Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Zwingli, and after him his disciple Bullinger, effected a change in the moral sentiment of Switzerland equivalent to that which a man would effect nowadays who should persuade men to discountenance or abandon military service of any kind for pay. One of the great obstacles to Zwingli’s success was his decided protest against the right of any Swiss to sell himself to foreign governments for the commission of bloodshed, regardless of any injury in justification; and it was mainly on that account that Bullinger succeeded in 1549 in preventing a renewal of the alliance or military contract between the cantons and Henry II. of France. ‘When a private individual,’ he said, ‘is free to enrol himself or not, and engages himself to fight against the friends and allies of his sovereign, I know not whether he does not hire himself to commit homicide, and whether he does not act like the gladiators, who, to amuse the Roman people, let themselves to the first comer to kill one another.’

But it is evident that, except with a reservation limiting a man’s service to a just national cause, Bullinger’s argument will also apply to the case of a hired soldier of his own country. The duty of every man to defend his country in case of invasion is intelligible enough; and it is very important to notice that originally in no country did the duty of military obedience mean more. In 1297 the High Constable and Marshal of England refused to muster the forces to serve Edward I. in Flanders, on the plea that neither they nor their ancestors were obliged to serve the king outside his dominions;[324] and Sir E. Coke’s ruling in Calvin’s case,[325] that Englishmen are bound to attend the king in his wars as well without as within the realm, and that their allegiance is not local but indefinite, was not accepted by writers on the constitution of the country. The existing militia oath, which strictly limits obedience to the defence of the realm, covered the whole military duty of our ancestors; and it was only the innovation of the military contract that prepared the way for our modern idea of the soldier’s duty as unqualified and unlimited with regard to cause and place and time. The very word soldier meant originally stipendiary, his pay or solde (from the Latin solidum) coming to constitute his chief characteristic. From a servant hired for a certain task for a certain time the steps were easy to a servant whose hire bound him to any task and for the whole of his life. The existing military oath, which binds a recruit and practically compels him as much to a war of aggression as of defence at the bidding of the executive, owes its origin to the revolution of 1689, when the refusal of Dumbarton’s famous Scotch regiment to serve their new master, William III., in the defence of Holland against France, rendered it advisable to pass the Mutiny Act, containing a more stringent definition of military duty by an oath couched in extremely general terms. Such has been the effect of time in confirming this newer doctrine of the contract implied by the military status, that the defence of the monarch ‘in person, crown, and dignity against all enemies,’ to which the modern recruit pledges himself at his attestation, would be held to bind the soldier not to withhold his services were he called upon to exercise them in the planet Mars itself.

Hence it appears to be an indisputable fact of history that the modern military theory of Europe, which demands complete spiritual self-abandonment and unqualified obedience on the part of a soldier, is a distinct trespass outside the bounds of the original and, so to speak, constitutional idea of military duty; and that in our own country it is as much an encroachment on the rights of Englishmen as it is on the wider rights of man.

But what is the value of the theory itself, even if we take no account of the history of its growth? If military service precludes a man from discussing the justice of the end pursued in a war, it can hardly be disputed that it equally precludes him from inquiries about the means, and that if he is bound to consider himself as fighting in any case for a lawful cause he has no right to bring his moral sense to bear upon the details of the service required of him. But here occurs a loophole, a flaw, in the argument; for no subject nor soldier can be compelled to serve as a spy, however needful such service may be. That proves that a limit does exist to the claims on a soldier’s obedience. And Vattel mentions as a common occurrence the refusal of troops to act when the cruelty of the deeds commanded of them exposed them to the danger of savage reprisals. ‘Officers,’ he says, ‘who had the highest sense of honour, though ready to shed their blood in a field of battle for their prince’s service, have not thought it any part of their duty to run the hazard of an ignominious death,’ such as was involved in the execution of such behests. Yet why not, if their prince or general commanded them? By what principle of morality or common sense were they justified in declining a particular service as too iniquitous for them and yet in holding themselves bound to the larger iniquity of an aggressive war? What right has a machine to choose or decide between good and bad any more than between just and unjust? Its moral incompetence must be thoroughgoing, or else in no case afford an extenuating plea. You must either grant it everything or nothing, or else offer a rational explanation for your rule of distinction. For it clearly needs explaining, why, if there are orders which a soldier is not bound to obey, if there are cases where he is competent to discuss the moral nature of the services required of him, it should not also be open to him to discuss the justice of the war itself of which those services are merely incidents.

Let us turn from the abstract to the concrete, and take two instances as a test of the principle. In 1689, Marshal Duras, commander of the French army of the Rhine, received orders to destroy the Palatinate, and make a desert between France and Germany, though neither the Elector nor his people had done the least injury to France. Did a single soldier, did a single officer quail or hesitate? Voltaire tells us that many officers felt shame in acting as the instrument of this iniquity of Louis XIV., but they acted nevertheless in accordance with their supposed honour, and with the still orthodox theory of military duty. They stopped short at no atrocity. They cut down the fruit-trees, they tore down the vines, they burnt the granaries; they set fire to villages, to country-houses, to castles; they desecrated the tombs of the ancient German emperors at Spiers; they plundered the churches; they reduced well-nigh to ashes Oppenheim, Spiers, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg, and other flourishing cities; they reduced 400,000 human beings to homelessness and destruction—and all in the name of military duty and military honour! Yet, of a truth, those were dastardly deeds if ever dastardly deeds have been done beneath the sun; and it is the sheerest sophistry to maintain that the men who so implicitly carried out their orders would not have done more for their miserable honour, would not have had a higher conception of duty, had they followed the dictates of their reason and conscience rather than those of their military superiors, and refused to sacrifice their humanity to an overstrained theory of their military obligation, and their memory to everlasting execration.

In the case of these destroyers military duty meant simply military servility, and it was this reckless servility that led Voltaire in his ‘Candide’ to put into the mouth of his inimitable philosopher, Martin, that definition of an army which tales like the foregoing suggested and justified: ‘A million of assassins, in regiments, traversing Europe from end to end, and committing murder and brigandage by rules of discipline for the sake of bread, because incompetent to exercise any more honest calling.’[326]

An English case of this century may be taken as a parallel one to the French of the seventeenth, and as an additional test of the orthodox military dogma that with the cause of war a soldier has no concern. It is the Copenhagen expedition of 1807, than which no act of might within this century was more strongly reprobated by the public opinion of Europe, and by all but the Tory opinion of England. A fleet and army having been sent to the Danish capital, and the Danish Government having refused to surrender their fleet, which was demanded as the alternative of bombardment, the English military officials proceeded to bombard the city, with infinite destruction and slaughter, which were only stayed at last by the surrender of the fleet as originally demanded. There was no quarrel with Denmark at the time, there was no complaint of injury; only the surrender of the fleet was demanded. English public opinion was both excited and divided about the morality of this act, which was only justified on the plea that the Government was in possession of a secret article of the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and the Czar of Russia, by which the Danish fleet was to be made use of in an attack upon England. But this secret article was not divulged, according to Alison, till ten years afterwards,[327] and many disbelieved in its existence altogether, even supposing that its existence would have been a good case for war. Many military men therefore shared in the feeling that condemned the act, yet they scrupled not to contribute their aid to it. Were they right? Read Sir C. Napier’s opinion of it at the time, and then say where, in the case of a man so thinking, would have lain his duty: ‘This Copenhagen expedition—is it an unjust action for the general good? Who can say that such a precedent is pardonable? When once the line of justice has been passed, there is no shame left. England has been unjust.... Was not our high honour worth the danger we might perhaps have risked in maintaining that honour inviolate?’[328]

These opinions, whether right or wrong, were shared by many men in both services. Sir C. Napier himself says: ‘Were there not plenty of soldiers who thought these things wrong? ... but would it have been possible to allow the army and navy ... to decide upon the propriety of such attacks?’[329] The answer is, that if they did, whether allowed or not, such things would be impossible, or, at all events, less probable: which is the best reason possible for the contention that they should. Had they done so in this very instance, our historians would have been spared the explanation of an episode that is a dark blot upon our annals.