Another stratagem is suggested by the conduct of the Prince of Orange, who, having detected in one of his own secretaries a spy in the service of the Prince of Luxembourg, forced him to write a letter to the latter containing such information as enabled himself to effect a march he wished to conceal. Might not, then, prisoners of war be used for the same compulsory service? For a spy just as much as a soldier is a recognised and accredited military agent, and, if the former may be made the channel of falsehood, why not the prisoner of war? The Romans made use of the latter to acquire information about their enemy’s plans, if in no other way, by torture or the threat of it; the Germans forced some of their French prisoners to perform certain military services connected with carrying on their campaign—would it be therefore unfair to make use of them as the Prince of Orange made use of his secretary?
To such questions there is no answer from the international law writers. Still less is there any authoritative military doctrine concerning them, and, if the stratagems in debate are excluded from ‘good’ war by the military honour of to-day, the above study of warlike artifices has been made to little purpose if it has not taught us how changeable and capricious that standard is, and of what marvellous adjustment it is capable.
It were a treat at which the gods themselves might smile to see and hear a moral philosopher and a military officer brought into conference together concerning the stratagems permissible in war. Let the reader imagine them trying to distribute in just and equal parts the due share of blame attaching severally to the following agents—to the man who betrays his country or his cause for gold, and the general who tempts him to his crime or accepts it gladly; to the man who serves as a spy, to the general who on the one side sends or employs him as a spy, and to the general who on the other side hangs him as a spy; to the man who discovers the strength of a town in the disguise of a butcher, and to his fellow-soldiers who enter it disguised as peasants or under the plea of shelter from sickness or a snowstorm; to the man who gains an advantage by propagating false intelligence, and the man who does so by the use of forged despatches; the man who, like Scipio, plays at negotiations for peace in order the better to spy out and avail himself of an enemy’s weakness, and the man who makes offers of treason to an enemy in order the more easily to take him at a disadvantage—and the conclusion will be not unlikely to occur to him, when he shudders at the possible length and futility of that imaginary disputation, that, whatever havoc is caused by a state of war to life, to property, to wealth, to family affections, to domestic honour, it is a havoc absolutely incomparable to that which it produces among the received moral principles of mankind. The military code regarding the fair and legitimate use of fraud and deception has nothing whatever in common with the ordinary moral code of civil life, the principles openly professed in it being so totally foreign to our simplest rules of upright and worthy conduct that in any other than the fighting classes of our civilised societies they would not be advocated for very shame, nor listened to for a moment without resentment.
[CHAPTER VI.]
BARBARIAN WARFARE.
Non avaritia, non crudelitas modum novit.... Quæ clam commissa capite luerentur, quia paludati fecere laudamus.—Seneca.
Variable notions of honour—Primitive ideas of a military life—What is civilised warfare—Advanced laws of war among several savage tribes—Symbols of peace among savages—The Samoan form of surrender—Treaties of peace among savages—Abeyance of laws of war in hostilities with savages—Zulus blown up in caves with gun-cotton—Women and men kidnapped for transport service on the Gold Coast—Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the New World contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions—Wars with natives of English and French in America—High rewards offered for scalps—The use of bloodhounds in war—The use of poison and infected clothes—Penn’s treaty with the Indians—How Missionaries come to be a cause of war—Explanation of the failure of modern Missions—The Mission Stations as centres of hostile intrigue—Plea for the State-regulation of Missions—Depopulation under Protestant influences—The prevention of false rumours, Tendenzlügen—Civilised and barbarian warfare—No real distinction between them.
A missionary, seeing once a negro furrowing his face with scars, asked him why he put himself to such needless pain, and the reply was: ‘For honour, and that people on seeing me may say, There goes a man of heart.’
Ridiculous as this negro’s idea of honour must appear to us, it bears a sufficient resemblance to other notions of the same kind that have passed current in the world at different times to satisfy us of the extreme variability of the sentiment in question. Cæsar built with difficulty a bridge across the Rhine, chiefly because he held it beneath his own dignity, or the Roman people’s, for his army to cross it in boats. The Celts of old thought it as ignominious to fly from an inundation, or from a burning or falling house, as to retreat from an enemy. The Spartans considered it inglorious to pursue a flying foe, or to be killed in storming a besieged city. The same Gauls who gloried in broadsword-wounds would almost go mad with shame if wounded by an arrow or other missile that only left an imperceptible mark. The use of letters was once thought dishonourable by all the European nations. Marshal Montluc, in the sixteenth century, considered it a sign of abnormal overbookishness for a man to prefer to spend a night in his study than to spend it in the trenches, though, now, a contrary taste would be thought by most men the mark of a fool.