The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of course the effect of rendering military service less popular, and consequently recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any corresponding diminution in the frequency of wars, which are independent of the hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise, something might be said for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys none of the common rights of man. There is therefore no gain from any point of view in denying to the military class the enjoyment of the rights and privileges of ordinary humanity.
The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In the Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and the offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying without royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent of the commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German war so great was the social disorder found to be consequent upon these restrictions, that a special law had to be made to remove the bar of illegitimacy from the marriages in question.[276] In the English army the inability of privates to marry before the completion of seven years’ service, and the possession of at least one badge, and then only with the consent of the commanding officer, is a custom so entirely contrary to the liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that, whatever its incidental advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a deterring motive when the choice of a career becomes a subject of reflection.
The custom of what is known in the army as Church Parade affords another instance of the unreasonable curtailments of individual liberty that are still regarded as essential to discipline. A soldier is drummed to church just as he is drummed to the drill-ground or the battle-field. His presence in church is a matter of compulsion, not of choice or conviction; and the general principle that such attendance is valueless unless it is voluntary is waived in his case as in that of very young children, with whom, in this respect, he is placed on a par. If we inquire for the origin of the practice, we shall probably find it in certain old Saxon and imperial articles of war, which show that the prayers of the military were formerly regarded as equally efficacious with their swords in obtaining victories over their enemies; and therefore as a very necessary part of their duty.[277] The American articles of war, since 1806, enact that ‘it is earnestly recommended to all officers and soldiers to attend divine service,’ thus obviating in a reasonable way all the evils inevitably connected with a purely compulsory, and therefore humiliating, church parade.[278]
It may be that these restrictions of a soldier’s liberty are necessary; but if they are, and if, as Lord Macaulay says, soldiers must, ‘for the sake of public freedom, in the midst of public freedom, be placed under a despotic rule,’ ‘must be subject to a sharper penal code and to a more stringent code of procedure than are administered by the ordinary tribunals,’ so that acts, innocent in the citizen or only punished slightly, become crimes, capitally punishable, when committed by them, then at least we need no longer be astonished that it should be almost as difficult to entrap a recruit as to catch a criminal.
But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service, it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they have made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial, or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military system. It has been from its armies more than from its kings that our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals, tortures, and cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely have devised a more excruciating punishment than the old English military one of riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made to sit astride planks nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to resemble a horse, with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed to his legs to drag them downwards; or again, than the punishment of the Picket, in which the hand was fastened to a hook in a post above the head, and the man’s suspended body left to be supported by his bare heel resting on a wooden stump, of which the end was cut to the sharpness of a sword point.[279] The punishment of running the gauntlet (from the German Gassenlaufen, street running, because the victim ran through the street between two lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course) is said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps, from the fact of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a single comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet found favour among military authorities.[280]
But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons, its floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do more than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that have never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle-field should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of the soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a blank without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a comrade, who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how cheap a rate men may be reduced to value their lives after experience of the realities of a military career.
Many of the devices are curious by which this indifference to life has been matured and sustained. In ancient Athens the public temples were closed to those who refused military service, who deserted their ranks or lost their bucklers; whilst a law of Charondas of Catana constrained such offenders to sit for three days in the public forum dressed in the garments of women. Many a Spartan mother would stab her son who came back alive from a defeat; and such a man, if he escaped his mother, was debarred not only from public offices but from marriage; exposed to the blows of all who chose to strike him; compelled to dress in mean clothing, and to wear his beard negligently trimmed. And in the same way a Norse soldier who fled, or lost his shield, or received a wound in any save the front part of his body, was by law prevented from ever afterwards appearing in public.[281]
There are, indeed, few military customs but have their origin and explanation in the artificial promotion of courage in the minds of the combatants. This is true even to the details and peculiarities of costume. English children are, perhaps, still taught that French soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not frighten them in war-time; and doubtless French children imbibe a similar theory regarding the red coats of the English. The same reason was given by Julius Ferretus in the middle of the sixteenth century for the short red frock then generally worn by the military.[282] The first mention of red as a special military colour in England is said to have been the order issued in 1526 for the coats of all yeomen of the household to be of red cloth.[283] But the colour goes, at least, as far back as Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, who chose it, according to Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by cloth and most lasting; according to Plutarch, that its brightness might help to raise the spirits of its wearers; or, according to Ælian and Valerius Maximus, in order to conceal the sight of blood, that raw soldiers might not be dispirited and the enemy proportionately encouraged.
The bear-skin hats, which still make some English regiments so ridiculous and unsightly, were originally no doubt intended to inspire terror. Evelyn, writing of the year 1678, says: ‘Now were brought into service a new sort of soldiers called Grenadiers, who were dexterous in flinging hand-grenades, every man having a handful. They had furred caps with coped crowns like Janizaries, which made them look very fierce; and some had long hoods hanging down behind as we picture fools.’ We may fairly identify the motive of such headgear with the result; and the more so since the looking fierce with the borrowed skins of bears was a well-known artifice of the ancient Romans. Thus Vegetius speaks of helmets as covered with bear-skins in order to terrify the enemy,[284] and Virgil has a significant description of a warrior as
Horridus in jaculis et pelle Libystidis ursæ.