For this principle of individual military responsibility is of such power, that if carried to its consequences, it must ultimately prove fatal to militarism; and if it has not yet the prescription of time and common opinion in its favour, it is sealed nevertheless with the authority of many of the best intellects that have helped to enlighten the past, and is indissolubly contained in the teaching alike of our religious as of our moral code. It can, in fact, only be gainsaid by a denial of the fundamental maxims of those two guides of our conduct, and for that reason stands absolutely proof against the assaults of argument. Try to reconcile with the ordinary conceptions of the duties of a man or a Christian the duty of doing what his conscience condemns, and it may be safely predicted that you will try in vain. The considerations that may occur of utility and expediency beat in vain against the far greater expediency of a world at peace, freed from the curse of the warrior’s destructiveness; nor can the whole armoury of military logic supply a single counter-argument which does not resolve itself into an argument of supposed expediency, and which may not therefore be effectually parried, even on this narrower debating ground, by the consideration of the overwhelming advantages which could not but flow from the universal acceptance of the contrary and higher principle—the principle that for a soldier, as for anyone else, his first duty is to his conscience.
Or, to put the conclusion in the fewest words: The soldier claims to be a non-moral agent. That is the corner-stone of the whole military system. Challenge then the claimant to justify his first principle, and the custom of war will shake to its foundation, and in time go the way that other evil customs have gone before it, when once their moral support has been undermined or shattered.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Halleck’s International Law, ii. 21. Yet within three weeks of the beginning of the war with France 60,000 Prussians were hors de combat.
[2] ‘Artem illam mortiferam et Deo odibilem balistrariorum et sagittariorum adversus Christianos et Catholicos exerceri de cætero sub anathemate prohibemus.’
[3] Fauchet’s Origines des Chevaliers, &c. &c., ii. 56; Grose’s Military Antiquities, i. 142; and Demmin’s Encyclopédie d’Armurerie, 57, 496.
[4] Fauchet, ii. 57. ‘Lequel engin, pour le mal qu’il faisait (pire que le venin des serpens), fut nommé serpentine,’ &c.
[5] Grose, ii. 331.
[6] Dyer, Modern Europe, iii. 158.
[7] Scoffern’s Projectile Weapons, &c., 66.