Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and of free thought, who, from a youthful love for arms and camp-life, which he attributed to a certain heat of liver, began life in the army, actually gave up his military career for the reasons which he thus expressed in a letter to a friend: ‘Although custom and example render the profession of arms the noblest of all, I, for my own part, who only regard it like a philosopher, value it at its proper worth, and, indeed, I find it very difficult to give it a place among the honourable professions, seeing that idleness and licentiousness are the two principal motives which now attract most men to it.’[315]

Of course no one in modern times would come to the same conclusions as Descartes for the same reasons, the discipline of our armies being somewhat more serious than it was in the first half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read of the German campaign in France without hoping, for the good of the world, that the inevitable association of war with the most revolting forms of crime therein displayed, may some day produce a general state of sentiment similar to that anticipated by Descartes.

It may be, said that the example of Descartes proves and indicates nothing; and we may feel pretty sure that his scruples seemed extravagantly absurd to his contemporaries, if he suffered them to know them. Nevertheless, he might have appealed to several well-known historical facts as a reason against too hasty a condemnation of his apparent super-sensitiveness. He might have argued that the profession of a pirate once reflected no more moral discredit than that of a soldier did in his days; that the pirate’s reply to Alexander, that he infested the seas by the same right wherewith the conqueror devastated the land, conveyed a moral sentiment once generally accepted, nor even then quite extinct; that in the days of Homer it was as natural to ask a seafarer whether he were a freebooter as whether he were a merchant; that so late in Greek history as the time of Thucydides, several tribes on the mainland of Greece still gloried in piracy, and accounted their plunder honourably won; and that at Rome the Cilician pirates, whom it devolved on Pompey to disperse, were joined by persons of wealth, birth, and education, ‘as if,’ says Plutarch, ‘their employment were worthy of the ambition of men of honour.’

Remembering, therefore, these things, and the fact that not so very many centuries ago public opinion was so lenient to the practice of bishops and ecclesiastics taking an active part in warfare that they commonly did so in spite of canons and councils to the contrary, it is a fair subject for speculation whether the moral opinion of the future may not come to coincide with the feeling of Descartes, and it behoves us to keep our minds alive to possibilities of change in this matter, already it would seem in process of formation. Who will venture to predict what may be the effect of the rise of the general level of education, and of the higher moral life of our time, on the popular judgment of even fifty years hence regarding a voluntarily adopted military life?

We may, perhaps, attribute it to the extreme position taken up with regard to military service by the Quakers and Mennonites that the example of Descartes had so slight a following. That thick phalanx of our kind who fondly mistake their own mental timidity for moderation, perpetually make use of the doctrines of extremists as an excuse for tolerating or even defending what in the abstract they admit to be evil; and it was unfortunately with this moderate party that Grotius elected to throw in his lot. No one admitted more strongly the evils of war. The reason he himself gave for writing his ‘De Jure Pacis et Belli’ was the licence he saw prevailing throughout Christendom in resorting to hostilities; recourse had to arms for slight motives or for none; and when war was once begun an utter rejection of all reverence for divine or human law, just as if the unrestrained commission of every crime became thenceforth legitimate. Yet, instead of throwing the weight of his judgment into the scale of opinion which opposed the custom altogether (though he did advocate an international tribunal that should decide differences and compel obedience to its decisions), he only tried to shackle it with rules of decency that are absolutely foreign to it, with the result, after all, that he did very little to humanise wars, and nothing to make them less frequent.

Nevertheless, though Grotius admitted the abstract lawfulness of military service, he made it conditional on a thorough conviction of the righteousness of the cause at issue. This is the great and permanent merit of his work, and it is here that we touch on the pivot or central question of military ethics. The orthodox theory is, that with the cause of war a soldier has no concern, and that since the matter in contention is always too complicated for him to judge of its merits, his only duty is to blindfold his reason and conscience, and rush whithersoever his services are commanded. Perhaps the best exposition of this simple military philosophy is that given by Shakespeare in his scene of the eve of Agincourt, where Henry V., in disguise, converses with some soldiers of the English army. ‘Methinks,’ says the king, ‘I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.’

William. ‘That’s more than we know.’

Bates. ‘Ay, or more than we should seek after, for we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’

Yet the whisper of our own day is, Does it? For a soldier, nowadays, enjoys equally with the civilian, who by his vote contributes to prevent or promote hostilities, the greater facilities afforded by the spread of knowledge for the exercise of his judgment; and it is to subject him to undeserved ignominy to debar him from the free use of his intellect, as if he were a minor or an imbecile, incompetent to think for himself. Putting even the difficulty of decision at its worst, it can never be greater for the soldier than it is for the voter; and if the former is incompetent to form an opinion, whence does the peasant or mechanic derive his ability? Moreover, the existence of a just and good cause has always been the condition insisted on as alone capable of sanctioning military service by writers of every shade of thought—by St. Augustine as representing the early Catholic Church, by Bullinger or Becon as representatives of the early Reformed Church, and by Grotius as representative of the modern school of publicists. Grotius contends that no citizen or subject ought to take part in an unjust war, even if he be commanded to do so. He openly maintains that disobedience to orders is in such a case a lesser evil than the guilt of homicide that would be incurred by fighting. He inclines to the opinion that, where the cause of war seems doubtful, a man would do better to refrain from service, and to leave the king to employ those whose readiness to fight might be less hampered by questions of right and wrong, and of whom there would always be a plentiful supply. Without these reservations he regards the soldier’s task as so much the more detestable than the executioner’s, as manslaughter without a cause is more heinous than manslaughter with one,[316] and thinks no kind of life more wicked than that of men who, without regard for the cause of war, fight for hire, and to whom the question of right is equivalent to the question of the highest wage.[317]