Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Even our custom of proclaiming that a war is not undertaken against a people but against its rulers is not unknown in savage life. The Ashantee army used to strew leaves on their march, to signify that their hostility was not with the country they passed through but only with the instigators of the war; they told the Fantees that they had no war with them collectively, but only with some of them.[213] How common a military custom this appeal to the treason of an enemy is, notwithstanding the rarity of its success, everybody knows. When, for instance, the Anglo-Zulu war began, it was solemnly proclaimed that the British Government had no quarrel with the Zulu people; it was a war against the Zulu king, not against the Zulu nation. (Jan. 11, 1879.) So were the Ashantees told by the English invading force; so were the Afghans; so were the Egyptians; and so were the French by the Emperor William before his merciless hordes laid waste and desolate some of the fairest provinces of France; so, no doubt, will be told the Soudan Arabs. And yet this appeal to treason, this premium on a people’s disloyalty, is the regular precursor of wars, wherein destruction for its own sake, the burning of grain and villages for the mere pleasure of the flames, forms almost invariably the most prominent feature. The military view always prevails over the civil, of the meaning of hostilities that have no reference to a population but only to its government. In the Zulu war, for instance, in spite of the above proclamation, the lieutenant-general ordered raids to be made into Zululand for the express purpose of burning empty kraals or villages; defending such procedure by the usual military logic, that the more the natives at large felt the strain of the war, the more anxious they would be to see it concluded; and it was quite in vain for the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to argue that the burning of empty kraals would neither do much harm to the Zulus nor good to the English; and that whereas the war had been begun on the ground that it was waged against the Zulu king and not against his nation, such conduct was calculated to alienate from the invaders the whole of the Zulu people, including those who were well disposed to them. Such arguments hardly ever prevail over that passion for wanton destruction and for often quite unnecessary slaughter, which finds a ready and comprehensive shelter under the wing of military exigencies.

The assumption, therefore, that savage races are ignorant of all laws of war, or incapable of learning them, would seem to be based rather on our indifference about their customs than on the realities of the case, seeing that the preceding evidence to the contrary results from the most cursory inquiry. But whatever value there may be in our own laws of war, as helping to constitute a real difference between savage and civilised warfare, the best way to spread the blessing of a knowledge of them would clearly be for the more civilised races to adhere to them strictly in all wars waged with their less advanced neighbours. An English commander, for instance, should no more set fire to the capital of Ashantee or Zululand for so paltry a pretext as the display of British power than he would set fire to Paris or Berlin; he should no more have villages or granaries burnt in Africa or Afghanistan than he would in Normandy; and he should no more keep a Zulu envoy or truce-bearer in chains[214] than he would so deal with the bearer of a white flag from a Russian or Italian enemy.

The reverse principle, which is yet in vogue, that with barbarians you must or may be barbarous, leads to some curious illustrations of civilised warfare when it comes in conflict with the less civilised races. In one of the Franco-Italian wars of the sixteenth century, more than 2,000 women and children took refuge in a large mountain cavern, and were there suffocated by a party of French soldiers, who set fire to a quantity of wood, straw, and hay, which they stacked at the mouth of the cave; but it was considered so shameful an act, that the Chevalier Bayard had two of the ringleaders hung at the cavern’s mouth.[215] Yet when the French General Pélissier in this century suffocated the unresisting Algerians in their caves, it was even defended as no worse than the shelling of a fortress; and there is evidence that gun-cotton was not unfrequently used to blast the entrance to caves in Zululand in which men, women, and children had hoped to find shelter against an army which professed only to be warring with their king.[216]

The following description of the way in which, in the Ashantee war, the English forces obtained native carriers for their transport service is not without its instruction in this respect:—

‘We took to kidnapping upon a grand scale. Raids were made on all the Assin villages within reach of the line of march, and the men, and sometimes the women, carried off and sent up the country under guard, with cases of provisions. Lieutenant Bolton, of the 1st West India Regiment, rendered immense service in this way. Having been for some time commandant of Accra, he knew the coast and many of the chiefs; and having a man-of-war placed at his disposal, he went up and down the coast, landing continually, having interviews with chiefs, and obtaining from them large numbers of men and women; or when this failed, landing at night with a party of soldiers, surrounding villages, and sweeping off the adult population, leaving only a few women to look after the children. In this way, in the course of a month, he obtained several thousands of carriers.’[217]

And then a certain school of writers talks of the love and respect for the British Empire which these exhibitions of our might are calculated to win from the inferior races! The Ashantees are disgraced by the practice of human sacrifices, and the Zulus have many a barbarous usage; but no amount of righteous indignation on that account justifies such dealings with them as those above described. If it does, we can no longer condemn the proceedings of the Spaniards in the New World. For we have to remember that it was not only the Christianity of the Inquisition, or Spanish commerce that they wished to spread; not mere gold nor new lands that they coveted, but that they also strove for such humanitarian objects as the abolition of barbarous customs like the Mexican human sacrifices. ‘The Spaniards that saw these cruel sacrifices,’ wrote a contemporary, the Jesuit Acosta, ‘resolved with all their power to abolish so detestable and cursed a butchery of men.’ The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were in intention or expression every whit as humane as we English of the nineteenth. Yet their actions have been a reproach to their name ever since. Cortes subjected Guatamozin, king of Mexico, to torture. Pizarro had the Inca of Peru strangled at the stake. Alvarado invited a number of Mexicans to a festival, and made it an opportunity to massacre them. Sandoval had 60 caziques and 400 nobles burnt at one time, and compelled their relations and children to witness their punishment. The Pope Paul had very soon (1537) to issue a bull, to the effect that the Indians were really men and not brutes, as the Spaniards soon affected to regard them.

The whole question was, moreover, argued out at that time between Las Casas and Sepulveda, historiographer to the Emperor Charles V. Sepulveda contended that more could be effected against barbarism by a month of war than by 100 years of preaching; and in his famous dispute with Las Casas at Valladolid in 1550, defended the justice of all wars undertaken against the natives of the New World, either on the ground of the latter’s sin and wickedness, or on the plea of protecting them from the cruelties of their own fellow-countrymen; the latter plea being one to which in recent English wars a prominent place has been always given. Las Casas replied—and his reply is unanswerable—that even human sacrifices are a smaller evil than indiscriminate warfare. He might have added that military contact between people unequally civilised does more to barbarise the civilised than to civilise the barbarous population. It is well worthy of notice and reflection that the European battle-fields became distinctly more barbarous after habits of greater ferocity had been acquired in wars beyond the Atlantic, in which the customary restraints were forgotten, and the ties of a common human nature dissolved by the differences of religion and race.

The same effect resulted in Roman history, when the extended dominion of the Republic brought its armies into contact with foes beyond the sea. The Roman annalists bear witness to the deterioration that ensued both in their modes of waging war and in the national character.[218] It is in an Asiatic war that we first hear of a Roman general poisoning the springs;[219] in a war for the possession of Crete that the Cretan captives preferred to poison themselves rather than suffer the cruelties inflicted on them by Metellus;[220] in the Thracian war that the Romans cut off their prisoners’ hands, as Cæsar afterwards did those of the Gauls.[221] And we should remember that a practical English statesman like Cobden foresaw, as a possible evil result of the closer relations between England and the East, a similar deterioration in the national character of his countrymen. ‘With another war or two,’ he wrote, ‘in India and China, the English people would have an appetite for bull-fights if not for gladiators.’[222]

Nor is there often any compensation for such results in the improved condition of the tribes whom it is sought to civilise after the method recommended by Sepulveda. The happiest fate of the populations he wished to see civilised by the sword was where they anticipated their extermination or slavery by a sort of voluntary suicide. In Cuba, we are told that ‘they put themselves to death, whole families doing so together, and villages inviting other villages to join them in a departure from a world that was no longer tolerable.’[223] And so it was in the other hemisphere; the Ladrone islanders, reduced by the sword and the diseases of the Spaniards, took measures intentionally to diminish their numbers and to check population, preferring voluntary extinction to the foul mercies of the Jesuits: till now a lepers’ hospital is the only building left on what was once one of the most populous of their islands.

It must, however, be admitted in justice to the Spaniards, that the principles which governed their dealings with heathen races infected more or less the conduct of colonists of all nationalities. A real or more often a pretended zeal for the welfare of native tribes came among all Christian nations to co-exist with the doctrine, that in case of conflict with them the common restraints of war might be put in abeyance. What, for instance, can be worse than this, told of the early English settlers in America by one of themselves? ‘The Plymouth men came in the mean time to Weymouth, and there pretended to feast the savages of those parts, bringing with them forks and things for the purpose, which they set before the savages. They ate thereof without any suspicion of any mischief, who were taken upon a watchword given, and with their own knives hanging about their necks were by the Plymouth planters stabbed and slain.’[224]