The view that no inhabitant of occupied territory can be compelled to participate directly in the struggle against his own country is subject to an exception by the general usages of war which must be recorded here: the calling up and employment of the inhabitants as guides on unfamiliar ground. However much it may ruffle human feeling, to compel a man to do harm to his own Fatherland, and indirectly to fight his own troops, none the less no army operating in an enemy’s country will altogether renounce this expedient.[85]
And Worse.
But a still more severe measure is the compulsion of the inhabitants to furnish information about their own army, its strategy, its resources, and its military secrets. The majority of writers of all nations are unanimous in their condemnation of this measure. Nevertheless it cannot be entirely dispensed with; doubtless it will be applied with regret, but the argument of war will frequently make it necessary.[86]
Of forced labor.
Of a certain harsh measure and its justification.
As to 5 and 6, the summoning of the inhabitants to supply vehicles and perform works has also been stigmatized as an unjustifiable compulsion upon the inhabitants to participate in “Military operations.” But it is clear that an officer can never allow such a far-reaching extension of this conception, since otherwise every possibility of compelling work would disappear, while every kind of work to be performed in war, every vehicle to be furnished in any connection with the conduct of war, is or may be bound up with it. Thus the argument of war must decide. The German Staff, in the War of 1870, moreover, rarely made use of compulsion in order to obtain civilian workers for the performance of necessary works. It paid high wages and, therefore, almost always had at its disposal sufficient offers. This procedure should, therefore, be maintained in future cases. The provision of a supply of labor is best arranged through the medium of the local authorities. In case of refusal of workers punishment can, of course, be inflicted. Therefore the conduct of the German civil commissioner, Count Renard—so strongly condemned by French jurists and jurists with French sympathies—who, in order to compel labor for the necessary repair of a bridge, threatened, in case of further refusal, after stringent threats of punishment had not succeeded in getting the work done, to punish the workers by shooting some of them, was in accordance with the actual laws of war; the main thing was that it attained its object, without its being necessary to practise it. The accusation made by the French that, on the German side, Frenchmen were compelled to labor at the siege works before Strassburg, has been proved to be incorrect.
Hostages.
7. By hostages are understood those persons who, as security or bail for the fulfilment of treaties, promises or other claims, are taken or detained by the opposing State or its army. Their provision has been less usual in recent wars, as a result of which some Professors of the law of nations have wrongly decided that the taking of hostages has disappeared from the practise of civilized nations. As a matter of fact it was frequently practised in the Napoleonic wars; also in the wars of 1848, 1849, and 1859 by the Austrians in Italy; in 1864 and 1866 by Prussia; in the campaigns of the French in Algiers; of the Russians in the Caucasus; of the English in their Colonial wars, as being the usual thing. The unfavorable criticisms of it by the German Staff in isolated cases is therefore to be referred to different grounds of applied expedients.[87]