It must needs be that new questions arise, or old perplexities in a fresh form; and of these one that has risen again in our time is this: Does any moral stain attach to bloodshed committed upon the battle-field? Or is the difference between military and ordinary homicide a real one, and does the plea of duty sanction any act, however atrocious in the abstract, provided it be committed under the uniform of the State?
The general opinion is, of course, that no soldier in his military capacity can be guilty of crime; but opinion has not always been so fixed, and it is worth noticing that in the forms of civilisation that preceded our own, and in some existing modern races of lower type than our own, traces clearly appear of a sense of wrong attaching to any form of bloodshed whatever, whether of fair battle or of base treachery, calling alike for the purifying influences of expiation and cleansing. In South Africa, for instance, the Basuto returning from war proceeds with all his arms to the nearest stream, to purify not only his own person but his javelins and his battle-axe. The Zulu, too, practises ablutions on the same occasion; and the Bechuana warrior wears a rude kind of necklace, to remind him of the expiation due from him to the slain, and to disperse the dreams that might otherwise trouble him, and perhaps even drive him to die of remorse.[310]
The same feelings may be detected in the old world. The Macedonians had a peculiar form of sacrificatory purification, which consisted in cutting a dog in half and leading the whole army, arrayed in full armour, between the two parts.[311] As the Bœotians had the same custom, it was probably for the same reason. At Rome, for the same purpose, a sheep, and a bull, and a pig or boar, were every year led three times round the army and then sacrificed to Mars. In Jewish history the prohibition to King David to build the temple was expressly connected with the blood he had shed in battle. In old Greek mythology Theseus held himself unfit, without expiation, to be admitted to the mysteries of Ceres, though the blood that stained his hands was only that of thieves and robbers. And in the same spirit Hector refused to make a libation to the gods before he had purified his hands after battle. ‘With unwashen hands,’ he said, ‘to pour out sparkling wine to Zeus I dare not, nor is it ever the custom for one soiled with the blood and dust of battle to offer prayers to the god whose seat is in the clouds.’[312]
For the cause of this feeling we may perhaps choose between an almost instinctive reluctance to take human life, and some such superstition as explains the necessity for purification among the Basutos,—the idea, namely, of escaping the revenge of the slain by the medium of water.[313] The latter explanation would be in keeping with the not uncommon notion in savage life of the inability of a spirit to cross running water, and would help to account for the necessity there was for a Hebrew to flee, or for a Greek to make some expiation, even though only guilty of an act of unintentional homicide. And in this way it is possible that the sanctity of human life, which is one of the chief marks, and should be one of the chief objects, of civilisation, originated in the very same fear of a post-mortem vengeance, which leads some savage tribes to entreat pardon of the bear or elephant they have slain after a successful chase.
But, account as we like for the origin of the feeling, its undoubted existence is the point of interest, for it is easy to see that under slightly more favourable conditions of history it might have ripened into a state of thought which would have held the soldier and the manslayer in equal abhorrence. Christianity in its primitive form certainly aimed at and very nearly effected the transition. In the Greek Church a Christian soldier was debarred from the Eucharist for three years if he had slain an enemy in battle; and the Christian Church of the first three centuries would have echoed the sentiment expressed by St. Cyprian in his letter to Donatus: ‘Homicide when committed by an individual is a crime, but a virtue when committed in a public war; yet in the latter case it derives its impunity, not from its abstract harmlessness, but solely from the scale of its enormity.’
The education of centuries has long since effaced the earlier scruple; but there are tens of thousands of Englishmen to whom the military profession is the last they would voluntarily adopt, and it would be rash to predict the impossibility of the revival of the older feeling, or the dimensions it may ultimately assume. The greatest poet of our time, who more than any other living man has helped to lead European opinion into new channels, may, perhaps, in the following lines have anticipated the verdict of the coming time, and divined an undercurrent of thought that is beginning to flow even now amongst us with no inconsiderable force of feeling:—
La phrase, cette altière et vile courtisane,
Dore le meurtre en grand, fourbit la pertuisane,
Protège les soudards contre le sens commun,
Persuade les niais que tous sont faits pour un,
Prouve que la tuerie est glorieuse et bonne,
Déroute la logique et l’évidence, et donne
Un sauf-conduit au crime à travers la raison.[314]
The destruction of the romance of war by the greater publicity given to its details through the medium of the press clearly tends to strengthen this feeling, by tempering popular admiration for military success with a cooling admixture of horror and disgust. Take, for instance, the following description of the storming of the Egyptian trenches at Tel-el-Kebir, by an eye-witness of it:—‘In the redoubts into which our men were swarming the Egyptians, throwing away their arms, were found cowering, terror-stricken, in the corners of the works, to hide themselves from our men. Although they had made such a contemptible exhibition, from a soldierly point of view, it was impossible to help pitying the poor wretches as they huddled together; it seemed so much like rats in a pit when the terrier has set to work.’ And some 2,500 of them were afterwards buried on the spot, most of them killed by bayonet wounds in the back.
This is an instance of the tuerie that Victor Hugo speaks of, which we all call glorious when we meet in the streets, reserving, some of us, another opinion for the secret chamber. Still, when it comes to comparing the work of a victory to that of a terrier in a rat-pit, it must be admitted that the realism of war threatens to become more repellent than its romance was once attractive, and to deter men more and more from the choice of a profession of which similar disgusting scenes are the common and the probable episodes.