Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

In spite, therefore, of Grotius, the above stratagems must be considered as dishonourable; and that so they are beginning to be considered is indicated by the fact that at the Brussels Conference of 1874 the use of an enemy’s flag or uniform was expressly rejected from the category of fair military stratagems. But the improvement is in spite of international law, not in consequence of it.

There is an obvious distinction indeed between the above method of overcoming an enemy and such favourite devices as ambuscades, feigned retreats, night attacks, or the diversion of a defence to the wrong point. But perhaps nothing in the history of moral opinion is more curious than that even these modes of deceit should have been, not by one people or an unwarlike people, but by several people, and one among them the most warlike nation known to history, deliberately rejected as unfair and dishonourable modes of warfare. The historical evidence on this point appears to be quite conclusive, and is worth recalling for the interest that cannot but attach to one of the strangest but most neglected chapters in the history of human ethics.

The Achæans, says Polybius, disdained even to subdue their enemies with the help of deceit. In their opinion a victory was neither honourable nor secure that was not obtained in open combat by superior courage. Therefore they esteemed it a kind of law among them never to use any concealed weapons, nor to throw darts from a distance, being persuaded that an open and close conflict was the only fair method of combat. For the same reason they not only made a declaration of war, but sent notice each to the other of their resolution to try the fortune of a battle, and of the place where they were determined to engage.[175]

And in Ternate, one of the Molucca Islands, which suffered such untold miseries after the Europeans had discovered its spices and its heathenism, not only was war never begun without being first declared, but it was also customary to inform the enemy of the number of men and the amount and kind of weapons with which it was intended to conduct hostilities.[176]

But the case of the Romans is by far the most remarkable. Polybius, Livy, and Ælian all agree in their testimony that for a long period of their history the Romans refrained from all kinds of stratagem as from a sort of military meanness; and their evidence is corroborated by Valerius Maximus, who says that the Romans, having no word in their language to express a military ruse, were forced to borrow the Greek word, from which our own word stratagem is derived.[177] Polybius, who lived and wrote as late as the second century before Christ, after complaining that artifice was then so prevalent among the Romans that their chief study was to deceive one another in war and in politics, adds that, in spite of this degeneracy, they still declared war solemnly beforehand, seldom formed ambuscades, and preferred to fight man to man in close engagement. So late as the year 172 B.C. the elder senators regretted the lost virtue of their ancestors, who refrained from such stratagems as night attacks, counterfeit flights, and sudden returns, and who sometimes even appointed the day of battle and fixed the field of combat, looking for victory not from fraud, but only from superiority in personal bravery.[178] Ælian, too, declares that the Romans never resorted to stratagems till about the end of the Second Punic War; and truly the great Roman general, Scipio, who took the name of Africanus, displayed a thorough African skill in the use he made of spies and surprises to bring that war to a successful issue.

With regard to night attacks the Macedonians appear to have cherished similar feelings, since we find Alexander refusing to attack Darius by night on the ground that he did not wish to gain a stolen victory. And with regard to close combat, something of the old Roman and Achæan feeling was displayed in Europe when first the crossbow, and in later times the musket, rendered personal prowess of lesser importance. Before the time of Richard I., when the crossbow became the chief weapon in war, warriors, says the Abbé Velley, were so free and brave that they would only owe victory to their lance and their sword, and everybody detested those perfidious arms with which a coward under shelter was enabled to slay the bravest.[179] So said Montluc of the musket, which in 1523 had not yet, he says, superseded in France the use of the crossbow: ‘Would to God this accursed instrument had never been invented.... So many brave and valiant men would not have met their deaths at the hands very often of the greatest cowards, who would not so much as dare look at the man whom they knock down from a distance with their accursed balls.’[180] And in the same spirit Charles XII. of Sweden once bade his soldiers to come to close quarters with the enemy without shooting, on the ground that it was only for cowards to shoot.

Such ideas are, of course, dead beyond the hope of recovery; but they are an odd commentary on our conceit in the improved tone of our military code of honour. We have long since learned to despise these old-world notions of honour and courage, and to make very few exceptions indeed to the newer doctrine of Christendom, that in war anything and everything is fair. But it is worth the pause of a moment to reflect that such moral sentiments in restraint of the use of fraud in war should have once had a real existence in the world; that they should once have swayed the minds of the most successful military nation that ever existed, and stood by them till they had attained that high degree of power which was theirs at the time of the Second Punic War (217-199 B.C.) In comparing the code of military honour prevalent in pagan antiquity with that of more recent times, it is but fair to remember that the pagan nations of old recognised some principles of action which were never dreamt of in the best days of Christian chivalry; and that the generals of the people who we are sometimes told were a mere robber community would have had as strong a feeling against the righteousness of a night attack, a feigned retreat, or a surprise, as our modern generals would have of an open violation of a truce or convention.

The downward path in this matter is easy, and the history of Rome after Scipio Africanus is associated with a change of opinion concerning stratagems that in no degree fell short of that subtlety of the Greeks, Gauls, or Africans, which the Romans once regarded as perfidy. Frontinus, who wrote a book on stratagems in the reign of Trajan, and still more Polyænus, who wrote a large book on the same subject for the Emperors Verus and Antoninus, appear to have thought that no deceit was too bad to serve as a good precedent for the conduct of war. Polyænus not merely made a collection of some nine hundred stratagems, but collected them for the express purpose of their being of service to the Roman Emperors in the war then undertaken against Parthia. To the rulers of a people who had once regarded even an ambuscade as beneath their chivalry he brought as worthy of their recollection and study actions which are an eternal stain on the memory of those who committed them. Let us take for example the devices he records for obtaining possession of besieged places, remembering that from the moment the chamade has been beaten, or any other sign been given for a conference or parley between the contending forces, a truce by tacit agreement is held to suspend their mutual hostilities.

1. Thibron persuaded the governor of a fort in Asia to come out to arrange terms, under an oath that he should return if they failed to agree. During the relaxation of guard that naturally ensued, Thibron’s men took the fort by assault: and Thibron, reconducting the governor according to his word, forthwith put him to death.[181]