided that though a
+Christian might take up arms at the command of the magistrate, it
+would be his duty to disobey the magistrate if he purposed to make
+war on the guiltless; and that only the death of those soldiers on
+the battle-field was glorious who fought for their religion or their
+country. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, complained of
+the utter disregard of a just and patriotic motive for war in the code
+of military ethics then prevalent. Speaking of the fighters of his day,
+he thus characterised their position in the State: ‘The rapacity of
+wolves, the violence of lions, the fierceness of tigers is nothing in
+comparison of their furious and cruel tyranny; and yet do many of them
+this not for the safeguard of their country (for so it would be the
+more tolerable), but to satisfy their butcher-like affects, to boast
+another day of how many men they have been the death, and to bring
+home the more preys that they may live the fatter ever after for these
+spoils and stolen goods.’[272] From military service he maintained
+that all considerations of justice and humanity had been entirely
+banished, and their stead been taken by robbery and theft, ‘the
+insatiable spoiling of other men’s goods, and a whole sea of barbarous
+and beast-like manners.’ In this way the necessity of a just cause as
+a reason for taking part in actual warfare was reasserted at the time
+of the Reformation, and has only since then been allowed to drop out
+of sight altogether; so that now public opinion has no guide in the
+matter, and even less than it had in ancient Rome, the attitude of the
+Church towards the State on this point being rather that of Anaxarchus
+the philosopher to Alexander the Great, when, to console that conqueror
+for his murder of Clitus, he said to him: ‘Know you not that Jupiter is
+represented with Law and Justice at his side, to show that whatever is
+done by sovereign power is right?’
+
+Considering, therefore, that no human institution yet devised or
+actually in existence has had or has a moral influence or facilities
+for exercising it at all equal to that enjoyed by the Church, it is all
+the more to be regretted that she has never taken any real interest
+in the abolition of a custom which is at the root of half the crime
+and misery with which she has to contend. Whatever hopes might at
+one time have been reasonably entertained of the Reformed Church as
+an anti-military agency, the cause of peace soon sank into a sort
+of heresy, or what was worse, an unfashionable tenet, associated,
+condemned, and contemned with other articles of religious dissent.
+‘Those who condemn the profession or art of soldiery,’ said Sir James
+Turner, ‘smell rank of anabaptism and quakery.’[273]
+
+It would be difficult to find in the whole range of history any such
+example of wasted moral force. As Erasmus had cause to deplore it in
+the sixteenth century, so had Voltaire in the eighteenth. The latter
+complained that he did not remember a single page against war in the
+whole of Bourdaloue’s sermons, and he even suggested that the real
+explanation might be a literal want of courage on the part of the
+clergy. The passage is worth quoting from the original, both for its
+characteristic energy of expression and for its clear insight into
+the real character of the custom of war:--‘Pour les autres moralistes
+à gages que l’on nomme prédicateurs, ils n’ont jamais seulement osé
+prêcher contre la guerre.... Ils se gardent bien de décrier la guerre,
+qui réunit tout ce que la perfidie a de plus lâche dans les manifestes,
+tout ce que l’infâme friponnerie a de plus bas dans les fournitures des
+armées, tout ce que le brigandage a d’affreux dans le pillage, le viol,
+le larcin, l’homicide, la dévastation, la destruction. Au contraire,
+ces bons prêtres bénissent en cérémonie les étendards de meurtre; et
+leurs confrères chantent pour de l’argent des chansons juives, quand
+la terre a été inondée de sang.’[274]
+
+If Voltaire’s reproach is unjust, it can of course be easily refuted.
+The challenge is a fair one. Let him be convicted of overstating his
+charge, by the mention of any ecclesiastic of mark from either the
+Catholic or the Protestant school within the last two centuries whose
+name is associated with the advocacy of the mitigation or the abolition
+of contests of force; or any war in the same period which the clergy
+of either denomination have as a body resisted either on the ground
+of the injustice of its origin or of the ruthless cruelty with which
+it has been waged. Whatever has yet been attempted in this direction,
+or whatever anti-military stimulus has been given to civilisation,
+has come distinctly from men of the world or men of letters, not from
+men of distinction in the Church: not from Fénelon or Paley, but from
+William Penn, the Abbé St.-Pierre (whose connection with the Church
+was only nominal), from Vattel, Voltaire, and Kant. In other words,
+the Church has lost her old position of spiritual ascendency over
+the consciences of mankind, and has surrendered to other guides and
+teachers the influence she once exercised over the world.
+
+This is especially the case with our own Church; for before the most
+gigantic evil of our time, her pulpit stands mute, and colder than
+mute. Whatever sanction or support a body like the Peace Society has
+met with from the Church or churches of England during its seventy
+years’ struggle on behalf of humanity has been, not the general rule,
+but the rare exception; and recent events would even seem to show that
+the voice of the pulpit, so far from ever becoming a pacific agency, is
+destined to become in the future the great tocsin of war, the loudest
+clamourer for counsels of aggression.
+
+This attitude on the part of the Church having become more and more
+marked and conspicuous, as wars in recent centuries have become more
+frequent and more fierce, it was not unnatural that some attempt should
+at last have been made to give some sort of justification of a fact
+which has undoubtedly become an increasing source of perplexity and
+distress to all sincere and reflective Christians. In default of a
+better, let us take the justification offered by Canon Mozley in his
+sermon on ‘War,’ preached before the University of Oxford on March 12,
+1871, of which the following summary conveys a faithful, though of
+necessity an abbreviated, reflection. The main points dwelt upon in
+that explanation or apology are: That Christianity, by its original
+recognition of the division of the world into nations, with all their
+inherent rights, thereby recognised the right of war, which was plainly
+one of them; that the Church, never having been constituted a judge
+of national questions or motives, can only stand neutral between
+opposing sides, contemplating war as it were forensically, as a mode
+of international settlement that is amply justified by the want of
+any other; that a natural justice is inherent not only in wars of
+self-defence, but in wars for rectifying the political distribution of
+the world’s races or nationalities, and in wars that aim at progress
+and improvement; that the spirit of self-sacrifice inseparable from war
+confers upon it a moral character that is in special harmony with the
+Christian type; that as war is simply the working out of a problem by
+force, there is no more hatred between the individual combatants than
+there is in the working out of an argument by reasoning, ‘the enmity
+is in the two wholes--the abstractions--the individuals are at peace;’
+that the impossibility of a substitution of a universal empire for
+independent nations, or of a court of arbitration, bars all hope of the
+attainment of an era of peace through the natural progress of society;
+that the absence of any head to the nations of the world constitutes
+a defect or want of plan in its system, which as it has been given to
+it by nature cannot be remedied by other means; that it is no part
+of the mission of Christianity to reconstruct that system, or rather
+want of system, of the world, from which war flows, nor to provide
+another world for us to live in; but that, nevertheless, Christianity
+only sanctions it through the medium of natural society, and on the
+hypothesis of a world at discord with itself.
+
+One may well wonder that such a tissue of irrelevant arguments could
+have been addressed by any man in a spirit of seriousness to an
+assembly of his fellows. Imagine such utterances being the last word of
+Christianity! Surely a son of the Church were more recognisable under
+the fighting Bishop of Beauvais’ coat of mail than under the disguise
+of such language as this. Why should it be assumed, one might ask,
+that the existence of distinct nations, each enjoying the power, and
+therefore the right to make war upon its neighbours, is incompatible
+with the existence of an international morality which should render the
+exercise of the war-right impossible, or very difficult; or that the
+Church, had she tried, could have contributed nothing to so desirable
+a result? It is begging the question altogether to contend that a
+state of things is impossible which has never been attempted, when
+the very point at issue is whether, had it been attempted, it might
+not by this time have come to be realised. The right of the mediæval
+barons and their vassals to wage private war together belonged once
+as much to the system, or want of system, of the world as the right
+of nations to attack one another in our own or an earlier period of
+history; yet so far was the Church, even in those days, from shrinking
+from contact with so barbarous a custom as something beyond her power
+or her mission, that she was herself the main social instrument that
+brought it to an end. The great efforts made by the Church to abolish
+the custom of private war have already been mentioned: a point which
+Canon Mozley, perhaps, did wisely to ignore. Yet there is, surely, no
+sufficient reason why the peace of the world should be an object of
+less interest to the Church in these days than it was in those; or
+why her influence should be less as one chief element in the natural
+progress of society than it was when she fought to release human
+society from the depraving custom of the right of private war. It is
+impossible to contend that, had the Church inculcated the duties of
+the individual to other nations as well as to his own, in the way to
+which human reason would naturally respond, such a course would have
+had no effect in solving the problem of enabling separate nationalities
+to coexist in a state of peace as well as of independence. It is at
+least the reverse of self-evident that the promotion of feelings of
+international fraternity, the discouragement of habits of international
+jealousy, the exercise of acts of international friendship, the
+teaching of the real identity of international interests, in all of
+which the pulpit might have lent, or might yet lend, an invaluable
+aid, would have had, or would still have any detrimental effect on
+the political system of distinct nationalities, or on the motives and
+actions of a rational patriotism. It is difficult to believe that
+the denunciations of a Church whose religious teaching had power to
+restrain the military fury of an Alaric or a Genseric would have been
+altogether powerless over the conduct of those German hordes whose
+military excesses in France, in 1870, have left a lasting blot on
+their martial triumph and the character of their discipline; or that
+her efforts on behalf of peace, which more than a thousand years
+ago effectually reconciled the Angles and Mercians, the Franks and
+Lombards, would be wasted in helping to remove any standing causes of
+quarrel that may still exist between France and Germany, England and
+Russia, Italy and Austria.
+
+There are, indeed, hopeful signs, in spite of Canon Mozley’s apology
+of despair, that the priesthood of Christendom may yet reawake to a
+sense of its power and opportunities for removing from the world an
+evil custom which lies at the root of almost every other, and is the
+main cause and sustenance of crime and pauperism and disease. It is
+possible that we have already passed the worst period of indifference
+in this respect, or that it may some day prove only to have been
+connected with the animosities of rival sects, ever ready to avail
+themselves of the chances that war between different nations might
+severally bring to their several petty interests. With the subsidence
+of such animosities, it were reasonable to expect the Church to
+reassert the more genuine principle of her action and attitude--that no
+evil incident to human society is to be regarded as irremediable till
+every resource has been exhausted to cope with it, and every outlet of
+escape from it been proved to be a failure. Then, but not till then, is
+it becoming in Christian priests to utter the language of helplessness;
+then, but not till then, should the Church fold her hands in despair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CURIOSITIES OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE.
+
+ _La discipline n’est que l’art d’inspirer aux soldats plus de peur
+ de leurs officiers que des ennemis._--HELVETIUS.
+
+ Increased severity of discipline--Limitation of the right of
+ matrimony--Compulsory Church parade, and its origin--Atrocious
+ military punishments--Reasons for the military love of
+ red--The origin of bear-skin hats--Different qualities of
+ bravery--Historical fears for the extinction of courage--The
+ conquests of the cause of peace--Causes of the unpopularity of
+ military service--The dulness of life in the ranks--The prevalence
+ of desertion--Articles of war against malingering--Military
+ artificial ophthalmia--The debasing influence of discipline
+ illustrated from the old flogging system--The discipline of the
+ Peninsular army--Attempts to make the service more popular,
+ by raising the private’s wages, by shortening his term of
+ service--The old recruiting system of France and Germany--The
+ conscription imminent in England--The question of military service
+ for women--The probable results of the conscription--Militarism
+ answerable for Socialism.
+
+
+Two widely different conceptions of military discipline are contained
+in the words of an English writer of the seventeenth century, and in
+those of the French philosopher, Helvetius, in the eighteenth century.
+There is a fine ring of the best English spirit in the sentence of
+Gittins: ‘A soldier ought to fear nothing but God and dishonour.’
+And there is the true French wit and insight in that of Helvetius:
+‘Discipline is but the art of inspiring soldiers with more fear for
+their own officers than they have for the enemy.’[275]
+
+But the difference involved lies less in the national character of the
+writers than in the lapse of time between them, discipline having by
+degrees gained so greatly in severity that a soldier had come to be
+regarded less as a moral free agent than as a mechanical instrument,
+who, if he had any fear left for God and dishonour, felt it in a very
+minor degree to that which he cherished for his colonel or commander.
+This is the broad fact which explains and justifies the proposition of
+Helvetius; though no one, recollecting the evils of the days of looser
+discipline, might see cause to regret the change which deprived a
+soldier almost entirely of the moral liberty that naturally belonged to
+him as a man.
+
+The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of course
+the effect of rendering military service less popular, and consequently
+recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any corresponding
+diminution in the frequency of wars, which are independent of the
+hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise, something might be said
+for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys none of the common rights
+of man. There is therefore no gain from any point of view in denying
+to the military class the enjoyment of the rights and privileges of
+ordinary humanity.
+
+The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference
+to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In the
+Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and the
+offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying without
+royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent of the
+commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German war so great
+was the social disorder found to be consequent upon these restrictions,
+that a special law had to be made to remove the bar of illegitimacy
+from the marriages in question.[276] In the English army the inability
+of privates to marry before the completion of seven years’ service, and
+the possession of at least one badge, and then only with the consent
+of the commanding officer, is a custom so entirely contrary to the
+liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that, whatever its incidental
+advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a deterring motive when the
+choice of a career becomes a subject of reflection.
+
+The custom of what is known in the army as Church Parade affords
+another instance of the unreasonable curtailments of individual
+liberty that are still regarded as essential to discipline. A soldier
+is drummed to church just as he is drummed to the drill-ground or the
+battle-field. His presence in church is a matter of compulsion, not of
+choice or conviction; and the general principle that such attendance is
+valueless unless it is voluntary is waived in his case as in that of
+very young children, with whom, in this respect, he is placed on a par.
+If we inquire for the origin of the practice, we shall probably find it
+in certain old Saxon and imperial articles of war, which show that the
+prayers of the military were formerly regarded as equally efficacious
+with their swords in obtaining victories over their enemies; and
+therefore as a very necessary part of their duty.[277] The American
+articles of war, since 1806, enact that ‘it is earnestly recommended
+to all officers and soldiers to attend divine service,’ thus obviating
+in a reasonable way all the evils inevitably connected with a purely
+compulsory, and therefore humiliating, church parade.[278]
+
+It may be that these restrictions of a soldier’s liberty are necessary;
+but if they are, and if, as Lord Macaulay says, soldiers must, ‘for the
+sake of public freedom, in the midst of public freedom, be placed under
+a despotic rule,’ ‘must be subject to a sharper penal code and to a
+more stringent code of procedure than are administered by the ordinary
+tribunals,’ so that acts, innocent in the citizen or only punished
+slightly, become crimes, capitally punishable, when committed by them,
+then at least we need no longer be astonished that it should be almost
+as difficult to entrap a recruit as to catch a criminal.
+
+But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service,
+it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose
+essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they have
+made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of
+rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human
+endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial,
+or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military
+system. It has been from its armies more than from its kings that
+our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals, tortures, and
+cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely have devised
+a more excruciating punishment than the old English military one of
+riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made to sit astride planks
+nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to resemble a horse,
+with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed to his legs to drag
+them downwards; or again, than the punishment of the Picket, in which
+the hand was fastened to a hook in a post above the head, and the
+man’s suspended body left to be supported by his bare heel resting on
+a wooden stump, of which the end was cut to the sharpness of a sword
+point.[279] The punishment of running the gauntlet (from the German
+_Gassenlaufen_, street running, because the victim ran through the
+street between two lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course)
+is said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps,
+from the fact of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a
+single comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet
+found favour among military authorities.[280]
+
+But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons,
+its floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do
+more than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that
+have never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the
+disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to
+bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle-field
+should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of the
+soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a blank
+without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a comrade,
+who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how cheap a rate men
+may be reduced to value their lives after experience of the realities
+of a military career.
+
+Many of the devices are curious by which this indifference to life has
+been matured and sustained. In ancient Athens the public temples were
+closed to those who refused military service, who deserted their ranks
+or lost their bucklers; whilst a law of Charondas of Catana constrained
+such offenders to sit for three days in the public forum dressed in the
+garments of women. Many a Spartan mother would stab her son who came
+back alive from a defeat; and such a man, if he escaped his mother, was
+debarred not only from public offices but from marriage; exposed to
+the blows of all who chose to strike him; compelled to dress in mean
+clothing, and to wear his beard negligently trimmed. And in the same
+way a Norse soldier who fled, or lost his shield, or received a wound
+in any save the front part of his body, was by law prevented from ever
+afterwards appearing in public.[281]
+
+There are, indeed, few military customs but have their origin and
+explanation in the artificial promotion of courage in the minds of
+the combatants. This is true even to the details and peculiarities
+of costume. English children are, perhaps, still taught that French
+soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not
+frighten them in war-time; and doubtless French children imbibe a
+similar theory regarding the red coats of the English. The same reason
+was given by Julius Ferretus in the middle of the sixteenth century
+for the short red frock then generally worn by the military.[282] The
+first mention of red as a special military colour in England is said to
+have been the order issued in 1526 for the coats of all yeomen of the
+household to be of red cloth.[283] But the colour goes, at least, as
+far back as Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, who chose it, according to
+Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by cloth and most lasting;
+according to Plutarch, that its brightness might help to raise the
+spirits of its wearers; or, according to Ælian and Valerius Maximus,
+in order to conceal the sight of blood, that raw soldiers might not be
+dispirited and the enemy proportionately encouraged.
+
+The bear-skin hats, which still make some English regiments so
+ridiculous and unsightly, were originally no doubt intended to inspire
+terror. Evelyn, writing of the year 1678, says: ‘Now were brought into
+service a new sort of soldiers called Grenadiers, who were dexterous
+in flinging hand-grenades, every man having a handful. They had furred
+caps with coped crowns like Janizaries, which made them look very
+fierce; and some had long hoods hanging down behind as we picture
+fools.’ We may fairly identify the motive of such headgear with the
+result; and the more so since the looking fierce with the borrowed
+skins of bears was a well-known artifice of the ancient Romans. Thus
+Vegetius speaks of helmets as covered with bear-skins in order to
+terrify the enemy,[284] and Virgil has a significant description of a
+warrior as
+
+ Horridus in jaculis et pelle Libystidis ursæ.
+
+We may trace the same motive again in the figures of fierce birds or
+beasts depicted on flags and shields and helmets, whence they have
+descended with less harmful purpose to crests and armorial bearings.
+Thus the Cimbri, whom Marius defeated, wore on their plume-covered
+helmets the head of some fierce animal with its mouth open, vainly
+hoping thereby to intimidate the Romans. The latter, before it became
+customary to display the images of their emperors on their standards,
+reared aloft the menacing representations of dragons, tigers, wolves,
+and such like; and the figure of a dragon in use among the Saxons
+at the time of the Conquest, and after that event retained by the
+early Norman princes among the ensigns of war,[285] may reasonably
+be attributed to the same motive. The legend of St. George killing
+the Dragon, if it is not a survival of Theseus and the Minotaur, very
+likely originated as a myth, intended to be explanatory of the custom.
+
+Lastly, under this head should be mentioned Villani’s account of the
+English armour worn in the thirteenth century, where he describes how
+the pages studied to keep it clean and bright, so that when their
+masters came to action their armour shone like looking glass and gave
+them a more terrifying appearance.[286] Was the result here again the
+motive, and must we look for the primary cause of the great solicitude
+still paid to the brightness of accoutrements to the hope thereby to
+add a pang the more to the terror desirable to instil into an enemy?
+
+Such were some of the artificial supports supplied to bravery in former
+times. But there is all the difference in the world between the bravery
+appealed to by our ancestors and that required since the revolution
+effected in warfare by the invention of gunpowder. Before that epoch,
+the use of catapults, bows, or other missiles did not deduct from the
+paramount importance of personal valour. The brave soldier of olden
+times displayed the bravery of a man who defied a force similar or
+equal to his own, and against which the use of his own right hand and
+intellect might help him to prevail; but his modern descendant pits his
+bravery mainly against hazard, and owes it to chance alone if he escape
+alive from a battle. However higher in kind may be the bravery required
+to face a shower of shrapnel than to contend against swords and spears,
+it is assuredly a bravery that involves rather a blind trust in luck
+than a rational trust in personal fortitude.
+
+So thoroughly indeed was this change foreseen and appreciated that at
+every successive advance in the methods of slaughter curious fears
+for the total extinction of military courage have haunted minds too
+readily apprehensive, and found sometimes remarkable expression.
+When the catapult[287] was first brought from Sicily to Greece, King
+Archidamus saw in it the grave of true valour; and the sentiment
+against firearms, which led Bayard to exclaim, ‘C’est une honte qu’un
+homme de cœur soit exposé à périr par une miserable friquenelle,’ was
+one that was traceable even down to the last century in the history of
+Europe. For Charles XII. of Sweden is declared by Berenhorst to have
+felt keenly the infamy of such a mode of fighting; and Marshal Saxe
+held musketry fire in such contempt that he even went so far as to
+advocate the reintroduction of the lance, and a return to the close
+combats customary in earlier times.[288]
+
+But our military codes contain no reflection of the different aspects
+under which personal bravery enters into modern, as compared with
+ancient, warfare; and this omission has tended to throw governments
+back upon pure force and compulsion, as the only possible way of
+recruiting their regiments. The old Roman military punishments, such as
+cruelly scourging a man before putting him to death, afford certainly
+no models of a lenient discipline; but when we read of companies who
+lost their colours being for punishment only reduced to feed on barley
+instead of wheat, and reflect that death by shooting would be the
+penalty under the discipline of most modern nations[289] for an action
+bearing any complexion of cowardice, it is impossible to admit that
+a rational adjustment of punishments to offences is at all better
+observed in the war articles of the moderns than in the military codes
+of pagan antiquity.
+
+This, at least, is clear, from the history of military discipline,
+that only by the most repressive laws, and by a tyranny subversive
+of the commonest rights of men, is it possible to retain men in the
+fighting service of a country, after forcing or cajoling them into
+it. And this consideration fully meets the theory of an inherent love
+of fighting dominating human nature, such as that contended for in a
+letter from Lord Palmerston to Cobden, wherein he argues that man is
+by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. The proposition is true
+undoubtedly of some savage races, and of the idle knights of the days
+of chivalry, but, not even in those days, of the lower classes, who
+incurred the real dangers of war, and still less of the unfortunate
+privates or conscripts of modern armies. Fighting is only possible
+between civilised countries, because discipline first fits men for war
+and for nothing else, and then war again necessitates discipline. Nor
+is anything gained by ignoring the conquests that have already been
+won over the savage propensity to war. Single States no longer suffer
+private wars within their boundaries, like those customary between
+the feudal barons; we decide most of our quarrels in law courts, not
+upon battle-fields, and wisely prefer arguments to arms. A population
+as large as that of Ireland and about double as large as that of all
+our colonies in Australia put together lives in London alone, not only
+without weapons of defence in their hands, but with so little taste
+for blood-encounters that you may walk for whole days through its
+length and breadth without so much as seeing a single street-fight.
+If then this miracle of social order has been achieved, why not the
+wider one of that harmony between nations which requires but a little
+common-sense and determination on the part of those most concerned in
+order to become an accomplished reality?
+
+The limitations of personal liberty already alluded to would of
+themselves suffice in a country of free institutions to render the
+military profession distasteful and unpopular. The actual perils
+of war, at no time greater than those of mines, railways, or
+merchant-shipping, would never alone deter men from service; so that
+we must look for other causes to explain the difficulty of recruiting
+and the frequency of desertion, which are the perplexity of military
+systems still based, as our own is, on the principle of voluntary not
+compulsory enlistment.
+
+What then makes a military life so little an object of desire in
+countries where it can be avoided is more than its dangers, more even
+than its loss of liberty, its irredeemable and appalling dulness. The
+shades in point of cheerfulness must be few and fine which distinguish
+a barrack from a convict prison. In none of the employments of civil
+life is there anything to compare with the unspeakable monotony of
+parades, recurring three or four times every day, varied perhaps in
+wet weather by the military catechism, and with the intervals of time
+spent in occupations of neither interest nor dignity. The length of
+time devoted to the mere cleaning and polishing of accoutrements is
+such, that the task has actually come to have the name ‘soldiering’;
+and the work which comes next in importance to this soldiering is the
+humble one of peeling potatoes for dinner. Even military greatcoats
+require on a moderate estimate half a hour or more every day to be
+properly folded, the penalty of an additional hour’s drill being the
+probable result of any carelessness in this highly important military
+function. But for the attention thus given to military dress the author
+of the ‘Soldier’s Pocket Book’ supplies us with a reason: ‘The better
+you dress a soldier, the more highly he will be thought of by women and
+consequently by himself.’
+
+Still less calculated to lend attractiveness to the life of the ranks
+are the daily fatigue works, or extra duties which fall in turn on the
+men of every company, such as coal carrying, passage cleaning, gutter
+clearing, and other like menial works of necessity.
+
+But it is the long hours of sentry duty, popularly called ‘Sentry-go,’
+which constitute the soldier’s greatest bane. Guard duty in England,
+recurring at short periods, lasts a whole day and night, every four
+hours of the twenty-four being spent in full accoutrements in the
+guard-room, and every intervening two hours on active sentry, thus
+making in all--sixteen hours in the guard-room, and eight on the sentry
+post. The voluntary sufferings of the saints, the tortures devised by
+the religious orders of olden days, or the self-inflicted hardships of
+sport, pale before the two hours’ sentry-go on a winter’s night. This
+it is that kills our soldiers more fatally than an enemy’s cannon, and
+is borne with more admirable patience than even the hardships of a
+siege. ‘After about thirty-one or thirty-two years of age,’ says Sir
+F. Roberts, ‘the private soldier usually ages rapidly, and becomes a
+veteran both in looks and habits;’[290] and this distinguished military
+commander points to excessive sentry duty as the cause.
+
+But, possible as it thus is, by rigour of discipline, to produce in a
+soldier total indifference to death, by depriving him of everything
+that makes life desirable, it is impossible to produce indifference to
+tedium; and a policy is evidently self-destructive which, by aiming
+exclusively at producing a mechanical character, renders military
+service itself so unpopular that only the young, the inexperienced,
+or the ill-advised will join the colours at all; that 10 per cent. of
+those who do join them will desert; and that the rest will regard it as
+the gala day of their lives when they become legally entitled to their
+discharge from the ranks.
+
+In England about 10 per cent. of the recruits desert every year, as
+compared with 50 per cent. from the small army of the United States.
+The reason for so great a difference is probably not so much that the
+American discipline is more severe or dull than the English, as that in
+the newer country, where subsistence is easier, the counter-attractions
+of peaceful trades offer more plentiful inducements to desertion.
+
+Desertion from the English ranks has naturally diminished since the
+introduction of the short-service system has set a visible term to
+the hardships of a military life. Adherence to the colours for seven
+or eight years, or even for twelve, which is now the longest service
+possible at the time of enlistment, and adherence to them for life,
+clearly place a very different complexion on the desirability of an
+illegal escape from them. So that considering the reductions that
+have been made in the term of service, and the increase of pay made
+in 1867, and again in 1873, nothing more strongly demonstrates the
+national aversion of the English people to arms than the exceeding
+difficulty with which the ranks are recruited, and the high average
+of the percentage of desertions. If of recent years recruiting has
+been better, the explanation is simply that trade has been worse;
+statistics of recruiting being the best possible barometer of the state
+of the nation, since the scarcity or abundance of recruits varies
+concomitantly with the brisk or slack demand for labour in other
+employments.
+
+In few things has the world grown more tolerant than in its opinion and
+treatment of Desertion. Death was once its certain penalty, and death
+with every aggravation that brutal cruelty could add. Two of Rome’s
+most famous generals were Scipio Æmilianus and Paulus Æmilius; yet the
+former consigned deserters to fight wild beasts at the public games,
+and the latter had them trodden to death by elephants.
+
+A form of desertion, constituting one of the most curious but least
+noticed chapters in the history of military discipline, is that
+of Malingering, or the feigning of sickness, and self-mutilation,
+disabling from service. The practice goes far back into history.
+Cicero tells of a man who was sold for a slave for having cut off a
+finger, in order to escape from a campaign in Sicily. Vegetius, the
+great authority on Roman discipline, speaks of soldiers who simulated
+sickness being punished as traitors;[291] and an old English writer on
+the subject says of the Romans: ‘Whosoever mutilated their own or their
+children’s bodies so as thereby designedly to render them unfit to
+carry arms (a practice common enough in those elder times when all were
+pressed to the wars), were adjudicated to perpetual exile.’[292]
+
+The writer here referred to lived long before the days of the
+conscription, with which he fancied self-mutilation to be connected.
+And it certainly seems that whereas all the military codes of modern
+nations contain articles dealing with that offence, and decreeing
+penalties against it, there was less of it in the days before
+compulsory service. There is, for instance, no mention of it in the
+German articles of war of the seventeenth century, though the other
+military crimes were precisely those that are common enough still.[293]
+
+But even in England, where soldiers are not yet military slaves, it
+has been found necessary to deal, by specific clauses in the army
+regulations, with a set of facts of which there is no notice in the war
+articles of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.[294] The inference
+therefore is, that the conditions of military service have become
+universally more disagreeable. The clauses in the actual war articles
+deserve to be quoted, that it may appear, by the provisions against it,
+to what lengths the arts of self-mutilation are carried by despairing
+men. The 81st Article of War provides punishment against any soldier
+in Her Majesty’s army ‘who shall malinger, feign or produce disease or
+infirmity, or shall wilfully do any act or wilfully disobey any orders
+whether in hospital or otherwise, thereby producing or aggravating
+disease or infirmity or delaying his cure, ... or who shall maim or
+injure himself or any other soldier, whether at the instance of such
+other soldier or not, or cause himself to be maimed or injured by
+any other person with intent thereby to render himself or such other
+soldier unfit for service, ... or who shall tamper with his eyes with
+intent thereby to render himself unfit for service.’
+
+That it should be necessary thus to provide against self-inflicted
+injuries is surely commentary enough on the condition of life in the
+ranks. The allusion to tampering with the eyes may be illustrated from
+a passage in the ‘Life of Sir C. Napier,’ wherein we are told how in
+the year 1808 a private of the 28th Regiment taught his fellow-soldiers
+to produce artificial ophthalmia by holding their eyelids open, whilst
+a comrade in arms would scrape some lime from the barrack ceiling into
+their eyes.[295] For a profession of which such things are common
+incidents, surely the wonder is, not that it should be difficult, but
+that it should be possible at all, to make recruits. In the days of
+Mehemet Ali in Egypt, so numerous were the cases in which the natives
+voluntarily blinded themselves, and even their children, of one eye in
+order to escape the conscription, that Mehemet Ali is said to have
+found himself under the necessity of raising a one-eyed regiment.
+Others for the same purpose would chop off the trigger finger of the
+right hand, or disable themselves from biting cartridges by knocking
+out some of their upper teeth. Scarcely a peasant in the fields but
+bore the trace of some such voluntarily inflicted disfigurement. But
+with such facts it seems idle to talk of any inherent love for fighting
+dominating the vast majority of mankind.
+
+The severity of military discipline has even a worse effect than those
+yet alluded to in its tendency to demoralise those who are long subject
+to it, by inducing mental habits of servility and baseness. After
+Alexander the Great had killed Clitus in a fit of drunken rage, the
+Macedonian soldiery voted that Clitus had been justly slain, and prayed
+that he might not enjoy the rites of sepulture.[296] Military servility
+could scarcely go further than that, but such baseness is only possible
+under a state of discipline which, to make a soldier, unmakes a man,
+by depriving him of all that distinguishes his species. Under no other
+than military training, and in no other than the military class, would
+the atrocities have been possible which used to be perpetrated in the
+barrack riding-school in the old flogging days. Officers and privates
+needed the debasing influence of discipline to enable them to look on
+as patient spectators at the sufferings of a helpless comrade tortured
+by the cat-o’-nine tails. Sir C. Napier said that as a subaltern
+he ‘frequently saw 600, 700, 800, 900, and 1,000 lashes sentenced
+by regimental courts-martial and generally every lash inflicted;’
+a feeling of horror would run through the ranks at the first blows
+and some recruits would faint, but that was all.[297] Had they been
+men and not soldiers, they would not have stood such iniquities.
+A typical instance of this martial justice or law (to employ the
+conventional profanation of those words) was that of a sergeant who in
+1792 was sentenced to 1,000 lashes for having enlisted two drummers
+for the East India Company whom he knew to belong already to the Foot
+Guards; but the classical description of an English flogging will
+always be Somerville’s account of its infliction upon himself in his
+‘Autobiography of a Working Man.’[298] There you may read how the
+regiment was drawn up four-deep inside the riding-school; how the
+officers (men of gentle birth and breeding) stood within the lines of
+the men; how the basin of water and towels were ready prepared in case
+the victim should faint; how the hands and feet of the latter were
+fastened to a ladder by a rope; and how the regimental sergeant-major
+stood with book and pencil coolly counting each stroke as it was
+delivered with slow and deliberate torture till the full complement of
+a hundred lashes had been inflicted. The mere reading of it even now
+is enough to make the blood boil, but that men, brave and freeborn,
+should have stood by in their hundreds and seen the actual reality
+without stirring, proves how utterly all human feeling is eradicable by
+discipline, and how sure is the training it supplies in disregard for
+the common claims of humanity.
+
+Happily, floggings in the English army now count among the curiosities
+of military discipline, like the wooden horse or the thumb-screw;
+but the striking thing is that the discipline, in the sense of the
+good conduct of the army in the field, was never worse than in the
+days when 1,000 lashes were common sentences. It was precisely when
+courts-martial had the legal power to exercise such tyranny that
+the Duke of Wellington complained to Lord Castlereagh that the law
+was not strong enough to maintain discipline in an army upon actual
+service.[299] Speaking of the army in the Peninsula he says: ‘It is
+impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed
+by the troops; ... there is not an outrage of any description which
+has not been committed on a people who have received us as friends
+by soldiers who never yet for one moment suffered the slightest want
+or the smallest privation.... We are an excellent army on parade, an
+excellent one to fight, but we are worse than an enemy in a country.’
+And again a few months later: ‘I really believe that more plunder and
+outrage have been committed by this army than by any other that was
+ever in the field.’ In the general order of May 19, 1809, are these
+words: ‘The officers of companies must attend to the men in their
+quarters as well as on the march, or the army will soon be no better
+than a banditti.’[300]
+
+Whence it is fair to infer that severity of discipline has no necessary
+connection with the good behaviour or easy control of troops in
+the field, such discipline under the Iron Duke himself having been
+conspicuous for so lamentable a failure. The real fact would seem
+to be, that troops are difficult to manage just in proportion to the
+rigour, the monotony, and the dulness of the discipline imposed upon
+them in time of peace; the rebound corresponding to the compression,
+by a moral law that seems to follow the physical one. This fact is
+nowhere better noticed than in Lord Wolseley’s narrative of the China
+war of 1860, where he says, in allusion to the general love of pillage
+and destruction that characterises soldiers and was so conspicuously
+displayed at the shameful burning of the beautiful palaces in and
+round Pekin: ‘Soldiers are nothing more than grown-up schoolboys.
+The wild moments of enjoyment passed in the pillage of a place live
+long in a soldier’s memory.... Such a time forms so marked a contrast
+with the ordinary routine of existence passed under the tight hand of
+discipline that it becomes a remarkable event in life and is remembered
+accordingly.’[301]
+
+The experience of the Peninsular war proves how slender is the
+link between a well-drilled and a well-disciplined army. The best
+disciplined army is the one which conducts itself with least excess
+in the field and is least demoralised by victory. It is the hour of
+victory that is the great test of the value of military regulations;
+and so well aware of this was the best disciplined State of antiquity,
+that the soldiers of Sparta desisted from pursuit as soon as victory
+was assured to them, partly because it was deemed ungenerous to destroy
+those who could make no further resistance (a sentiment absolutely
+wanting from the boasted chivalry of Christian warfare), and partly
+that the enemy might be tempted to prefer flight to resistance. It is a
+reproach to modern generalship that it has been powerless to restrain
+such excesses as those which have made the successful storming of
+cities rather a disgrace than an honour to those who have won them.
+The only way to check them is to make the officers responsible for
+what occurs, as might be done, for instance, by punishing a general
+capitally for storming a city with forces so badly disciplined as
+to nullify the advantages of success. An English military writer,
+speaking of the storming of Ismail and Praga by the Russians under
+Suwarrow, says truly that ‘posterity will hold the fame and honour of
+the commander responsible for the life of every human being sacrificed
+by disciplined armies beyond the fair verge of battle;’ but it is idle
+to speak as if only Russian armies were guilty of such excesses, or
+to say that nothing but the prospect of them could tempt the Russian
+soldier to mount the breach or the scaling-ladder. The Russian soldier
+in history yields not one whit to the English or French in bravery, nor
+is there a grain of difference between the Russian storming of Ismail
+and Praga and the English storming of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, or San
+Sebastian, that tarnished the lustre of the British arms in the famous
+Peninsular war.
+
+And should we be tempted to think that successes like these associated
+with the names of these places may be so important in war as to
+outweigh all other considerations, we must also not forget that the
+permanent military character of nations, for humanity or the reverse,
+counts for more in the long run of a people’s history than any
+advantage that can possibly be gained in a single campaign.
+
+Enough has, perhaps, been said of the unpopularity of military service,
+and of the obvious causes thereof, to make it credible that, had the
+system of conscription never been resorted to in Europe, and the
+principle of voluntary enlistment remained intact and universal, the
+difficulty of procuring the human fighting material in sufficient
+quantities would in course of time have rendered warfare impossible. As
+other industries than mere fighting have won their way in the world,
+the difficulty of hiring recruits to sell their lives to their country
+has kept even pace with the facility of obtaining livelihoods in more
+regular and more lucrative as well as less miserable avocations. In the
+fourteenth century soldiers were very highly paid compared with other
+classes, and the humblest private received a daily wage equivalent to
+that of a skilled mechanic;[302] but the historical process has so
+far reversed matters that now the pay of the humblest mechanic would
+compare favourably with that of all the fighting grades lower than
+the commissioned and warrant ranks. Consequently, every attempt to
+make the service popular has as yet been futile, no amelioration of
+it enabling it to compete with pacific occupations. The private’s pay
+was raised from sixpence to a shilling during the wars of the French
+Revolution;[303] and before that it was found necessary, about the
+time of the war with the American colonies, to bribe men to enlist
+by the system (since abolished) of giving bounties at the time of
+enlistment. Previous to the introduction of the bounty system, a guinea
+to provide the recruit with necessaries and a crown wherewith to drink
+the king’s health was all that was given upon enlistment, the service
+itself (with the chances of loot and the allied pleasures) having been
+bounty enough.[304] Even the system of bounties proved attractive only
+to boys; for as the English statesman said, whose name is honourably
+associated with the first change in our system from enlistment for
+life to enlistment for a limited period, ‘men grown up with all the
+grossness and ignorance and consequent want of consideration incident
+to the lower classes’ were too wary to accept the offers of the
+recruiting department.[305]
+
+The shortening of the term of service in 1806 and subsequently
+the increase of pay, the mitigation of punishments, must all be
+understood as attempts to render the military life more attractive
+and more capable of competing with other trades; but that they have
+all signally failed is proved by the chronic and ever-increasing
+difficulty of decoying recruits. The little pamphlet, published by
+authority and distributed gratis at every post-office in the kingdom,
+showing forth ‘the Advantages of the Army’ in their rosiest colours,
+cannot counteract the influence of the oral evidence of men, who,
+after a short period of service, are dispersed to all corners of the
+country, with their tales of military misery to tell, confirming and
+propagating that popular theory of a soldier’s life which sees in it a
+sort of earthly purgatory for faults of character acquired in youth, a
+calling only to be adopted by those whose antecedents render industry
+distasteful to them, and unfit them for more useful pursuits.
+
+The same difficulty of recruiting was felt in France and Germany in the
+last century, when voluntary enlistment was still the rule. In that
+curious old military book, Fleming’s ‘Volkommene Teutsche Soldat,’ is a
+picture of the recruiting officer, followed by trumpeters and drummers,
+parading the streets, and shaking a hat full of silver coins near a
+table spread with the additional temptations of wine and beer.[306] But
+it soon became necessary to supplement this system by coercive methods;
+and when the habitual neglect of the wounded and the great number of
+needless wars made it difficult or impossible to fill up the ranks with
+fresh recruits, the German authorities resorted to a regular system of
+kidnapping, taking men as they could get them from their ploughs, their
+churches, or even from their very beds.
+
+In France, too, Louis XIV. had to resort to force for filling his ranks
+in the war of the Spanish Succession; although the system of recruiting
+remained nominally voluntary till very much later. The total cost of
+a French recruit amounted to ninety-two livres; but the length of his
+service, though it was changed from time to time from periods varying
+from three to eight years, never exceeded the latter limit, nor came to
+be for life as it did practically in England.
+
+The experience of other countries proves, therefore, that England
+will sooner or later adopt the principle of conscription or cease to
+waste blood and money in Continental quarrels. The conscription will
+be for her the only possible way of obtaining an army at all, or one
+at all commensurate with those of her possible European rivals. We
+should not forget that in 1878, when we were on the verge of a war with
+Russia (and we live always on the verge of a war with Russia), our
+best military experts met and agreed that only by means of compulsory
+service could we hope to cope with our enemy with any chance of
+success. And the conscription, whether under a free government or
+not, means a tyranny compared to which the tyrannies of the Tudors
+or Stuarts were as a yoke of silk to a yoke of iron. It would matter
+little that it should lead to or involve a political despotism, for
+the greater despotism would ever be the military one, crushing out
+all individuality, moral liberty, and independence, and consigning to
+the soul-destroying routine of petty military details all the talent,
+taste, knowledge, and wealth of our country, which have hitherto given
+it a distinctive character in history, and a foremost place among the
+nations of the earth.
+
+In the year 1702 a woman served as a captain in the French army with
+such signal bravery that she was rewarded with the Order of St. Louis.
+Nor was this the only result; for the episode roused a serious debate
+in the world, whether, or not, military service might be expected of,
+or exacted from, the female sex generally.[307] Why, then, should the
+conscription be confined to one half only of a population, in the face
+of so many historical instances of women who have shown pre-eminent,
+or at least average, military capacity? And if military service is so
+ennobling and excellent a thing, as it is said to be, for the male
+population of a country, why not also for the female? Or as we may be
+sure that it would be to the last degree debasing for the latter half
+of the community, may we not suspect that the reasoning is altogether
+sophistical which claims other effects as the consequence of its
+operation on the stronger sex?
+
+What those effects are likely to be on the further development of
+European civilisation, we are as yet scarcely in a position to judge.
+We are still living only on the threshold of the change, and can
+hardly estimate the ultimate effect on human life of the transference
+to the whole male population of a country of the habits and vices
+previously confined to only a section of it. But this at least is
+certain, that at present every prediction which ushered in the change
+is being falsified from year to year. This universal service which
+we call the conscription was, we were told, to usher in a sort of
+millennium; it was to have the effect of humanising warfare; of
+raising the moral tone of armies; and of securing peace, by making
+the prospect of its alternative too appalling to mankind. Not only
+has it done none of these things, but there are even indications of
+consequences the very reverse. The amenities that cast occasional
+gleams over the professional hostilities of the eighteenth century, as
+when, for instance, Crillon besieging Gibraltar sent a cart-load of
+carrots to the English governor, whose men were dying of scurvy, have
+passed altogether out of the pale of possibility, and given place to
+a hatred between the combatant forces that is tempered by no courtesy
+nor restrained by the shadow of humanity. Whole nations, instead of
+a particular class, have been familiarised with deeds of robbery and
+bloodshed, and parted with a large part of their leisure once available
+for progress in industry. War itself is at any given moment infinitely
+more probable than it used to be, from the constant expectation of it
+which comes of constant preparation; nothing having been proved falser
+by history than the popular paradox which has descended to us from
+Vegetius that the preparation for war is the high road to peace.[308]
+When, one may ask, has the world not been prepared for war, and how
+then has it had so much of it? And as to the higher moral tone likely
+to spring from universal militarism, of what kind may we expect it to
+be, when we read in a work by the greatest living English general,
+destined, Carlyle hoped, one day to make short work of Parliament, such
+an exposition as the following of the relation between the moral duties
+of a soldier and those of a civilian: ‘He (the soldier) must be taught
+to believe that his duties are the noblest which fall to a man’s lot.
+He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers, like
+missionaries, must be fanatics.’[309]
+
+Erasmus once observed in a letter to a friend how little it mattered
+to most men to what nationality they belonged, seeing that it was only
+a question of paying taxes to Thomas instead of to John, or to John
+instead of to Thomas; but it becomes a matter of even less importance
+when it is only a question of being trained for murder and bloodshed in
+the drill-yards of this or that government. What is it to a conscript
+whether it is for France or Germany that he is forced to undergo drill
+and discipline, when the insipidity of the drill and the tyranny of the
+discipline is the same in either case? If the old definition of a man
+as a reasoning animal is to be exchanged for that of a fighting animal,
+and the claims of a country upon a man are to be solely or mainly in
+respect of his fighting utility, it is evident that the relation is
+altered between the individual and his country, and that there is no
+longer any tie of affection between them, nor anything to make one
+nationality different from or preferable to another. This is clearly
+the tendency of the conscription; and it is already remarkable how it
+has lessened those earlier and narrower views of patriotism which were
+the pretext formerly for so many trials of strength between nations.
+What, then, are the probable ultimate effects of this innovation on the
+development and maintenance of the peace in Europe?
+
+The conscription, by reducing the idea of a country to that merely of
+a military despotism, has naturally caused the differences between
+nations to sink into a secondary place, and to be superseded by those
+differences of class, opinions, and interests which are altogether
+independent of nationality, and regardless of the barriers of language
+or geography. Thus the artisan of one country has learnt to regard
+his fellow-worker of another country as in a much truer sense his
+countryman than the priest or noble who, because he lives in the same
+geographical area as himself, pays his taxes to the same central
+government; and the different political schools in the several
+countries of Europe have far more in common with one another than with
+the opposite party of their own nationality. So that the first effect
+of that great military engine, the conscription, has been to unloosen
+the bonds of the idea of nationality which has so long usurped the
+title to patriotism; to free us from that notion of our duty towards
+our neighbour which bids us hate him because he is our neighbour; and
+to diminish to that extent the chances of war by the undermining of the
+prejudice which has ever been its mainstay.
+
+But the conscription in laying one spectre has raised another; for over
+against Nationalism, the jealousy of nations, it has reared Socialism,
+the jealousy of classes. It has done so, not only by weakening the old
+national idea which kept the rivalry of classes in abeyance, but by
+the pauperism, misery, and discontent which are necessarily involved
+in the addition it causes to military expenditure. The increase caused
+by it is so enormous as to be almost incredible. In France the annual
+military expenditure is now about twenty-five million pounds, whereas
+in 1869, before the new law of universal liability to service, the
+total annual cost of the army was little over fifteen millions, or the
+average annual cost of the present army of Great Britain. ‘Nothing,’
+said Froissart, ‘drains a treasury like men-at-arms;’ and it is
+probably below the truth to say that a country is the poorer by a
+pound for every shilling it expends upon its army. Thus by the nature
+of things is Socialism seen to flow from the conscription; and we have
+only to look at the recent history of Europe to see how the former has
+grown and spread in exact ratio to the extension of the latter. That it
+does not yet prevail so widely in England as in France, or Germany, or
+Russia is because as yet we have not that compulsory military service
+for which our military advisers are beginning to clamour.
+
+The growth of Socialism in its turn is not without an effect that
+may prove highly beneficial as a solvent of the militarism which is
+the uncompensated evil of modern times. For it tends to compel the
+governments of our different nationalities to draw closer together,
+and, adopting some of the cosmopolitanism of their common foe, to enter
+into league and union against those enemies to actual institutions for
+whom militarism itself is primarily responsible, owing to the example
+so long set by it in methods of lawlessness, to the sanction so long
+given by it to crime. With Socialistic theories permeating every
+country, but more especially those that groan under the conscription,
+international jealousies are smothered and kept down, and must, if the
+cause continues, ultimately die out. Hence the curious result, but
+a result fraught with hopefulness for the future, that the peace of
+the world should owe itself now, in an indirect but clearly traceable
+manner, to the military system which of all others that was ever
+invented is the best calculated to prevent and endanger it. But since
+this is merely to say that the danger of foreign war is lessened by
+the imminent fear of civil war, little is gained by the exchange of
+one peril for another. Socialism can only be averted by removing the
+cause which gives birth to it--namely, that unproductive expenditure on
+military forces which intensifies and perpetuates pauperism. So that
+the problem of the times for us in England is not how we may obtain
+a more liberal military expenditure, still less how we may compass
+compulsory service; but rather how most speedily we can disband our
+army--an ever-growing danger to our peace and liberty--and how we can
+advance elsewhere the cause of universal disarmament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE LIMITS OF MILITARY DUTY.
+
+ _‘I confess when I went into arms at the beginning of this war,
+ I never troubled myself to examine sides; I was glad to hear the
+ drums beat for soldiers, as if I had been a mere Swiss, that had
+ not cared which side went up or down, so I had my pay.’_--MEMOIRS
+ OF A CAVALIER.
+
+ The old feeling of the moral stain of bloodshed--Military
+ purificatory customs--Modern change of feeling about
+ warfare--Descartes on the profession of arms--The old-world
+ sentiment in favour of piracy--The central question of military
+ ethics--May a soldier be indifferent to the cause of war?--The
+ right to serve made conditional on a good cause, by St. Augustine,
+ Bullinger, Grotius, and Sir James Turner--Old Greek feeling about
+ mercenary service--Origin of our mercenary as opposed to gratuitous
+ service--Armies raised by military contractors--The value of the
+ distinction between foreign and native mercenaries--Original
+ limitation of military duty to the actual defence of the
+ realm--Extension of the notion of allegiance--The connection of the
+ military oath with the first Mutiny Act--Recognised limits to the
+ claims on a soldier’s obedience--The falsity of the common doctrine
+ of duty illustrated by the devastation of the Palatinate by the
+ French and by the bombardment of Copenhagen by the English--The
+ example of Admiral Keppel--Justice between nations--Its observation
+ in ancient India and Rome--St. Augustine and Bayard on justice
+ in war--Grotius on good grounds of war--The military claim to
+ exemption from moral responsibility--The soldier’s first duty to
+ his conscience--The admission of this principle involves the end of
+ war.
+
+
+It must needs be that new questions arise, or old perplexities in
+a fresh form; and of these one that has risen again in our time is
+this: Does any moral stain attach to bloodshed committed upon the
+battle-field? Or is the difference between military and ordinary
+homicide a real one, and does the plea of duty sanction any act,
+however atrocious in the abstract, provided it be committed under the
+uniform of the State?
+
+The general opinion is, of course, that no soldier in his military
+capacity can be guilty of crime; but opinion has not always been so
+fixed, and it is worth noticing that in the forms of civilisation that
+preceded our own, and in some existing modern races of lower type
+than our own, traces clearly appear of a sense of wrong attaching to
+any form of bloodshed whatever, whether of fair battle or of base
+treachery, calling alike for the purifying influences of expiation and
+cleansing. In South Africa, for instance, the Basuto returning from
+war proceeds with all his arms to the nearest stream, to purify not
+only his own person but his javelins and his battle-axe. The Zulu, too,
+practises ablutions on the same occasion; and the Bechuana warrior
+wears a rude kind of necklace, to remind him of the expiation due from
+him to the slain, and to disperse the dreams that might otherwise
+trouble him, and perhaps even drive him to die of remorse.[310]
+
+The same feelings may be detected in the old world. The Macedonians
+had a peculiar form of sacrificatory purification, which consisted
+in cutting a dog in half and leading the whole army, arrayed in full
+armour, between the two parts.[311] As the Bœotians had the same
+custom, it was probably for the same reason. At Rome, for the same
+purpose, a sheep, and a bull, and a pig or boar, were every year led
+three times round the army and then sacrificed to Mars. In Jewish
+history the prohibition to King David to build the temple was expressly
+connected with the blood he had shed in battle. In old Greek mythology
+Theseus held himself unfit, without expiation, to be admitted to the
+mysteries of Ceres, though the blood that stained his hands was only
+that of thieves and robbers. And in the same spirit Hector refused to
+make a libation to the gods before he had purified his hands after
+battle. ‘With unwashen hands,’ he said, ‘to pour out sparkling wine
+to Zeus I dare not, nor is it ever the custom for one soiled with the
+blood and dust of battle to offer prayers to the god whose seat is in
+the clouds.’[312]
+
+For the cause of this feeling we may perhaps choose between an almost
+instinctive reluctance to take human life, and some such superstition
+as explains the necessity for purification among the Basutos,--the
+idea, namely, of escaping the revenge of the slain by the medium of
+water.[313] The latter explanation would be in keeping with the not
+uncommon notion in savage life of the inability of a spirit to cross
+running water, and would help to account for the necessity there was
+for a Hebrew to flee, or for a Greek to make some expiation, even
+though only guilty of an act of unintentional homicide. And in this way
+it is possible that the sanctity of human life, which is one of the
+chief marks, and should be one of the chief objects, of civilisation,
+originated in the very same fear of a post-mortem vengeance, which
+leads some savage tribes to entreat pardon of the bear or elephant
+they have slain after a successful chase.
+
+But, account as we like for the origin of the feeling, its undoubted
+existence is the point of interest, for it is easy to see that under
+slightly more favourable conditions of history it might have ripened
+into a state of thought which would have held the soldier and the
+manslayer in equal abhorrence. Christianity in its primitive form
+certainly aimed at and very nearly effected the transition. In the
+Greek Church a Christian soldier was debarred from the Eucharist for
+three years if he had slain an enemy in battle; and the Christian
+Church of the first three centuries would have echoed the sentiment
+expressed by St. Cyprian in his letter to Donatus: ‘Homicide when
+committed by an individual is a crime, but a virtue when committed in
+a public war; yet in the latter case it derives its impunity, not from
+its abstract harmlessness, but solely from the scale of its enormity.’
+
+The education of centuries has long since effaced the earlier scruple;
+but there are tens of thousands of Englishmen to whom the military
+profession is the last they would voluntarily adopt, and it would be
+rash to predict the impossibility of the revival of the older feeling,
+or the dimensions it may ultimately assume. The greatest poet of our
+time, who more than any other living man has helped to lead European
+opinion into new channels, may, perhaps, in the following lines have
+anticipated the verdict of the coming time, and divined an undercurrent
+of thought that is beginning to flow even now amongst us with no
+inconsiderable force of feeling:--
+
+ La phrase, cette altière et vile courtisane,
+ Dore le meurtre en grand, fourbit la pertuisane,
+ Protège les soudards contre le sens commun,
+ Persuade les niais que tous sont faits pour un,
+ Prouve que la tuerie est glorieuse et bonne,
+ Déroute la logique et l’évidence, et donne
+ Un sauf-conduit au crime à travers la raison.[314]
+
+The destruction of the romance of war by the greater publicity given to
+its details through the medium of the press clearly tends to strengthen
+this feeling, by tempering popular admiration for military success
+with a cooling admixture of horror and disgust. Take, for instance,
+the following description of the storming of the Egyptian trenches at
+Tel-el-Kebir, by an eye-witness of it:--‘In the redoubts into which
+our men were swarming the Egyptians, throwing away their arms, were
+found cowering, terror-stricken, in the corners of the works, to hide
+themselves from our men. Although they had made such a contemptible
+exhibition, from a soldierly point of view, it was impossible to help
+pitying the poor wretches as they huddled together; _it seemed so much
+like rats in a pit when the terrier has set to work_.’ And some 2,500
+of them were afterwards buried on the spot, most of them killed by
+bayonet wounds in the back.
+
+This is an instance of the _tuerie_ that Victor Hugo speaks of, which
+we all call glorious when we meet in the streets, reserving, some of
+us, another opinion for the secret chamber. Still, when it comes to
+comparing the work of a victory to that of a terrier in a rat-pit, it
+must be admitted that the realism of war threatens to become more
+repellent than its romance was once attractive, and to deter men more
+and more from the choice of a profession of which similar disgusting
+scenes are the common and the probable episodes.
+
+Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and of free thought, who,
+from a youthful love for arms and camp-life, which he attributed to a
+certain heat of liver, began life in the army, actually gave up his
+military career for the reasons which he thus expressed in a letter
+to a friend: ‘Although custom and example render the profession of
+arms the noblest of all, I, for my own part, who only regard it like a
+philosopher, value it at its proper worth, and, indeed, I find it very
+difficult to give it a place among the honourable professions, seeing
+that idleness and licentiousness are the two principal motives which
+now attract most men to it.’[315]
+
+Of course no one in modern times would come to the same conclusions
+as Descartes for the same reasons, the discipline of our armies being
+somewhat more serious than it was in the first half of the seventeenth
+century. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read of the German campaign
+in France without hoping, for the good of the world, that the
+inevitable association of war with the most revolting forms of crime
+therein displayed, may some day produce a general state of sentiment
+similar to that anticipated by Descartes.
+
+It may be, said that the example of Descartes proves and indicates
+nothing; and we may feel pretty sure that his scruples seemed
+extravagantly absurd to his contemporaries, if he suffered them to
+know them. Nevertheless, he might have appealed to several well-known
+historical facts as a reason against too hasty a condemnation of his
+apparent super-sensitiveness. He might have argued that the profession
+of a pirate once reflected no more moral discredit than that of a
+soldier did in his days; that the pirate’s reply to Alexander, that he
+infested the seas by the same right wherewith the conqueror devastated
+the land, conveyed a moral sentiment once generally accepted, nor even
+then quite extinct; that in the days of Homer it was as natural to ask
+a seafarer whether he were a freebooter as whether he were a merchant;
+that so late in Greek history as the time of Thucydides, several tribes
+on the mainland of Greece still gloried in piracy, and accounted their
+plunder honourably won; and that at Rome the Cilician pirates, whom
+it devolved on Pompey to disperse, were joined by persons of wealth,
+birth, and education, ‘as if,’ says Plutarch, ‘their employment were
+worthy of the ambition of men of honour.’
+
+Remembering, therefore, these things, and the fact that not so very
+many centuries ago public opinion was so lenient to the practice of
+bishops and ecclesiastics taking an active part in warfare that they
+commonly did so in spite of canons and councils to the contrary, it is
+a fair subject for speculation whether the moral opinion of the future
+may not come to coincide with the feeling of Descartes, and it behoves
+us to keep our minds alive to possibilities of change in this matter,
+already it would seem in process of formation. Who will venture to
+predict what may be the effect of the rise of the general level of
+education, and of the higher moral life of our time, on the popular
+judgment of even fifty years hence regarding a voluntarily adopted
+military life?
+
+We may, perhaps, attribute it to the extreme position taken up with
+regard to military service by the Quakers and Mennonites that the
+example of Descartes had so slight a following. That thick phalanx of
+our kind who fondly mistake their own mental timidity for moderation,
+perpetually make use of the doctrines of extremists as an excuse for
+tolerating or even defending what in the abstract they admit to be
+evil; and it was unfortunately with this moderate party that Grotius
+elected to throw in his lot. No one admitted more strongly the evils
+of war. The reason he himself gave for writing his ‘De Jure Pacis et
+Belli’ was the licence he saw prevailing throughout Christendom in
+resorting to hostilities; recourse had to arms for slight motives
+or for none; and when war was once begun an utter rejection of all
+reverence for divine or human law, just as if the unrestrained
+commission of every crime became thenceforth legitimate. Yet, instead
+of throwing the weight of his judgment into the scale of opinion which
+opposed the custom altogether (though he did advocate an international
+tribunal that should decide differences and compel obedience to its
+decisions), he only tried to shackle it with rules of decency that are
+absolutely foreign to it, with the result, after all, that he did very
+little to humanise wars, and nothing to make them less frequent.
+
+Nevertheless, though Grotius admitted the abstract lawfulness of
+military service, he made it conditional on a thorough conviction
+of the righteousness of the cause at issue. This is the great and
+permanent merit of his work, and it is here that we touch on the pivot
+or central question of military ethics. The orthodox theory is, that
+with the cause of war a soldier has no concern, and that since the
+matter in contention is always too complicated for him to judge of
+its merits, his only duty is to blindfold his reason and conscience,
+and rush whithersoever his services are commanded. Perhaps the best
+exposition of this simple military philosophy is that given by
+Shakespeare in his scene of the eve of Agincourt, where Henry V., in
+disguise, converses with some soldiers of the English army. ‘Methinks,’
+says the king, ‘I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king’s
+company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.’
+
+_William._ ‘That’s more than we know.’
+
+_Bates._ ‘Ay, or more than we should seek after, for we know enough
+if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our
+obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’
+
+Yet the whisper of our own day is, Does it? For a soldier, nowadays,
+enjoys equally with the civilian, who by his vote contributes to
+prevent or promote hostilities, the greater facilities afforded by
+the spread of knowledge for the exercise of his judgment; and it is
+to subject him to undeserved ignominy to debar him from the free use
+of his intellect, as if he were a minor or an imbecile, incompetent
+to think for himself. Putting even the difficulty of decision at its
+worst, it can never be greater for the soldier than it is for the
+voter; and if the former is incompetent to form an opinion, whence does
+the peasant or mechanic derive his ability? Moreover, the existence
+of a just and good cause has always been the condition insisted on as
+alone capable of sanctioning military service by writers of every shade
+of thought--by St. Augustine as representing the early Catholic Church,
+by Bullinger or Becon as representatives of the early Reformed Church,
+and by Grotius as representative of the modern school of publicists.
+Grotius contends that no citizen or subject ought to take part in an
+unjust war, even if he be commanded to do so. He openly maintains
+that disobedience to orders is in such a case a lesser evil than the
+guilt of homicide that would be incurred by fighting. He inclines to
+the opinion that, where the cause of war seems doubtful, a man would
+do better to refrain from service, and to leave the king to employ
+those whose readiness to fight might be less hampered by questions of
+right and wrong, and of whom there would always be a plentiful supply.
+Without these reservations he regards the soldier’s task as so much the
+more detestable than the executioner’s, as manslaughter without a cause
+is more heinous than manslaughter with one,[316] and thinks no kind of
+life more wicked than that of men who, without regard for the cause of
+war, fight for hire, and to whom the question of right is equivalent to
+the question of the highest wage.[317]
+
+These are strong opinions and expressions, and as their general
+acceptance would logically render war impossible, it is no small gain
+to have in their favour so great an authority as Grotius. But it is
+an even greater gain to be able to quote on the same side an actual
+soldier. Sir James Turner at the end of his military treatise called
+‘Pallas Armata,’ published in 1683, came to conclusions which, though
+adverse to Grotius, contain some remarkable admissions and show the
+difference that two centuries have made on military maxims with regard
+to this subject. ‘It is no sin for a mere soldier,’ he says, ‘to serve
+for wages, unless his conscience tells him he fights in an unjust
+cause.’ Again, ‘That soldier who serves or fights for any prince or
+State for wages in a cause he knows to be unjust, sins damnably.’ He
+even argues that soldiers whose original service began for a just
+cause, and who are constrained by their military oaths to continue
+in service for a new and unjust cause of war, ought to ‘desert their
+employment and suffer anything that could be done to them before they
+draw their swords against their own conscience and judgments in an
+unjust quarrel.’[318]
+
+These moral sentiments of a military man of the seventeenth century
+are absolutely alien to the military doctrines of the present day;
+and his remarks on wages recall yet another important landmark of
+ancient thought that has been removed by the progress of time. Early
+Greek opinion justly made no distinction between the mercenary who
+served a foreign country and the mercenary who served his own. All
+hired military service was regarded as disgraceful, nor would anyone
+of good birth have dreamt of serving his own country save at his own
+expense. The Carians rendered their names infamous as the first of the
+Greek race who served for pay; whilst at Athens Pericles introduced the
+custom of supporting the poorer defenders of their country out of the
+exchequer.[319] Afterwards, of course, no people ever committed itself
+more eagerly to the pursuit of mercenary warfare.
+
+In England also gratuitous military service was originally the
+condition of the feudal tenure of land, nor was anyone bound to serve
+the king for more than a certain number of days in the year, forty
+being generally the longest term. For all service in excess of the
+legal limit the king was obliged to pay; and in this way, and by
+the scutage tax, by which many tenants bought themselves off from
+their strict obligations, the principle of a paid military force was
+recognised from the time of the Conquest. But the chief stipendiary
+forces appear to have been foreign mercenaries, supported, not out
+of the commutation tax, but out of the king’s privy purse, and still
+more out of the loot won from their victims in war. These were those
+soldiers of fortune, chiefly from Flanders, Brabançons, or Routers,
+whose excesses as brigands led to their excommunication by the Third
+Lateran Council (1179), and to their destruction by a crusade three
+years later.[320]
+
+But the germ of our modern recruiting system must rather be looked for
+in those military contracts or indentures, by which from about the time
+of Edward III. it became customary to raise our forces: some powerful
+subject contracting with the king, in consideration of a certain sum,
+to provide soldiers for a certain time and task. Thus in 1382 the
+war-loving Bishop of Norwich contracted with Richard II. to provide
+2,500 men-at-arms and 2,500 archers for a year’s service in France, in
+consideration of the whole fifteenth that had been voted by Parliament
+for the war.[321] In the same way several bishops indented to raise
+soldiers for Henry V. And thus a foreign war became a mere matter
+of business and hire, and armies to fight the French were raised by
+speculative contractors, very much as men are raised nowadays to make
+railways or take part in other works needful for the public at large.
+The engagement was purely pecuniary and commercial, and was entirely
+divested of any connection with conscience or patriotism. On the other
+hand, the most obviously just cause of war, that of national defence in
+case of invasion, continued to be altogether disconnected with pay, and
+remained so much the duty of the militia or capable male population of
+the country, that both Edward III. and Richard II. directed writs even
+to archbishops and bishops to arm and array all abbots, priors, and
+monks, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, for the defence of the
+kingdom.[322]
+
+Originally, therefore, the paid army of England, as opposed to the
+militia, implied the introduction of a strictly mercenary force
+consisting indifferently of natives or foreigners, into our military
+system. But clearly there was no moral difference between the two
+classes of mercenaries so engaged. The hire, and not the cause, being
+the main consideration of both, the Englishman and the Brabançon were
+equally mercenaries in the ordinary acceptation of the term. The
+prejudice against mercenaries either goes too far or not far enough.
+If a Swiss or an Italian hiring himself to fight for a cause about
+which he was ignorant or indifferent was a mercenary soldier, so was
+an Englishman who with equal ignorance and indifference accepted the
+wages offered him by a military contractor of his own nation. Either
+the conduct of the Swiss was blameless, or the Englishman’s moral
+delinquency was the same as his.
+
+The public opinion of former times regarded both, of course, as equally
+blameless, or rather as equally meritorious. And it is worth noticing
+that the word _mercenary_ was applied alike to the hired military
+servant of his own as of another country. Shakespeare, for instance,
+applies the term mercenary to the 1,600 Frenchmen of low degree slain
+at Agincourt, whom Monstrelet distinguishes from the 10,000 Frenchmen
+of position who lost their lives on that memorable day--
+
+ In this ten thousand they have lost,
+ There are but sixteen hundred mercenaries.
+
+And even so late as 1756, the original signification of the word had so
+little changed, that in the great debate in the House of Lords on the
+Militia Bill of that year Lord Temple and several other orators spoke
+of the national standing army as an army of _mercenaries_, without
+making any distinction between the Englishmen and the Hessians who
+served in it.[323]
+
+The moral distinction that now prevails between the paid service of
+natives and of foreigners is, therefore, of comparatively recent
+origin. It was one of the features of the Reformation in Switzerland
+that its leaders insisted for the first time on a moral difference
+between Swiss soldiers who served their own country for pay, and those
+who with equal bravery and credit sold their strength to the service of
+the highest foreign bidder.
+
+Zwingli, and after him his disciple Bullinger, effected a change in the
+moral sentiment of Switzerland equivalent to that which a man would
+effect nowadays who should persuade men to discountenance or abandon
+military service of any kind for pay. One of the great obstacles to
+Zwingli’s success was his decided protest against the right of any
+Swiss to sell himself to foreign governments for the commission of
+bloodshed, regardless of any injury in justification; and it was
+mainly on that account that Bullinger succeeded in 1549 in preventing
+a renewal of the alliance or military contract between the cantons
+and Henry II. of France. ‘When a private individual,’ he said, ‘is
+free to enrol himself or not, and engages himself to fight against the
+friends and allies of his sovereign, I know not whether he does not
+hire himself to commit homicide, and whether he does not act like the
+gladiators, who, to amuse the Roman people, let themselves to the first
+comer to kill one another.’
+
+But it is evident that, except with a reservation limiting a man’s
+service to a just national cause, Bullinger’s argument will also apply
+to the case of a hired soldier of his own country. The duty of every
+man to defend his country in case of invasion is intelligible enough;
+and it is very important to notice that originally in no country did
+the duty of military obedience mean more. In 1297 the High Constable
+and Marshal of England refused to muster the forces to serve Edward I.
+in Flanders, on the plea that neither they nor their ancestors were
+obliged to serve the king outside his dominions;[324] and Sir E. Coke’s
+ruling in Calvin’s case,[325] that Englishmen are bound to attend the
+king in his wars as well without as within the realm, and that their
+allegiance is not local but indefinite, was not accepted by writers
+on the constitution of the country. The existing militia oath, which
+strictly limits obedience to the defence of the realm, covered the
+whole military duty of our ancestors; and it was only the innovation of
+the military contract that prepared the way for our modern idea of the
+soldier’s duty as unqualified and unlimited with regard to cause and
+place and time. The very word _soldier_ meant originally stipendiary,
+his pay or _solde_ (from the Latin _solidum_) coming to constitute
+his chief characteristic. From a servant hired for a certain task
+for a certain time the steps were easy to a servant whose hire bound
+him to any task and for the whole of his life. The existing military
+oath, which binds a recruit and practically compels him as much to a
+war of aggression as of defence at the bidding of the executive, owes
+its origin to the revolution of 1689, when the refusal of Dumbarton’s
+famous Scotch regiment to serve their new master, William III., in the
+defence of Holland against France, rendered it advisable to pass the
+Mutiny Act, containing a more stringent definition of military duty by
+an oath couched in extremely general terms. Such has been the effect
+of time in confirming this newer doctrine of the contract implied by
+the military status, that the defence of the monarch ‘in person, crown,
+and dignity against all enemies,’ to which the modern recruit pledges
+himself at his attestation, would be held to bind the soldier not to
+withhold his services were he called upon to exercise them in the
+planet Mars itself.
+
+Hence it appears to be an indisputable fact of history that the
+modern military theory of Europe, which demands complete spiritual
+self-abandonment and unqualified obedience on the part of a soldier,
+is a distinct trespass outside the bounds of the original and, so
+to speak, constitutional idea of military duty; and that in our own
+country it is as much an encroachment on the rights of Englishmen as it
+is on the wider rights of man.
+
+But what is the value of the theory itself, even if we take no account
+of the history of its growth? If military service precludes a man from
+discussing the justice of the end pursued in a war, it can hardly be
+disputed that it equally precludes him from inquiries about the means,
+and that if he is bound to consider himself as fighting in any case
+for a lawful cause he has no right to bring his moral sense to bear
+upon the details of the service required of him. But here occurs a
+loophole, a flaw, in the argument; for no subject nor soldier can be
+compelled to serve as a spy, however needful such service may be. That
+proves that a limit does exist to the claims on a soldier’s obedience.
+And Vattel mentions as a common occurrence the refusal of troops to
+act when the cruelty of the deeds commanded of them exposed them to
+the danger of savage reprisals. ‘Officers,’ he says, ‘who had the
+highest sense of honour, though ready to shed their blood in a field
+of battle for their prince’s service, have not thought it any part of
+their duty to run the hazard of an ignominious death,’ such as was
+involved in the execution of such behests. Yet why not, if their prince
+or general commanded them? By what principle of morality or common
+sense were they justified in declining a particular service as too
+iniquitous for them and yet in holding themselves bound to the larger
+iniquity of an aggressive war? What right has a machine to choose or
+decide between good and bad any more than between just and unjust? Its
+moral incompetence must be thoroughgoing, or else in no case afford an
+extenuating plea. You must either grant it everything or nothing, or
+else offer a rational explanation for your rule of distinction. For it
+clearly needs explaining, why, if there are orders which a soldier is
+not bound to obey, if there are cases where he is competent to discuss
+the moral nature of the services required of him, it should not also
+be open to him to discuss the justice of the war itself of which those
+services are merely incidents.
+
+Let us turn from the abstract to the concrete, and take two instances
+as a test of the principle. In 1689, Marshal Duras, commander of the
+French army of the Rhine, received orders to destroy the Palatinate,
+and make a desert between France and Germany, though neither the
+Elector nor his people had done the least injury to France. Did a
+single soldier, did a single officer quail or hesitate? Voltaire tells
+us that many officers felt shame in acting as the instrument of this
+iniquity of Louis XIV., but they acted nevertheless in accordance with
+their supposed honour, and with the still orthodox theory of military
+duty. They stopped short at no atrocity. They cut down the fruit-trees,
+they tore down the vines, they burnt the granaries; they set fire to
+villages, to country-houses, to castles; they desecrated the tombs of
+the ancient German emperors at Spiers; they plundered the churches;
+they reduced well-nigh to ashes Oppenheim, Spiers, Worms, Mannheim,
+Heidelberg, and other flourishing cities; they reduced 400,000 human
+beings to homelessness and destruction--and all in the name of military
+duty and military honour! Yet, of a truth, those were dastardly deeds
+if ever dastardly deeds have been done beneath the sun; and it is the
+sheerest sophistry to maintain that the men who so implicitly carried
+out their orders would not have done more for their miserable honour,
+would not have had a higher conception of duty, had they followed the
+dictates of their reason and conscience rather than those of their
+military superiors, and refused to sacrifice their humanity to an
+overstrained theory of their military obligation, and their memory to
+everlasting execration.
+
+In the case of these destroyers military duty meant simply military
+servility, and it was this reckless servility that led Voltaire in his
+‘Candide’ to put into the mouth of his inimitable philosopher, Martin,
+that definition of an army which tales like the foregoing suggested and
+justified: ‘A million of assassins, in regiments, traversing Europe
+from end to end, and committing murder and brigandage by rules of
+discipline for the sake of bread, because incompetent to exercise any
+more honest calling.’[326]
+
+An English case of this century may be taken as a parallel one to the
+French of the seventeenth, and as an additional test of the orthodox
+military dogma that with the cause of war a soldier has no concern.
+It is the Copenhagen expedition of 1807, than which no act of might
+within this century was more strongly reprobated by the public opinion
+of Europe, and by all but the Tory opinion of England. A fleet and
+army having been sent to the Danish capital, and the Danish Government
+having refused to surrender their fleet, which was demanded as the
+alternative of bombardment, the English military officials proceeded
+to bombard the city, with infinite destruction and slaughter, which
+were only stayed at last by the surrender of the fleet as originally
+demanded. There was no quarrel with Denmark at the time, there was no
+complaint of injury; only the surrender of the fleet was demanded.
+English public opinion was both excited and divided about the morality
+of this act, which was only justified on the plea that the Government
+was in possession of a secret article of the Treaty of Tilsit between
+Napoleon and the Czar of Russia, by which the Danish fleet was to be
+made use of in an attack upon England. But this secret article was
+not divulged, according to Alison, till ten years afterwards,[327]
+and many disbelieved in its existence altogether, even supposing that
+its existence would have been a good case for war. Many military men
+therefore shared in the feeling that condemned the act, yet they
+scrupled not to contribute their aid to it. Were they right? Read Sir
+C. Napier’s opinion of it at the time, and then say where, in the
+case of a man so thinking, would have lain his duty: ‘This Copenhagen
+expedition--is it an unjust action for the general good? Who can say
+that such a precedent is pardonable? When once the line of justice has
+been passed, there is no shame left. England has been unjust.... Was
+not our high honour worth the danger we might perhaps have risked in
+maintaining that honour inviolate?’[328]
+
+These opinions, whether right or wrong, were shared by many men in
+both services. Sir C. Napier himself says: ‘Were there not plenty of
+soldiers who thought these things wrong? ... but would it have been
+possible to allow the army and navy ... to decide upon the propriety of
+such attacks?’[329] The answer is, that if they did, whether allowed or
+not, such things would be impossible, or, at all events, less probable:
+which is the best reason possible for the contention that they should.
+Had they done so in this very instance, our historians would have been
+spared the explanation of an episode that is a dark blot upon our
+annals.
+
+A more pleasing precedent, therefore, than that of the French officers
+in the Palatinate, or of the English at Copenhagen, is the case of
+Admiral Keppel, who, whilst numbers of naval officers flocked to the
+Admiralty to offer their services or to request employment, steadily
+declined to take part in the war of England against her American
+colonies, because he deemed her cause a bad one.[330] He did no
+violence to his reason or conscience nor tarnished his fame by acting a
+part, of which in his individual capacity he disapproved. His example
+is here held up as illustrating the only true doctrine, and the only
+one that at all accords with the most rudimentary principles of either
+religion or morality. The contrary doctrine bids a man to forswear the
+use of both his reason and his conscience in consideration for his pay,
+and deprives him of that liberty of thought and moral action compared
+with which his civil and political liberty are nothing worth. For what
+indeed is this contrary time-honoured doctrine when stripped of all
+superfluities, and displayed in the outfit of common sense and common
+words? What is it but that the duty of military obedience overrides
+all duty of a man towards himself; that, though he may not voluntarily
+destroy his body, he cannot do too much violence to his soul; that it
+is his duty to annihilate his moral and intellectual being, to commit
+spiritual suicide, to forego the use of the noblest faculties which
+belong to him as a man; that to do all this is a just cause of pride
+to him, and that he is in all respects the nobler and better for
+assimilating himself to that brainless and heartless condition which is
+that also of his charger or his rifle?
+
+If this doctrine is true and sound, then it may be asked whether there
+has ever been or exists upon the earth any tyranny, ecclesiastical or
+political, comparable to this military one; whether any but the baser
+forms of priestcraft have ever sought to deprive a man so completely
+of the enjoyment of his highest human attributes, or to absolve him so
+utterly from all moral responsibility for his actions.
+
+This position can scarcely be disputed, save by denying the reality
+of any distinction between just and unjust in international conduct;
+and against this denial may be set not only the evidence of every age,
+but of every language above the stage of mere barbarism. Disregard of
+the difference is one of the best measures of the civilisation of a
+people or epoch. We at once, for instance, form a higher estimate of
+the civilisation of ancient India, when we read in Arrian that her
+kings were so apprehensive of committing an unjust aggression that
+they would not lead their armies out of India for the conquest of
+other nations.[331] One of the best features in the old pagan world
+was the importance attached to the justice of the motives for breaking
+the peace. The Romans appear never to have begun a war without a
+previous consultation with the College of Fecials as to its justice;
+and in the same way, and for the same purpose, the early Christian
+emperors consulted the opinion of the bishops. If a Roman general made
+an unjust attack upon a people his triumph was refused, or at least
+resisted; nor are the instances infrequent in which the senate decreed
+restitution where a consul, acting on his own responsibility, had
+deprived a population of its arms, its lands, or its liberties.[332]
+Hence the Romans, with all their apparent aggressiveness, won the
+character of a strict regard to justice, which was no small part of the
+secret of their power. ‘You boast,’ the Rhodians said to them, ‘that
+your wars are successful because they are just, and plume yourselves
+not so much on the victory which concludes them as on the fact that
+you never begin them without good cause.’[333] Conquest corrupted the
+Romans in these respects as it has done many another people; but even
+to the end of the Republic the tradition of justice survived; nor is
+there anything finer in the history of that people than the attempt
+of the party headed by Ateius the tribune to prevent Crassus leaving
+Rome when he was setting out to make war upon the Parthians, who not
+only had committed no injury, but were the allies of the Republic; or
+than the vote of Cato, that Cæsar, who, in time of peace, had slain or
+routed 300,000 Germans, should be given up to the people he had injured
+in atonement for the wrong he had done to them.
+
+The idea of the importance of a just cause of war may be traced, of
+course, in history, after the extinction of the grand pagan philosophy
+in which it had its origin. It was insisted on even by Christian
+writers who, like St. Augustine, did not regard all military service
+as wicked. What, he asked, were kingdoms but robberies on a vast scale,
+if their justice were put out of the reckoning.[334] A French writer
+of the time of Charles V. concluded that while soldiers who fell in a
+just cause were saved, those who died for an unjust cause perished in
+a state of mortal sin.[335] Even the Chevalier Bayard, who accompanied
+Charles VIII. without any scruple in his conquest of Naples, was fond
+of saying that all empires, kingdoms, and provinces were, if without
+the principle of justice, no better than forests full of brigands;[336]
+and the fine saying is attributed to him, that the strength of arms
+should only be employed for the establishment of right and equity. But
+on the whole the justice of the cause of war became of less and less
+importance as time went on; nor have our modern Christian societies
+ever derived benefit in that respect from the instruction or guidance
+of their churches at all equal to that which the society of pagan Rome
+derived from the institution of its Fecials, as the guardians of the
+national conscience.
+
+It was among the humane endeavours of Grotius to try to remedy this
+defect in modern States by establishing certain general principles by
+which it might be possible to test the pretext of any given war from
+the side of its justice. At first sight it appears obvious that a
+definite injury is the only justification for a resort to hostilities,
+or, in other words, that only a defensive war is just; but then the
+question arises how far defence may be anticipatory, and an injury
+feared or probable give the same rights as one actually sustained.
+The majority of wars, that have not been merely wars of conquest and
+robbery, may be traced to that principle in history, so well expressed
+by Livy, that men’s anxiety not to be afraid of others causes them
+to become objects of dread themselves.[337] For this reason Grotius
+refused to admit as a good _casus belli_ the fact that another nation
+was making warlike preparations, building garrisons and fortresses,
+or that its power might, if unchecked, grow to be dangerous. He also
+rejected the pretext of mere utility as a good ground for war, or such
+pleas as the need of better territory, the right of first discovery, or
+the improvement or punishment of barbarous nations.
+
+A strict adherence to these principles, vague as they are, would
+have prevented most of the bloodshed that has occurred in Europe
+since Grotius wrote. The difficulty, however, is, that, as between
+nations, the principle of utility easily overshadows that of justice;
+and although the two are related as the temporary to the permanent
+expediency, and therefore as the lesser to the greater expediency,
+the relation between them is seldom obvious at the time of choice,
+and it is easy beforehand to demonstrate the expediency of a war of
+which time alone can show both the inexpediency and the injustice.
+Any war, therefore, however unjust it may seem, when judged by the
+canons of Grotius, is easily construed as just when measured by the
+light of an imperious and magnified passing interest; and the absence
+of any recognised definition or standard of just dealing between
+nations affords a salve to many a conscience that in the matters of
+private life would be sensitive and scrupulous enough. The story of
+King Agesilaus is a mirror in which very few ages or countries may not
+see their own history reflected. When Phœbidas, the Spartan general,
+seized the Cadmeia of Thebes in the time of peace, the greater part
+of Greece and many Spartans condemned it as a most iniquitous act of
+war; but Agesilaus, who at other times was wont to talk of justice
+as the greatest of all the virtues, and of valour without it as of
+little worth, defended his officer’s action, on the plea that it was
+necessary to regard the tendency of the action, and to account it even
+as glorious if it resulted in an advantage to Sparta.
+
+But when every allowance is made for wars of which the justice is not
+clearly defined from the expediency, many wars have occurred of so
+palpably unjust a character, that they could not have been possible
+but for the existence of the loosest sentiments with regard to the
+responsibility of those who took part in them. We read of wars or the
+pretexts of wars in history of which we all, whether military men or
+civilians, readily recognise the injustice; and by applying the same
+principles of judgment to the wars of our own country and time we are
+each and all of us furnished for the direction of our conscience
+with a standard which, if not absolutely scientific or consistent, is
+sufficient for all the practical purposes of life, and is completely
+subversive of the excuse which is afforded by occasional instances of
+difficult and doubtful decision. The same facilities which exist for
+the civilian when he votes for or against taxation for a given war,
+or in approval or disapproval of the government which undertakes it,
+exist also for the soldier who lends his active aid to it; nor is it
+unreasonable to claim for the action of the one the same responsibility
+to his own conscience which by general admission attaches to the other.
+
+It is surely something like a degradation to the soldier that he
+should not enjoy in this respect the same rights as the civilian; that
+his merit alone should be tested by no higher a theory of duty than
+that which is applied to the merit of a horse; and that his capacity
+for blind and unreasoning obedience should be accounted his highest
+attainable virtue. The transition from the idea of military vassalage
+to that of military allegiance has surely produced a strange conception
+of honour, and one fitter for conscripts than for free men, when a
+man is held as by a vice to take part in a course of action which he
+believes to be wrong. Not only does no other profession enforce such an
+obligation, but in every other walk of life a man’s assertion of his
+own personal responsibility is a source rather of credit to him than of
+infamy. That in the performance of any social function a man should be
+called upon to make an unconditional surrender of his free will, and
+yield an obedience as thoughtless as a dummy’s to superior orders,
+would seem to be a principle of conduct pilfered from the Society of
+Jesus, and utterly unworthy of the nobility of a soldier. As a matter
+of history, the priestly organisation took the military one for its
+model: which should lead us to suspect that the tyranny we find fault
+with in the copy is equally present in the original, and that the
+latter is marked by the same vices that it transmitted to the borrowed
+organisation.
+
+The principle here contended for, that the soldier should be fully
+satisfied in his own mind of the justice of the cause he fights for, is
+the condition that Christian writers, from Augustine to Grotius, have
+placed on the lawfulness of military service. The objection to it, that
+its adoption would mean the ruin of military discipline, will appear
+the greatest argument of all in its favour when we reflect that its
+universal adoption would make war itself, which is the only reason for
+discipline, altogether impossible. Where would have been the wars of
+the last two hundred years had it been in force? Or where the English
+wars of the last six, with their thousands of lives and their millions
+of money spent for no visible good nor glory in fighting with Afghans,
+Zulus, Egyptians, and Arabs? Once restrict legitimate warfare to the
+limits of national defence, and it is evident that the refusal of men
+to take part in a war of aggression would equally put an end to the
+necessity of defensive exertion. If no government could rely on its
+subjects for the purposes of aggression and injustice, it goes without
+saying that the just cause of war would perish simultaneously. It is
+therefore altogether to be wished that that reliance should be weakened
+and destroyed.
+
+The reasoning, then, which contains the key that is alone capable of
+closing permanently the portals of Janus is this: that there exists a
+distinction between a just and an unjust war, between a good and a bad
+cause, and that no man has a right either to take part knowingly and
+wilfully in a cause he believes to be unjust, nor to commit himself
+servilely to a theory of duty which deprives him, at the very outset,
+of his inalienable human birthright of free thought and free will. This
+is the principle of personal responsibility which has long since won
+admission everywhere save in the service of Mars, and which requires
+but to be extended there to free the world from the custom that has
+longest and most ruinously afflicted it. For it attacks that custom
+where it has never yet been seriously attacked before, at its real
+source--namely, in the heart, the brain, and the conscience, that,
+in spite of all warping and training, still belong to the individual
+units who alone make it possible. It behoves all of us, therefore,
+who are interested in abolishing military barbarism, not merely to
+yield a passive assent to it ourselves, but to claim for it assent and
+assertion from others. We must ask and reask the question: What is the
+title by which a man, through the mere fact of his military cloth,
+claims exemption from the moral law that is universally binding upon
+his fellows?
+
+For this principle of individual military responsibility is of such
+power, that if carried to its consequences, it must ultimately prove
+fatal to militarism; and if it has not yet the prescription of time
+and common opinion in its favour, it is sealed nevertheless with the
+authority of many of the best intellects that have helped to enlighten
+the past, and is indissolubly contained in the teaching alike of our
+religious as of our moral code. It can, in fact, only be gainsaid by a
+denial of the fundamental maxims of those two guides of our conduct,
+and for that reason stands absolutely proof against the assaults
+of argument. Try to reconcile with the ordinary conceptions of the
+duties of a man or a Christian the duty of doing what his conscience
+condemns, and it may be safely predicted that you will try in vain.
+The considerations that may occur of utility and expediency beat in
+vain against the far greater expediency of a world at peace, freed from
+the curse of the warrior’s destructiveness; nor can the whole armoury
+of military logic supply a single counter-argument which does not
+resolve itself into an argument of supposed expediency, and which may
+not therefore be effectually parried, even on this narrower debating
+ground, by the consideration of the overwhelming advantages which could
+not but flow from the universal acceptance of the contrary and higher
+principle--the principle that for a soldier, as for anyone else, his
+first duty is to his conscience.
+
+Or, to put the conclusion in the fewest words: The soldier claims to
+be a non-moral agent. That is the corner-stone of the whole military
+system. Challenge then the claimant to justify his first principle,
+and the custom of war will shake to its foundation, and in time go the
+way that other evil customs have gone before it, when once their moral
+support has been undermined or shattered.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[1] Halleck’s _International Law_, ii. 21. Yet within three weeks of
+the beginning of the war with France 60,000 Prussians were _hors de
+combat_.
+
+[2] ‘Artem illam _mortiferam et Deo odibilem_ balistrariorum et
+sagittariorum adversus Christianos et Catholicos exerceri de cætero sub
+anathemate prohibemus.’
+
+[3] Fauchet’s _Origines des Chevaliers_, &c. &c., ii. 56; Grose’s
+_Military Antiquities_, i. 142; and Demmin’s _Encyclopédie d’Armurerie_,
+57, 496.
+
+[4] Fauchet, ii. 57. ‘Lequel engin, pour le mal qu’il faisait (pire que
+le venin des serpens), fut nommé serpentine,’ &c.
+
+[5] Grose, ii. 331.
+
+[6] Dyer, _Modern Europe_, iii. 158.
+
+[7] Scoffern’s _Projectile Weapons_, &c., 66.
+
+[8] _Sur l’Esprit_, i. 562.
+
+[9] Reade, _Ashantee Campaign_, 52.
+
+[10] Livy, xliv. 42.
+
+[11] These Instructions are published in Halleck’s _International Law_,
+ii. 36-51; and at the end of Edwards’s _Germans in France_.
+
+[12] ‘It would have been desirable,’ said the Russian Government,
+‘that the voice of a great nation like England should have been heard
+at an inquiry of which the object would appear to have met with its
+sympathies.’
+
+[13] _Jus Gentium_, art. 887, 878.
+
+[14] Florus, ii. 20.
+
+[15] Edwards’s _Germans in France_, 164.
+
+[16] This remarkable fact is certified by Mr. Russell, in his _Diary in
+the last Great War_, 398, 399.
+
+[17] Cicero, _In Verrem_, iv. 54.
+
+[18] See even the _Annual Register_, lvi. 184, for a denunciation of
+this proceeding.
+
+[19] Sismondi’s _Hist. des Français_, xxv.
+
+[20] Edwards’s _Germans in France_, 171.
+
+[21] Lieut-Col. Charras, _La Campagne de 1815_, i. 211, ii. 88.
+
+[22] Woolsey’s _International Law_, p. 223.
+
+[23] Cf. lib. xii. 81, and xiii. 25, 26; quoted by Grotius, iii. xi.
+xiii.
+
+[24] iii. 41.
+
+[25] _Cambridge Essays_, 1855, ‘Limitations to Severity in War,’ by C.
+Buxton.
+
+[26] See Raumer’s _Geschichte Europa’s_, iii. 509-603, if any doubt is
+felt about the fact.
+
+[27] General Order of October 9, 1813. Compare those of May 29, 1809,
+March 25, 1810, June 10, 1812, and July 9, 1813.
+
+[28] Vattel, iii. ix. 165.
+
+[29] Sir W. Napier (_Peninsular War_, ii. 322) says of the proceeding
+that it was ‘politic indeed, yet scarcely to be admitted within the
+pale of civilised warfare.’ It occurred in May 1810.
+
+[30] Bluntschli’s _Modernes Völkerrecht_, art. 573.
+
+[31] For the character of modern war see the account of the
+Franco-German war in the _Quarterly Review_ for April 1871.
+
+[32] Halleck, ii. 22.
+
+[33] Vehse’s _Austria_, i. 369. Yet, as usual on such occasions, the
+excesses were committed in the teeth of Tilly’s efforts to oppose them.
+
+‘Imperavit Tillius a devictorum cædibus et corporum castimonia
+abstinerent, quod imperium a quibusdam furentibus male servatum annales
+aliqui fuere conquesti.’--Adlzreiter’s _Annales Boicæ Gentis_, Part
+iii. l. 16, c. 38.
+
+[34] _Battles in the Peninsular War_, 181, 182.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ 396.
+
+[36] Foxe’s _Actes and Monuments_, iii. 52.
+
+[37] Saint-Palaye, _Mémoires sur la Chevalerie_, iii. 10, 133.
+
+[38] Vinsauf’s _Itinerary of Richard I._, ii. 16.
+
+[39] Matthew of Westminster, 460; Grose, ii. 348.
+
+[40] Monstrelet, ii. 115.
+
+[41] _Mémoires sur la Chevalerie_, i. 322.
+
+[42] Petitot, v. 102; and Ménard, _Vie de B. du Guesclin_, 440.
+
+[43] Petitot, v. 134.
+
+[44] Meyrick, _Ancient Armour_, ii. 5.
+
+[45] i. 123.
+
+[46] Monstrelet, i. 259.
+
+[47] ii. 5.
+
+[48] ii. 11.
+
+[49] ii. 22, compare ii. 56.
+
+[50] Monstrelet, ii. 111.
+
+[51] ii. 113.
+
+[52] See for some, Livy, xxix. 8, xxxi. 26, 30, xxxvii. 21, xliii. 7,
+xliv. 29.
+
+[53] Livy, xliv. 29.
+
+[54] Meyrick, i. 41.
+
+[55] Demmin, _Encyclopédie d’Armurerie_, 490.
+
+[56] Meyrick, ii. 204.
+
+[57] Grose, ii. 114.
+
+[58] Petitot, xvi. 134.
+
+[59] Grose, ii. 343.
+
+[60] iv. 27.
+
+[61] iv. 36.
+
+[62] iii. 109.
+
+[63] _Mémoires_, vi. 1.
+
+[64] Halleck, _International Law_, ii. 154.
+
+[65] _Elements of Morality_, sec. 1068.
+
+[66] _Des Droits et Devoirs des Nations neutres_, ii. 321-323.
+
+[67] _History of the Royal Navy_, i. 357.
+
+[68] Nicolas, ii. 341.
+
+[69] Nicolas, ii. 405.
+
+[70] Monstrelet, i. 12.
+
+[71] Nicolas, ii. 108.
+
+[72] _Ibid._ i. 333.
+
+[73] Froissart, ii. 85.
+
+[74] Entick, _New Naval History_ (1757), 823. ‘Some of the Spanish
+prizes were immensely rich, a great many of the French were of
+considerable value, and so were many of the English; but the balance
+was about two millions in favour of the latter.’
+
+[75] From Entick’s _New Naval History_ (1757), 801-817.
+
+[76] Martens, _Essai sur les Corsaires_ (Horne’s translation), 86, 87.
+
+[77] _Ibid._ 93.
+
+[78] III. xv. 229.
+
+[79] Emerigon, _On Insurances_ (translation), 442.
+
+[80] Martens, 19.
+
+[81] Hautfeuille, _Des Droits et Devoirs des Nations neutres_, ii. 349.
+
+[82] _De Jure Maritimo_, i. 72.
+
+[83] _Despatches_, vi. 145.
+
+[84] _Despatches_, vi. 79.
+
+[85] The last occasion was on April 13, 1875.
+
+[86] Halleck, _International Law_, ii. 316.
+
+[87] Bluntschli, _Modernes Völkerrecht_, art. 665.
+
+[88] James, _Naval History_, i. 255.
+
+[89] James, ii. 71.
+
+[90] _Ibid._ ii. 77.
+
+[91] Ortolan, _Diplomatie de la Mer_, ii. 32.
+
+[92] Campbell’s _Admirals_, viii. 40.
+
+[93] _Campbell_, vii. 21. _James_, i. 161. Stinkpots are jars or shells
+charged with powder, grenades, &c.
+
+[94] James, i. 283.
+
+[95] Brenton, ii. 471.
+
+[96] Caltrops, or crows’-feet, are bits of iron with four spikes so
+arranged that however they fall one spike always remains upwards.
+Darius planted the ground with caltrops before Arbela.
+
+[97] Chapter xix. of the _Tactica_.
+
+[98] Frontinus, _Strategematicon_, IV. vii. 9, 10. ‘Amphoras pice et
+tæda plenas; ... vascula viperis plena.’
+
+[99] Roger de Wendover, _Chronica_. ‘Calcem vivam, et in pulverem
+subtilem redactam, in altum projicientes, vento illam ferente,
+Francorum oculos excæcaverunt.’
+
+[100] Brenton, i. 635.
+
+[101] _De Jure Maritimo_, i. 265.
+
+[102] Rees’s _Cyclopædia_, ‘Fire-ship.’
+
+[103] Brenton, ii. 493, 494.
+
+[104] Halleck, ii. 317.
+
+[105] Woolsey, _International Law_, 187.
+
+[106] James, i. 277.
+
+[107] Phillimore, _International Law_, iii. 50-52.
+
+[108] _International Law_, ii. 95.
+
+[109] Villiaumé, _L’Esprit de la Guerre_, 56.
+
+[110] De Commines, viii. 8.
+
+[111] Watson’s _Philip II._, ii. 74.
+
+[112] _Ibid._ i. 213.
+
+[113] _Memoirs_, c. 19.
+
+[114] Villiaumé (_L’Esprit de la Guerre_, 71) gives the following
+version: ‘En 1793 et en 1794, le gouvernement anglais ayant violé le
+droit des gens contre la République Française, la Convention, dans
+un accès de brutale colère, décréta qu’il ne serait plus fait aucun
+prisonnier anglais ou hanovrien, c’est-à-dire que les vaincus seraient
+mis à mort, encore qu’ils se rendissent. Mais ce décret fut simplement
+comminatoire; le Comité de Salut Public, sachant très-bien que de
+misérables soldats n’étaient point coupables, donna l’ordre secret de
+faire grâce à tous les vaincus.’
+
+[115] Herodotus, vii. 136.
+
+[116] Livy, xlv. 42.
+
+[117] _Ibid._ xlv. 43.
+
+[118] Ward, _Law of Nations_, i. 250.
+
+[119] Petitot’s _Mémoires_, xvi. 177.
+
+[120] Livy, xlii. 8, 9.
+
+[121] Monstrelet, _Chronicles_, i. 200.
+
+[122] _Ibid._ i. 224.
+
+[123] _Ibid._ i. 249.
+
+[124] _Ibid._ i. 259.
+
+[125] Monstrelet, ii. 156.
+
+[126] _Ibid._ 120.
+
+[127] Philip de Commines, ii. 1.
+
+[128] _Ibid._ ii. 2.
+
+[129] _Ibid._ ii. 14.
+
+[130] Philip de Commines, iii. 9.
+
+[131] Motley’s _United Netherlands_, iii. 323.
+
+[132] Vattel, iii. 8, 143.
+
+[133] Borbstaedt, _Franco-German War_ (translation), 662.
+
+[134] Ward, i. 223.
+
+[135] Quintus Curtius, iv. 6, and Grote, viii. 368.
+
+[136] Quintus Curtius, vii. 11.
+
+[137] _Ibid._ iv. 15.
+
+[138] Arrian, iii. 18.
+
+[139] Quintus Curtius, vii. 5.
+
+[140] ‘Tous deux furent très braves, très vaillants, fort bizarres et
+cruels.’
+
+[141] Lyttleton, _Henry II._, i. 183.
+
+[142] Hoveden, 697.
+
+[143] 2 Samuel xii. 31.
+
+[144] _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, i. 47.
+
+[145] _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, 49.
+
+[146] ‘Life of Bayard’ in Petitot’s _Mémoires_, xvi. 9.
+
+[147] Major-General Mitchell’s _Biographies of Eminent Soldiers_, 92.
+
+[148] Livy, xxxi. 40. When Pelium was taken by storm, only the slaves
+were taken as spoil; the freemen were even let off without ransom.
+
+[149] _Ibid._ xxviii. 3.
+
+[150] _Ibid._ xxviii. 20, xxvii. 16, xxxi. 27.
+
+[151] _De Officiis_, i. 12. Yet on this passage is founded the common
+assertion that among the Romans ‘the word which signified stranger was
+the same with that which in its original denoted an enemy’ (Ward, ii.
+174); implying that in their eyes a stranger and an enemy were one and
+the same thing. Cicero says exactly the reverse.
+
+[152] _Recueil de Documents sur les exactions, vols, et cruautés des
+armées prussiennes en France._ The book is out of print, but may be
+seen at the British Museum, under the title, ‘Prussia--Army of.’ It is
+to be regretted that, whilst every book, however dull, relating to that
+war has been translated into English, this record has hitherto escaped
+the publicity it so well deserves.
+
+[153] _Ibid._ 19.
+
+[154] _Ibid._ 8.
+
+[155] _Ibid._ 13.
+
+[156] Chaudordy’s Circular of November 29, 1870, in the _Recueil_.
+
+[157] _Recueil_, 12, 15, 67, 119.
+
+[158] _Ibid._ 56.
+
+[159] _Ibid._ 54.
+
+[160] _Recueil_, 33-37, and Lady Bloomfield’s _Reminiscences_, ii. 235,
+8, 9.
+
+[161] The _Times_, March 7, 1881.
+
+[162] _Recueil_, 29; compare 91.
+
+[163] Morley’s _Cobden_, ii. 177.
+
+[164] Professor Sheldon Amos quotes the fact, but refrains from naming
+the paper, in his preface to Manning’s _Commentaries on the Law of
+Nations_, xl. Was it not the _Journal de France_ for Nov. 21, 1871?
+
+[165] iii. i. viii. 4.
+
+[166] _De Officiis_, i. 13.
+
+[167] _Modernes Völkerrecht_, Art. 565.
+
+[168] Polyænus, _Strategematum libri octo_, i. 34.
+
+[169] Polyænus, v. 41.
+
+[170] Ortolan’s _Diplomatie de la mer_, ii. 31, 375-7.
+
+[171] James’s _Naval History_, ii. 211; Campbell’s _Admirals_, vii. 132.
+
+[172] James, _Naval History_, ii. 225.
+
+[173] Nicolas, _Royal Navy_, ii. 27.
+
+[174] Hautefeuille, _Droit Maritime_, iii. 433. ‘Les vaisseaux de
+l’Etat eux-mêmes ne rougissent pas de ces grossiers mensonges qui
+prennent le nom de ruses de guerre.’
+
+[175] xiii. 1.
+
+[176] Montaigne, ch. v.
+
+[177] vii. 4. ‘Quia appellatione nostra vix apte exprimi possunt, Græca
+pronuntiatione Stratagemata dicuntur.’
+
+[178] Livy, xlii. 47.
+
+[179] _Histoire de la France_, iii. 401.
+
+[180] The word musket is from _muschetto_, a kind of hawk, implying
+that its attack was equally destructive and unforeseen.
+
+[181] Polyænus, ii. 19.
+
+[182] Polyænus, iii. 2; from Thucydides, iii. 34.
+
+[183] _Ibid._ vii. 27, 2.
+
+[184] _Ibid._ iv. 2-4.
+
+[185] Liskenne, _Bibliothèque Historique et Militaire_, iii. 845.
+
+[186] _Memoirs_, ch. xix.
+
+[187] ix. 6, 3.
+
+[188] vi. 22.
+
+[189] vi. 15.
+
+[190] iv. 7, 17.
+
+[191] E. Fournier, _L’Esprit dans l’Histoire_, 145-150.
+
+[192] iii. 10.
+
+[193] Liskenne, v. 233-4.
+
+[194] _Soldier’s Pocket-Book_, 81.
+
+[195] Polyænus, viii. 16, 8. ‘Lege Romanorum jubente hostium
+exploratores interficere.’
+
+[196] Livy, xxx. 29. According to Polyænus, he gave them a dinner and
+sent them back with instructions to tell what they had seen; viii. 16,
+8.
+
+[197] Watson’s _Philip II._ iii. 311.
+
+[198] Liskenne, iii. 840.
+
+[199] Hoffman, _Kriegslist_, 15.
+
+[200] Petitot’s _Mémoires de la France_, xv. 317.
+
+[201] Polyænus, ii. 27.
+
+[202] _Ibid._ v. 1, 4.
+
+[203] _Memoirs_, ch. xix.
+
+[204] Livy, xxxiv. 17.
+
+[205] As at the Brussels Conference, 1874, when such a proposal was
+made by the member for Sweden and Norway.
+
+[206] In Pinkerton, xvi. 817.
+
+[207] Turner’s _Nineteen Years in Samoa_, 304.
+
+[208] Schoolcraft’s _Indian Tribes_, iv. 52.
+
+[209] _The Basutos_, 223.
+
+[210] Potter’s _Grecian Antiquities_, ii. 69.
+
+[211] Turner’s _Samoa_, 298.
+
+[212] Ellis’s _Polynesian Researches_, i. 275.
+
+[213] Hutton’s _Voyage to Africa_, 1821, 337.
+
+[214] Colenso and Durnford’s _Zulu War_, 364, 379.
+
+[215] Petitot’s _Mémoires_, xv. 329.
+
+[216] The evidence is collected in _Cetschwayo’s Dutchman_, 99-103.
+
+[217] Henty’s _March to Coomassie_, 443. Compare Reade’s _Ashantee
+Campaign_, 241-2.
+
+[218] Florus, ii. 19; iii. 4; Velleius Paterculus, ii. 1.
+
+[219] Florus, ii. 20.
+
+[220] _Ibid._ iii. 7.
+
+[221] Florus, iii. 4; Cæsar, _De Bello Gallico_, ix. 44.
+
+[222] Morley’s _Cobden_, ii. 355.
+
+[223] Sir A. Helps’ _Las Casas_, 29.
+
+[224] T. Morton’s _New England Canaan_, 1637, iii.
+
+[225] Belknap’s _New Hampshire_, i. 262.
+
+[226] Penhallow’s _Indian Wars_, 1826, republished 1859, 31-3.
+
+[227] _Ibid._ 105, 6.
+
+[228] _Ibid._ 103. For further details of this debased military
+practice, see Adair’s _History of American Indians_, 245; Kercheval’s
+_History of the Valley of Virginia_, 263; Drake’s _Biography and
+History of the Indians_, 210, 373; Sullivan’s _History of Maine_, 251.
+
+[229] Kercheval’s _Virginia_, 113.
+
+[230] Eschwege’s _Brazil_, i. 186; Tschudi’s _Reisen durch Südamerika_,
+i. 262.
+
+[231] Parkman’s _Expedition against Ohio Indians_, 1764, 117.
+
+[232] Argensola, _Les Isles Molucques_, i. 60.
+
+[233] Drake’s _Biography and History of the Indians_, 489, 490.
+
+[234] R. C. Burton’s _City of the Saints_, 576; Eyre’s _Central
+Australia_, i. 175-9.
+
+[235] Borwick’s _Last of the Tasmanians_, 58.
+
+[236] Tschudi’s _Reisen_, ii. 262.
+
+[237] Maccoy’s _Baptist Indian Missions_, 441; Froebel’s _Seven Years
+in Central America_, 272; Wallace’s _Travels on the Amazon_, 326.
+
+[238] Bancroft’s _United States_, ii. 383-5; and compare Clarkson’s
+_Life of Penn_, chaps. 45 and 46.
+
+[239] Brooke’s _Ten Years in Sarawak_, i. 74.
+
+[240] Captain Hamilton’s _East Indies_, in Pinkerton, viii. 514.
+
+[241] W. H. Russell’s _My Diary in India_, 150.
+
+[242] _Annals of the Propagation of the Faith_, viii. 280-6.
+
+[243] _Caffres and Caffre Missions_, 210.
+
+[244] _Memorials of Henrietta Robertson_, 259, 308, 353.
+
+[245] _Ibid._ 353.
+
+[246] Colenso and Durnford’s _Zulu War_, 215.
+
+[247] Holden’s _History of Natal_, 210, 211.
+
+[248] Moister’s _Africa, Past and Present_, 310, 311.
+
+[249] Tams’s _Visit to Portuguese Possessions_, i. 181, ii. 28, 179.
+
+[250] Robertson’s _America_; Works, vi. 177, 205.
+
+[251] Thomson’s _Great Missionaries_, 30; Halkett’s _Indians of North
+America_, 247, 249, 256.
+
+[252] Le Blant, _Inscriptions Chrétiennes_, i. 86.
+
+[253] Bingham, _Christian Antiquities_, i. 486.
+
+[254] Cæsar, _De Bello Gallico_, vi. 14. ‘Druides a bello abesse
+consuerunt ... militiæ vacationem habent;’ and Origen, _In Celsum_,
+viii. 73, for the Romans.
+
+[255] Vaughan’s _Life of Wycliffe_, ii. 212-3.
+
+[256] Turner’s _England_, iv. 458, from Duchesne, _Gesta Stephani_.
+
+[257] ‘Non filius meus est vel ecclesiæ; ad regis autem voluntatem
+redimetur, quia potius Martis quam Christi miles judicatur.’
+
+[258] Turner’s _England_, v. 92.
+
+[259] ‘Sanxit ut nullus in posterum sacerdos in hostem pergeret,
+nisi duo vel tres episcopi electione cæterorum propter benedictionem
+populique reconciliationem, et cum illis electi sacerdotes qui bene
+scirent populis pœnitentias dare, missas celebrare, etc.’ (in _Du
+Cange_, ‘Hostis’).
+
+[260] Guicciardini. ‘Prometteva che se i soldati procedevano
+virilmente, che non accetterebbe la Mirandola con alcuno patto: ma
+lascierebbe in potestà loro il saccheggiarla.’
+
+[261] Monstrelet, i. 9.
+
+[262] Crichton’s _Scandinavia_, i. 170.
+
+[263] _Mémoires du Fleurange._ Petitot, xvi. 253.
+
+[264] See Palmer, _Origines Liturgicæ_, ii. 362-65, for the form of
+service.
+
+[265] _Petitot_, xvi. 229.
+
+[266] _Ibid._ 135.
+
+[267] Petitot, viii. 55. ‘Feciono venire per tutto il campo un prete
+parato col corpo di Christo, e in luogo di communicarsi ciascuno prese
+uno poco di terra, e la si mise in boca.’
+
+[268] Livy, xxxvi. 2.
+
+[269] Robertson, _Charles V._, note 21. Ryan, _History of Effects of
+Religion on Mankind_, 124.
+
+[270] M. J, Schmidt, _Histoire des Allemands traduite, etc._, iv. 232,
+3.
+
+[271] ‘Christianis licet ex mandato magistratus arma portare et _justa_
+bella administrare.’
+
+[272] _Policy of War a True Defence of Peace_, 1543.
+
+[273] _Pallas Armata_, 369, 1683.
+
+[274] In his treatise _Du droit de la guerre_.
+
+[275] _L’Esprit_, i. 562.
+
+[276] _Strafgesetzbuch_, Jan. 20, 1872, 15, 75, 150.
+
+[277] Fleming’s _Volkommene Teutsche Soldat_, 96.
+
+[278] Benet’s _United States Articles of War_, 391.
+
+[279] Grose, ii. 199.
+
+[280] See Turner’s _Pallas Armata_, 349, for these and similar military
+tortures.
+
+[281] Crichton’s _Scandinavia_, i. 168.
+
+[282] Grose, ii. 6.
+
+[283] Sir S. Scott’s _History of the British Army_, ii. 436.
+
+[284] ii. 16. ‘Omnes autem signarii vel signiferi quamvis pedites
+loricas minores accipiebant, et _galeas ad terrorem hostium ursinis
+pellibus tectas_.’
+
+[285] Scott, ii. 9.
+
+[286] Scott, i. 311.
+
+[287] Said to have been invented about 400 B.C. by Dionysius, tyrant of
+Syracuse.
+
+[288] Mitchell’s _Biographies of Eminent Soldiers_, 208, 287.
+
+[289] Compare article 14 of the German _Strafgesetzbuch_ of January 20,
+1872.
+
+[290] _Nineteenth Century_, November 1882: ‘The Present State of the
+Army.’
+
+[291] _De Re Militari_, vi. 5.
+
+[292] Bruce’s _Military Law_ (1717), 254.
+
+[293] See Fleming’s _Teutsche Soldat_, ch. 29.
+
+[294] See the War Articles for 1673, 1749, 1794.
+
+[295] 82.
+
+[296] Quintus Curtius, viii. 2.
+
+[297] _Military Law_, 163.
+
+[298] 286, 290.
+
+[299] _Despatches_, iii. 302, June 17, 1809.
+
+[300] Compare also _Despatches_, iv. 457; v. 583, 704, 5.
+
+[301] _China War_, 225.
+
+[302] Scott’s _British Army_, ii. 411.
+
+[303] _Wellington’s Despatches_, v. 705.
+
+[304] See Windham’s Speech in the House of Commons. April 3, 1806.
+
+[305] _Ibid._
+
+[306] P. 122.
+
+[307] Fleming, 109.
+
+[308] Preface to b. iii. ‘Ergo qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum.’
+
+[309] Lord Wolseley’s _Soldier’s Pocket Book_, 5.
+
+[310] Arbousset’s _Exploratory Tour_, 397-9.
+
+[311] Livy, xl. 6.
+
+[312] _Iliad_, vi. 266-8; and comp. _Æneid_, ii. 717-20.
+
+[313] Casalis’s _Basutos_, 258.
+
+[314] Victor Hugo’s _L’Ane_, 124.
+
+[315] Baillat’s _Vie de Descartes_, i. 41.
+
+[316] ii. 25, 9, 1. ‘Tanto carnifice detestabiliores quanto pejus est
+sine causâ quam ex causâ occidere.’
+
+[317] _Ibid._ 2. ‘Nullum vitæ genus est improbius quam eorum qui sine
+causæ respectu mercede conducti militant, et quibus ibi fas ubi plurima
+merces.’ Both the sentiment and the expression are borrowed from
+Lucan’s _Pharsalia_, x. 408: ‘Nulla fides pietasque viris qui castra
+sequuntur Venalesque manus; ibi fas ubi plurima merces.’
+
+[318] 364.
+
+[319] Potter’s _Greek Antiquities_, ii. 9.
+
+[320] Henry’s _Britain_, iii. 5, 1; Grose i. 56.
+
+[321] Grose, i. 58.
+
+[322] _Ibid._, i. 67.
+
+[323] _Parliamentary Debates_, May 24, 1756.
+
+[324] Sir S. Scott’s _British Army_, ii. 333.
+
+[325] N. Bacon’s Notes to _Selden’s Laws_, ii. 60.
+
+[326] _Candide_, c. xx.
+
+[327] Alison’s _Europe_, vi. 491.
+
+[328] _Life of Sir C. Napier_, i. 77.
+
+[329] _Military Law_, 17.
+
+[330] _Keppel’s Life_, by T. Keppel, ii. 1.
+
+[331] _Indian Expedition_, ix.
+
+[332] Livy, 39, 3; 42, 21; 43, 5.
+
+[333] Livy, xlv. 22. ‘Certe quidem vos estis Romani, qui ideo felicia
+bella vestra esse, quia justa sint, præ vobis fertis, nec tam exitu
+eorum, quod vincatis, quam principiis quod non sine causâ suscipiatis,
+gloriamini.’
+
+[334] _De Civitate Dei_, iv. 4 and 6.
+
+[335] _Arbre des Batailles_, quoted in Kennedy’s _Influence of
+Christianity on International Law_.
+
+[336] Petitot, xvi. 137.
+
+[337] III. 65. ‘Cavendo ne metuant, homines metuendos ultro se
+efficiunt, et injuriam ab nobis repulsam, tamquam aut facere aut pati
+necesse sit, injungimus aliis.’
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ Achæan, curious mode of warfare, 131
+
+ Alexander II. of Russia, 3, 10
+
+ Armed neutrality, the, 86
+
+ Armour, 55, 224
+
+ Ashantee battle song, 86
+
+
+ Balloonists in war, 148
+
+ Battles, allusions to:
+ Agincourt, 201, 262
+ Bouvines, 194
+ Camperdown, 80
+ Crecy, 9, 54
+ Dover, 84
+ Musselborough, 56
+ Navarette, 59
+ Neerwinden, 6
+ Nicopoli, 56
+ Nile, 81
+ Otterbourne, 196
+ Pavia, 141
+ Poitiers, 207
+ Tel-el-Kebir, 253
+
+ Bearskin hats, 223, 224
+
+ Becon, Thomas, on military service in the sixteenth century, 208
+
+ Bishops in war, 35, 52-3, 193-8, 261
+
+ Blinding of prisoners, 42-3
+
+ Blockade, effective, 92
+
+ Bloodhounds used in war, 171-2
+
+ Bombardment, theory and practice of, 12, 15, 17, 106, 116
+
+ Bounties for scalps, 156
+
+ Brigand, meaning of, 57
+
+ Britons, love for military life, 156
+
+ Brussels Conference on laws of war, 10, 94, 95, 105, 123, 130,
+ 141-6-7-8, 158
+
+ Bullinger, limits to right of military service, 208, 263
+
+
+ Cannons, 5
+
+ Cannon-shot oath, 130
+
+ Capitulations, 100-1
+
+ Chain-shot, 6
+
+ Chivalry, age of, 32
+
+ Church, influence of, on war, 52, 185-193, 204-16, 252
+
+ Churches, destruction of, 48
+
+ Church parade, 219
+
+ Cities, fate of, in war:
+ Amiens, surprise of, 148
+ Badajoz, storming of, 27
+ Barcelona, siege of, 138
+ Brescia, storming of, 103
+ Calais, siege of, 44
+ Constantine, storming of, 27
+ Copenhagen, bombardment of, 15, 268
+ Dinant, storming of, 102
+ Gaza, storming of, 107
+ Grammont, massacre at, 35
+ Gravelines, massacre at, 36
+ Haarlem, siege of, 97
+ Liège, storming of, 102
+ Limoges, massacre at, 37
+ Londonderry, siege of, 197-8
+ Magdeburg, massacre at, 27, 112
+ Malta, siege of, 97
+ Meaux, surrender of, 45, 101
+ Mirandola, siege of, 197
+ Oudenarde, siege of, 47
+ Pekin, English at, 237
+ Persepolis, burning of, 108
+ Poitiers, massacre at, 34
+ Rome, sack of, 103
+ Rouen, surrender of, 47, 101
+ San Sebastian, storming of, 28
+ Strasburg, bombardment of 15, 17, 106
+ Terouanne, destruction of, 137
+ Thebes, sack of, 103
+ Toledo, siege of, 42
+ Tyre, siege of, 108
+ Ulm, surprise of, 149
+ Washington, English in, 16
+
+ Conference stratagem, 136
+
+ Conscription, the, 242-8
+
+ Consecration of banners, 201
+
+ Contraband, 88
+
+ Contributions, military, 20, 118
+
+ Costume, military, 222-3
+
+ Crossbow, 4, 133
+
+ Cruelty and courage, 110
+
+ Custom of war, character of, 186, 210
+
+
+ Decimation, story of, 222
+
+ Declaration of Paris, 73, 78, 86-9
+
+ Declaration of St. Petersburg, 2, 3, 81
+
+ Declaration of war, 19, 198
+
+ Desertion, 230-1
+
+ Discipline, 7, 218, 234, 236
+
+ Dress, philosophy of military, 229
+
+ Duty, 74, 121, 264
+
+
+ Embargoes, 89
+
+ Explosive bullets, 1-2, 81
+
+
+ False flag, stratagem of the, 128-130
+
+ False information in war, 152
+
+ Fecials, Roman, 271
+
+ Firearms, feeling against, 5, 226
+
+ Fireships, 84-5
+
+ Flogging, 234-5
+
+ Forged despatches, 151
+
+ Free Companies, 60, 260
+
+ Free ships, free goods, 87
+
+ Fruit-trees, 16, 17, 47, 161
+
+
+ Germans, the, in war, 40, 106, 115-9
+
+ Greek fire, 83-4
+
+ Grenadiers, 223
+
+
+ Hanging in war, 44-7
+
+ Honour, variable notions of, 155-6, 267
+
+ Hostages, taking of, revived, 117
+
+
+ Innocent III., 206
+
+ Invention of the bayonet, 6
+
+
+ Jomini, Baron, President of Brussels Conference, 95
+
+ Julius II., story of, 196
+
+ Jus Angariæ, 90
+
+ Justice in war, 208, 258-9, 271, 273-80
+
+
+ Khonds, theory of war, 203
+
+ Kidnapping soldiers in Germany, 241
+
+ Kissing the earth, custom of, 201
+
+
+ Lateran Council, Third, 4
+
+ Laws of war among savages, 159
+
+ Lent, observation of, in war, 51, 205
+
+ Leo the Great, 204
+
+ Letters of marque, 74, 78
+
+ Letters, military contempt for, 156
+
+ Limoges, Council of, 203
+
+ Loha Pennu, an Indian war-god, 203
+
+
+ Macedonian warfare, 133
+
+ Magic, use of, in war, 199
+
+ Malingering, 231-4
+
+ Marriage, restrictions on, 218-9
+
+ Mercenary service, 260-3
+
+ Military cant, 21, 105-6, 118, 163
+
+ -- vandalism, 16, 48, 163, 237
+
+ Missionaries, 176-182
+
+ -- failure of, 177
+
+ -- legal control of, 181
+
+ Missionaries, Norwegian, in Zululand, 179
+
+ Mission stations destroyed, 180
+
+ Mozley, Canon, on war, 212
+
+ Musket, 5, 133
+
+ Mutiny Act, first, 265
+
+
+ Names of weapons, 200
+
+ Neutral ships and property, 86
+
+ Night attacks, 133
+
+ Numbers slain in war, 8-10
+
+
+ Oath, military, 264-5
+
+ Oath by cannon-shot, 130
+
+ Ophthalmia, artificial, 233
+
+
+ Palatinate, devastation of the, 17, 267
+
+ Pay, soldiers’, 239, 261
+
+ Perfidy, cases of, 135
+
+ Perjury, cases of, 139
+
+ Perpetual peace, Von Moltke on, 119
+
+ Piracy, 67-70, 255
+
+ Plunder of property at sea, 67-70
+
+ Plunder of property on land, 61-3, 66, 118
+
+ Poison, use of, in war, 13, 14, 172-3
+
+ Poisoning the air, 49
+
+ Poisoning water, 14, 29
+
+ Press, influence of, in war, 112, 177, 182, 253
+
+ Prisoners, treatment of, 17, 18, 40, 85, 99, 113
+
+ Prisoners, beheaded, 97, 106
+
+ -- blinded, 43
+
+ -- burnt, 103, 111
+
+ -- drowned, 101-2-6
+
+ -- hung, 46, 101-3
+
+ -- maimed, 43, 103
+
+ -- massacred, 41, 111
+
+ -- tortured, 194
+
+ Privateering, 70-9
+
+ -- Lord Nelson on, 77
+
+ Prizes and prize-money, 70
+
+ Prize Court, 76
+
+ Punishments, military, 221-6
+
+ Purificatory battle rites, 250
+
+ Pursers on privateers, 76
+
+
+ Recruiting, difficulty of, 240
+
+ -- former system of, in France and Germany, 241
+
+ Red, the military colour, 223
+
+ Red-hot shot, 5, 83
+
+ Reprisals, 93-118
+
+ -- savage German, 117-8
+
+ Right of search, 88
+
+ Right of wreck, 89
+
+ Roman warfare, 114, 132, 271-2
+
+
+ Sacred buildings in war, 16, 48-9
+
+ Sea battles, 80, 83
+
+ Scalping enemies, 170
+
+ Sentry-go, 229
+
+ Slavery, influence of its cessation on war, 112
+
+ Socialism, chief cause of, 245-8
+
+ Soldiers of mark:
+ Alaric, 204
+ Alexander the Great, 107-10, 133
+ Barbarossa, 100
+ Bayard, 6, 57, 149, 151, 165, 201, 226, 273
+ Bertrand du Guesclin, 40-1, 44
+ Black Prince, the, 37, 59
+ Blücher, 16, 17
+ Cæsar, 98, 156, 169, 272
+ Catinat, 145
+ Chandos, Sir John, 55
+ Charles of Anjou, 100
+ Charles the Bold, 111
+ Charles XII. of Sweden, 133, 226
+ Crillon, 22, 73, 243
+ Custine, 145
+ David, king of the Jews, 111, 251
+ David I. of Scotland, 111
+ Des Adretz, 111
+ Edward I., 106
+ Edward III., 44
+ Eugene, Prince, 149
+ Feuquières, 97, 138, 149
+ Francis I., 140
+ Francis de Vere, 104
+ Frederick the Great, 16, 142
+ Genseric, 205
+ Godfrey de Bouillon, 100
+ Gustavus Adolphus, 19-20, 22, 221
+ Henri Quatre, 30
+ Henry V., 101
+ Keppel, Admiral, 270
+ Manny, Sir Walter, 44, 57
+ Maurice, Prince, 150
+ Montluc, 107, 121, 133, 137, 145, 156
+ Moltke, 119
+ Orange, Prince of, 152
+ Parma, Prince of, 146
+ Pélissier, 165
+ Peterborough, Lord, 138
+ Pyrrhus, 157
+ Richard I., 111, 195
+ Saxe, Marshal, 226
+ Scipio, 146
+ Sertorius, 143, 145
+ Sully, 30
+ Suwarrow, 238
+ Wellington, Duke of, 20, 236
+ Wolseley, Lord, 143-4, 151, 244
+ Xerxes, 47, 99, 146
+
+ Spaniards in war, 40, 42, 97, 167-9, 200
+
+ Spies, 141-8
+ Vattel on, 141
+ Frederick the Great on, 142
+ Lord Wolseley on, 143-4
+
+ Storming cities, 27, 238
+
+ Surprises, 148-9
+
+ Surrender at discretion, 45, 100, 123
+
+
+ Ternate, island of, 131
+
+ Torpedoes, first use of, 5
+
+ -- introduced into European warfare, 85
+
+ Treatise on Tactics by Leo VI., 83
+
+ Truce of God, 205
+
+
+ War, real character of, 27, 186, 210
+
+ Wars, abolition of private, 205, 227
+
+ Weapons, 50
+
+ Women, imprisoned in war, 38
+
+ Women and children, slaughter of, 23, 33-8, 117
+
+ Women as soldiers, 242
+
+ Writers, &c.:
+ Arrian, 109
+ Bluntschli, 127
+ Bynkershoeck, 14, 127
+ Cicero, 114, 126
+ Descartes, 254
+ Dobritzhoffer, 160
+ Emerigon, 73
+ Erasmus, 186, 244
+ Froissart, 23
+ Frontinus, 134
+ Grotius, 14, 17, 23, 126, 187, 256, 258, 273
+ Hallam, 32, 50
+ Hautefeuille, 67
+ Kant, 23, 30
+ Las Casas, 167
+ Molloy, 77
+ Origen, 190
+ Palmerston, Lord, 227
+ Penn, 173
+ Polyænus, 135
+ Quintus Curtius, 109
+ St. Pierre, Abbé, 30
+ Sepulveda, 167
+ Tertullian, 189
+ Turner, Sir James, 259
+ Valin, 73
+ Vattel, 14, 18, 21, 73, 104-5, 139, 141, 266
+ Vauban, 15
+ Victor Hugo, 252
+ Voltaire, 210, 267-8
+ Whewell, 67
+ Wycliffe, 193
+ Zwingli, 263
+
+
+_Spottiswoode & Co., Printers, New-street Square, London._
+
+
+
+
+ Transcriber's notes:
+
+ The following is a list of changes made to the original.
+ The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
+
+ Page 11, footnote:
+
+ like England should have been heard an inquiry of which
+ like England should have been heard at an inquiry of which
+
+ Page 78:
+
+ which abolished privateering beween the signatory Powers,
+ which abolished privateering between the signatory Powers,
+
+ Page 244:
+
+ such an expositon as the following of the relation between
+ such an exposition as the following of the relation between
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Military Manners and Customs, by James Anson Farrer
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44635 ***
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