Military Manners and Customs
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Title: Military Manners and Customs
Author: James Anson Farrer
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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 am
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