Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

By these means it is undoubtedly possible to gain that advantage over your enemy which, according to every theory of war, it is the paramount object of hostilities to obtain; for it has been too often forgotten that a nation’s honour and character, which an enlightened patriotism should value higher than the mere earth on which it feeds and treads, are sacrificed and impaired whenever a treaty is taken by one of the parties to it to have been made in another sense from that which was clearly understood by both parties to have constituted its spirit at the time of making it. What a lasting stain rests, for instance, on the memory of Francis I., who before signing the Treaty of Madrid, by which he swore, in return for his liberty, to restore the Duchy of Burgundy, and to return a prisoner to Spain if he failed to do so, made a formal protest beforehand, in the presence of some friends, that the oath he was about to take was involuntary and therefore void, and broke it the moment he was free! And this was the man whose memory is associated with the famous saying after the battle of Pavia: ‘All is lost save honour.’ What he really said after that event, in a letter to his mother, was this: ‘All is lost save my honour and my life, which is safe,’ and the letter went on at length, much more in keeping with the character of that monarch.[191] His life indeed he saved; his honour he never recovered.

It was agreed at the Brussels Conference that resort to every possible method of obtaining information about the forces or country of an enemy should count as a fair military stratagem; and, indeed, with the subject of the deceitful side of war the military theory and treatment of Spies occupies no inconsiderable place.

Vattel is again as good an exponent as we can have of what international law teaches on this subject. His argument is as follows: It is not contrary to the law of nations to seduce one of the hostile side to turn spy, nor to bribe a governor to deliver a town, because such actions do not, like the use of poison or assassination, strike at the common welfare and safety of mankind. Such actions are the common episodes of every war. But that they are not in themselves honourable or compatible with a good conscience is proved by the fact that generals who resort to such means never boast of them; and, if they are at all excusable, it is only in the case of a very just war, when there is no other way of saving a country from ruin at the hands of lawless conquerors. A sovereign has no right to require the services of a spy from any of his subjects, but he may hold out the temptation of reward to mercenary souls; and if a governor is willing to sell himself and offer us a town for money, should we scruple to take advantage of his crime, and to get without danger what we have a right to get by force? At the same time a spy may rightly be put to death, because it is the only way we have of guarding against the mischief he may do us.[192]

Frederick the Great of Prussia was a contemporary of Vattel, and in November 1760 he published some military instructions for the use of his generals which, in the matter of spies, was based on a wider practical knowledge of the matter than of course belonged to the more pacific publicist. He classified spies into ordinary spies, double spies, spies of distinction, and spies by compulsion. By double spies he meant spies who also pretended to be in the service of the side they betrayed. By spies of distinction he meant officers of hussars, whose services he had found useful under the peculiar circumstances of the Austrian campaign. When he could not procure himself spies among the Austrians, owing to the careful guard which their light troops kept round their camp, the idea occurred to him, and he acted on it with success, of utilising the suspension of arms that was customary after a skirmish between hussars to make those officers the means of conducting an epistolary correspondence with the officers on the other side. Spies by compulsion he explained in this way: ‘When you wish to convey false information to an enemy, you take a trustworthy soldier and compel him to pass to the enemy’s camp to report there all that you wish the enemy to believe; you also send by him letters to excite the troops to desertion.’ And in the event of its being impossible to obtain information about the enemy, this distinguished child of Mars prescribes the following: Choose some rich citizen, who has land and wife and children, and another man disguised as his servant or coachman, who understands the enemy’s language. Force the former to take the latter with him to the enemy’s camp to complain of injuries sustained, threatening him that if he fail to bring the man back with him after having stayed long enough for the desired object, his wife and children shall be hanged and his house burnt. ‘I was myself constrained,’ adds this great warrior, ‘to have recourse to this method, when we were encamped at ——, and it succeeded.’[193]

Such were the military ethics of the great philosopher and king, whose character in the closer intimacy of biography proved so disagreeable a revelation to Carlyle. Pagan antiquity might be searched in vain for practice or sentiments more ignoble. Sertorius, the Roman captain, was one of the greatest masters of stratagem in the world, yet how different his language from that of the Great Frederick! ‘A man,’ he said, ‘who has any dignity of feeling should conquer with honour, and not use any base means even to save his life.’

From the sentiments of Frederick the Great regarding spies, let us pass to those of our own time. From Lord Wolseley’s ‘Soldier’s Pocket-Book’ may be gained some insight as to the manner in which a spy in an enemy’s camp may correspond with the hostile general. The best way, he suggests, is to send a peasant with a letter written on very thin paper, which may be rolled up so tightly as to be portable in a quill an inch and a half long, and this precious quill may be hidden in the hair or beard, or in a hollow made at the end of a walking-stick. It is also a good plan to write secret correspondence in lemon-juice across a newspaper or the leaves of a New Testament; it is then safe against discovery, and will become legible when held before a fire or near a red iron.

‘As a nation,’ says Lord Wolseley, ‘we are bred up to feel it a disgrace even to succeed by falsehood; the word spy conveys something as repulsive as slave; we will keep hammering along with the conviction that honesty is the best policy, and that truth always wins in the long run. These pretty little sentiments do well for a child’s copy-book, but a man who acts upon them had better sheathe his sword for ever.’[194] Was there ever such a confession of the incompatibility of the soldier’s calling with the precepts of ordinary honour? For how not so, if he must so far stoop from the ordinary level of moral rectitude as to be ready to scorn honesty and to trifle with truth? And then the question is, Had not a man better sheathe his sword for ever, or rather not enter at all upon a trade where he will have to regard the eternal principles of right and wrong as so much pretty sentiment only fit for the copy-book?

Since, therefore, we have the authority of Vattel, of Frederick the Great, and of Lord Wolseley that spies may or even must be employed in war, and that, be the trickery or bribery never so mean that procures their services, no discredit reflects itself upon those generals who use them—it is impossible not to notice it as one of the chief anomalies in existing military usages that, although a general has an unlimited right to avail himself of the services of a spy or a traitor, the penalty for acting in either of the latter capacities is death. The capital penalty is not of itself any test of the moral character of the action to which it is affixed, for the service of a fire-ship, which demanded the most desperate bravery, used to be undertaken in the face of capital punishment. Moreover, some of the most famous names in military history have not hesitated to act as spies. Sertorius was honoured by Marius with the usual rewards of signal valour for having learnt the language of the Gauls and gone as a spy amongst them disguised in their dress. The French general Custine entered Mayence in the disguise of a butcher. Catinat spied out the strength of Luxembourg in the costume of a coal-heaver. Montluc entered Perpignan as a cook, and only resolved never again to act as a spy because the narrowness of his escape convinced him, not that it was a service of too much dishonour, but a service of too much danger.

The custom of killing spies is an old Roman one,[195] and, indeed, seems to have prevailed all the world over. Nevertheless there have been exceptions even to that. Scipio Africanus had some Carthaginian spies who were brought before him led through the camp, and then dismissed under escort, and with the polite inquiry whether they had examined everything to their satisfaction.[196]